Reminding Duterte of his vow to fulfill agrarian reform

Sometimes it takes a foreign publication to bring important Philippine problems to the attention of the world. It’s a reminder even to us that besides the horrendous traffic, the continuing casualties of the “war against drugs” and the daily aggravations of life in our country, centuries-old concerns still plague our country and people.

For example, a long front-page report was featured in the international edition of The New York Times in its first weekend issue for 2020. Datelined Sagay City, on the island of Negros, it mainly dwells on the protracted problem of agrarian reform in the country: “the dominance of a handful of landowning families, and the landlessness of tens of millions of farmers who till the soil in near-feudal conditions.”

Sagay City was where nine farmers were massacred in October 2018 after they started to cultivate a piece of land inside a large sugarcane plantation, Hacienda Nene. The social conditions and tragic struggles of farmers and farmworkers in this and another hacienda in Negros are detailed in the report.

President Duterte, the report recalls, early on expressed sympathy with the Left revolutionary movement which had declared agrarian reform as a key objective since inception, and promised to forge peace with it. He named Rafael Mariano, long-time chair of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, to his cabinet, and supported the latter’s initial moves to implement agrarian reform. But when it came time for the confirmation of Mariano’s appointment, the President withheld his support. Amid strong opposition by landowners, especially Duterte’s allies in Davao, and his daughter Sara, mayor of Davao City (married to the lawyer of the Lapanday Foods plantation), the Commission on Appointments rejected Mariano.

Nonetheless, Duterte vowed last August to “finally accomplish the ultimate goal” of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), started in 1988 by President Corazon C. Aquino. Speaking on the CARP’s 31st anniversary then, he said he would distribute all agricultural lands in the country in what he called his administration’s “unique brand of agrarian reform.” 

When he took office in 2016, the NYT report notes, Duterte promised to liberate rural Filipinos from poverty by distributing land to farmers. But although he “has fashioned himself [as] a man of the people” in cracking down on criminality related to drugs, “he has evaded one crucial populist fight. He has not challenged the monopolistic grip of the landowners.” Instead, it adds, “he has fortified their control, reinforcing the conditions that gave him an opening to take power.”

The report began with what has become a not unusual scene in Sagay City: At high noon on Sept. 15, 2018, a gunman accosted and shot dead Eduardo Balayo, a farmer-organizer, as he walked home with his wife and young son after buying some fish from the public market.

The gunman was positively identified to the police by Balayo’s wife, Elza. He was Raymundo Jimenez, the overseer of Hacienda Ubamos, the sugarcane plantation where the Balayo family had lived and worked for more than 70 years. The hacienda is controlled by Narciso Javelosa, the vice mayor of Sagay City, through a lease with the landowning family.

More than a year after the murder, the report adds, Elza Balayo has lost hope that she will ever see justice. The Sagay police haven’t done any meaningful investigation and no one has been arrested. As for Duterte’s promise to give land to the farmers, she cried out: “He just talks and talks. It’s been so long, and we still don’t have our own land.”

In 2013, Eduardo Balayo had organized a local farmer’s association and did the necessary paperwork to pursue land distribution, via the Department of Agrarian Reform, of a 12.5-hectare area in Hacienda Ubamos. He and his brother, plus seven others, were later qualified by the DAR to receive 1.3 hectares each. Calculating that the land could yield more than 50 tons of sugarcane a year, they estimated that their expected net income (at least P120,000) would enable each family to keep their children in school.

These expectations were dashed with the killing of Eduardo, followed by that of his brother seven months later. Worse, in August, the DAR regional office withdrew the qualification of the remaining prospective beneficiaries. “The landowners are very resistant,” the NYT reporter was told.

   The other, bigger case reported by the NYT pertains to the 1,400-hectare Hacienda Balatong, where some 2,000 farming families lived and the farmers earned as little as P100 a day. In the late 1990s the landowner, Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco (one of the closest allies of the Marcoses), was able to evade the post-dictatorship’s land transfer program ‘through legal creativity”: By “officially selling his vast landholding but maintaining control over it through a devious corporative scheme,” the report says, the farmer-beneficiaries received titles to the land but immediately leased the land back to Cojuangco, in exchange for measly cash payments of P10,000 a year.

One of these farmers was Paulino Malvez, who complained he could not understand the agreement he was required to sign. Human rights lawyer Ben Ramos, who had been representing the farmers of Hacienda Balatong, advised Malvez to stop accepting the money from Cojuangco because the arrangement undermined Malvez’s future claims on the land he had acquired under CARP.

When Rafael Mariano was named acting DAR secretary, he asked Ramos to be an adviser. The latter recommended the filing of a petition annulling Cojuangco’s lease-back agreement and the parcelling of the estate to the farmer-beneficiaries. Mariano told the NYT his office moved to approve the petition and that “an executive committee convened by President Duterte [referring to the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council] had already accepted his recommendation to break up the estate.” After Mariano’s departure, his replacement promptly overturned his order allowing land transfer.

As for Ramos, who last lawyered for the Sagay massacre victims, he was shot dead in front of his home in Kabangkalan by still unidentified assailants in November 2018.

Per DAR records there were still 602,306 hectares of undistributed agricultural lands as of end-2016, of which Negros Island accounted for 125,279 hectares, the largest backlog among all the regions. “Ibigay mo na lahat,” the President told his agrarian reform secretary last August. With the grieving widows, farmers are asking if it’s all just talk.

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