NEVER FORGET: HACIENDA LUISITA MASSACRE 12 YEARS WITH NO JUSTICE

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On Nov. 16, 2016  marks 12 years before the Hacienda Luisita Massacre happened at the controversial landed burning in Tarlac owned by the intimates of the former President Benigno Aquino III.

Twelve picketing farmers and two children were killed and hundreds were insulted following police and soldiers dispatched by subsequently Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas, stormed a blockade by plantation workers. The protesters were pushing for fairer wages, increased support and, more broadly, a greater loyalty for national home reform.

Protesters demanding justice to the victims and outright distribution of the home home to 6,000 farmworker beneficiaries converge at the Mendiola bridge close Malacanang. They'll take steps in a caravan for the commemorative rites at the scene of the massacre.

That tragic incidents commemoration ought to focus not without help something surrounded by the long put off in obtaining justice for the massacre victims. It must call attention to 47 years of injustice inflicted by the Cojuangco's a propos the farm workers. They should have been unmodified the in flames, at cost in 1967, per the condition attached to its 1957 attain as well as paperwork maintain by the Jose Cojuangco Sr. intimates.

Moreover, the occasion should remember that two Cojuangco-Aquino presidents  Corazon and her son Benigno III  both promised, following they launched their presidential campaigns (Cory in the flavor of mention to Dec. 3, 1985 and P-Noy, a propos Feb. 9, 2010), to distribute the HLI home to its farm workers. Compliance behind the excite promises of the two has proved unsatisfactory, to make known the least.

On April 24, 2012 the Supreme Court finally ruled that 4,915 hectares (originally 6,000-lead hectares) should be distributed to 6,296 farm worker beneficiaries. However, the adopt looking farm workers action AMBALA has protested the flavor of distribution via tambiolo (lottery drum) raffle implemented by the Department of Agrarian Reform.

Also AMBALA rejects the condition that each beneficiary designate the burning at the 1989 price level  on peak of 30 years  in the by now getting sticking together of ownership of just 6,600 square meters. Because the Cojuangcos had benefited from the on fire for 47 years, bearing in mind it should have been owned by the farmworkers, AMBALA avers, no payment should be required anymore.

Lets see insist to Nov. 16, 2004.

Striking farm workers, demanding the turnover of the house to them, were in a hostile way dispersed by join up PNP-AFP forces. As the strikers and their supporters resisted the teargas shells and water cannons, successive gunshots rang out. Consequently, seven farm workers were killed, 121 were angry (32 had gunshot wounds), including 11 kids and four elderly men.

In the succeeding weeks, eight supporters of the strike were killed: Bishop Alberto Ramento, former final bishop of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente Fr. William Tadena, with of the IFI Tarlac City councilor Abelardo Ladera Ric Ramos, president of the Central Azucarera de Tarlac Labor Union; and four worker-community leaders. These murders have not been satisfactorily conclusive to this hours of daylight.

Meantime, the farm workers complain of continuing threats and harassment allegedly from the armed security guards, abetted by police and army soldiers deployed in 10 barangays within HLI.

Lets manner help farther:

The original Hacienda Luisita was a tobacco plantation, awarded in 1882 by the Spanish colonial running to the true Tabacalera, founded by Antonio Lopez, who named it after his wife Luisita Bru. It was sophisticated turned into a sugar plantation. (The sugar mill was built in 1927.)

Fearful of the Huk chaos, in 1957 Tabacalera offered to sell the hacienda gain the sugar mill. Political patronage got into conduct yourself, President Ramon Magsaysay, the wedding godfather of Ninoy Aquino and Cory Cojuangco, convinced her dad, Jose Cojuangco Sr., to get the property once running maintain:
1) the Central Bank deposited portion of the countrys dollar reserves plus a US bank to guarantee repayment of a cause problems on the bank arranged to Cojuangco
2) the GSIS decided Cojuangco a P5.9-million press to the lead.

In both instances, parallel conditions were set: after 10 years Cojuangco should distribute the home to the little farmers (CB), or subdivide it along along in the midst of the tenants who shall pay the cost thereof knocked out reasonably priced terms and conditions (GSIS). But in the by now closing the settlement when the GSIS, Cojuangco got the condition amended to shall be sold at cost to tenants, should there be any.

Thus, in 1967 Cojuangco refused to relinquish HL to the farm workers by claiming, There are no tenants upon the hacienda, appropriately no dependence to distribute the house.

In May 1980, the Marcos totalitarianism petitioned the Manila Regional Trial Court to compel the Cojuangco controlled Tarlac Development Corp. (which managed HL) to comply the home to the Ministry of Agrarian Reform for distribution to the farmers at cost. The lower court settled the petition, but the Cojuangcos asked the Court of Appeals to reverse the decision.

After Mrs. Aquino became president, her approach asked the Court of Appeals to go along together surrounded by approvingly upon the Cojuangco draw, which the latter promptly did.

 In 1987 she issued Proclamation 131 and Executive Order 229 defining her agrarian reform program, which included be oppressive to distribution substitute as a mode of implementation on the other hand of perch distribution. The SDO was incorporated in RA 6657 (CARP), signed in 1988.

Tadeco incorporated HLI to take taking place the SDO. Its valuation of shares was grossly unequal. The farm workers ration of 4,916 hectares, valued at P197 million (P40,000 per hectare), represented single-handedly 33% of unlimited shares, whereas the Cojuangcos non-blazing assets, valued at P394 million, constituted 67%.

In 2003, 5,300 farmworkers petitioned the DAR to revoke the SDO, claiming it had rendered them much poorer. In 2005 the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council granted the petition, but the Cojuangcos contested the revocation at the Supreme Court.

 Although the SC has unanimously ruled in agreement of the farmworkers, today the Cojuangcos continue to stage nameDAR ruling to distribute some 500 hectares of HLIs prime blazing, and have driven out the farmers tilling parts of the flaming.

Source: TPS


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Blogged: Ma. Era Cecilia Nunag

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