A collision to spark change

While the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Corona is an interesting, sometimes hilarious drama between competent and incompetent lawyers, let us not forget what brought it about. It is about the redistribution of Hacienda Luisita to the farmers who worked on the land. Remember also that this land comprising hectares was given to the Jose Cojuangco and sons with the proviso that it will be returned to the farmers after ten years.

When the senator-judges vote whether to acquit or convict CJ Renato Corona, it is not his person alone that will be judged. The impeachment trial was a means through which what had seemed impossible to change in this country can be made to happen. Suddenly, it has become fashionable among the thinking classes to get out of their comfort zones and fight for a decent and more just society. The continuous retention of Hacienda Luisita by one family is unacceptable.

To my mind both CJ Renato Corona and President Aquino II are mere actors playing out a collision that could force change in a country so impervious to needed reforms. The senator-judges and how they decide this case also play a role.

While it is important to watch the proceedings, it is equally important if not more important to keep in mind that land reform or the just distribution of opportunities for all is a fundamental requirement of a good society.

It is in this light that I have excerpted parts of the Supreme Court ruling for the watchers of the impeachment to read and think about. It is about giving control over the land in the hands of the farmers as per agreement when the government gave the family the loans and guarantees needed to acquire the land from the Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas.

* * * The Supreme Court voting 14-0, ordered on Nov. 22, 2011 to distribute the land to the farmers as agreed upon. It became a national concern because the hacienda is owned by the Cojuangcos, President Benigno Aquino III family. Being president he has the power to use instruments of government to stop the distribution or put a high price tag for it to frustrate a final ruling by the Supreme Court.

At least 14 farm workers, union leaders and agrarian reform advocates lost their lives in the struggle for the hacienda.

Below is part of the ruling under the heading “Control over Agricultural Lands” and the order to distribute land to the farm workers. It rejected the Cojuangco proposal during Cory’s presidency that the farmers be issued shares of stock in lieu of land.

“After having discussed and considered the different contentions raised by the parties in their respective motions, we are now left to contend with one crucial issue in the case at bar, that is, control over the agricultural lands by the qualified farm-worker beneficiaries (FWBS).

Upon a review of the facts and circumstances, we realize that the FWBS will never have control over these agricultural lands for as long as they remain as stockholders of HLI (Hacienda Luisita Inc.).

In line with our finding that control over agricultural lands must always be in the hands of the farmers, we reconsider our ruling that the qualified FWBS should be given an option to remain as stockholders of HLI, inasmuch as these qualified FWBS will never gain control given the present proportion of shareholdings in HLI.

HLI is entitled to just compensation for the agricultural land that will be transferred to DAR to be reckoned from Nov. 21, 1989, which is the date of issuance of PARC Resolution No. 89-12-2. DAR and Land Bank of the Philippines are ordered to determine the compensation due to HLI.

DAR shall submit a compliance report after six months from finality of this judgment. It shall also submit, after submission of the compliance report, quarterly reports on the execution of this judgment within the first 15 days after the end of each quarter, until fully implemented. The temporary restraining order is lifted.” SO ORDERED.

* * * Once again, an American author has written on the Philippine-american War. The book is by Pulitzer prize winning Gregg Jones. Its title is “Honor in the Dust.” Candice Millard reviews the book.

“Gregg Jones’s fascinating new book about the Philippine-american War is not how much war has changed in more than a century, but how little. On nearly every page, there is a scene that feels as if it could have taken place during the Bush and Obama administrations rather than those of Mckinley and Roosevelt. American troops are greeted on foreign soil as saviors and then quickly despised as occupiers.

The United States triumphantly declares a victorious end to the war, even as bitter fighting continues. Allegations of torture fill the newspapers, horrifying and transfixing the country.

Nowhere will this book resonate more profoundly with modern readers, however, than in the opening episode, which is as difficult to read as it is jarringly familiar. Jones describes the use of an interrogation technique whose name alone instantly brings to mind a recent, highly contentious tactic. To force information from a Filipino mayor believed to have been covertly helping insurgents, American soldiers resort to what they call the “water cure.”

President William Mckinley insisted that it was the Filipinos’ “liberty and not our power, their welfare and not our gain, we are seeking to enhance.”

There was within the United States a strong and vocal anti-imperialist movement, which included former President Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, but it struggled to tamp down the country’s growing expansionist zeal, and to compete with the energy, tenacity and bulldog ambition of one man in particular: Theodore Roosevelt. Not only had the “clamor of the peace faction” left him unmoved, Roosevelt wrote, it had served to strengthen his conviction that “this country needs a war.”

“There have been lies, yes, but they were told in a good cause,” Twain wrote, ridiculing the government with his acidic satire. “We have been treacherous, but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil.”

The Filipinos were poor, but they were not unsophisticated. They developed shadow governments, used an underground system to finance their insurgency — collecting donations and even taxes — and repeatedly surprised American troops with guerrilla attacks, killing a few men at a time and leaving the rest in a constant, exhausting state of vigilance.”