The landless

There are widely divergent versions of why nine members of a farmers’ group were murdered on Saturday night in a sugar plantation in Sagay, Negros Occidental. All the versions, however, bear a common thread: the victims wanted a piece of that land.

Whether they were promised ownership if they simply pitched a makeshift tent on the land – and they naively believed it – or they deliberately set off to occupy and seize private property, the slaughter dramatizes the sad plight of the poorest of the poor in our country.

Poverty is no excuse to illegally occupy private property, or jump the line in occupying subsidized housing meant for government workers, many of whom are also living below or near the poverty line. Yes, Juan and Juana, these include cops and soldiers.

But murdering nine individuals for encroaching on a sugar plantation is overkill, no pun intended. A hacienda owner who resorts to mass murder to keep the militant poor from grabbing land should know the country enough to worry about lethal retaliation from the New People’s Army (NPA).

Maybe the owner of the plantation called Hacienda Nene, identified as Carmen Tolentino, has her own armed security group to keep out trespassers and even NPA raiders. But under normal circumstances, the constant threat of retaliation should be enough to compel a reasonable businesswoman to seek government help instead in evicting illegal land occupants.

Who would massacre nine impoverished people? In the age of Tokhang and Double Barrel (although these are directed at drugs, not insurgencies) and the continuing skirmishing between government forces and the NPA, suspicion falls quickly on the military and police. Left-leaning groups have pointed to militias of the Philippine Army as the prime suspects in the murders of the National Federation of Sugar Workers’ chair for Sagay, Flora Jemola, in December 2017, and member Ronald Manlanat on Feb. 21 this year. Most of the nine victims last Saturday reportedly belonged to the NFSW.

Those who reject this premise, however, point out that precisely because government forces are expected to get the blame, it’s not entirely implausible that certain elements in the insurgency were behind the massacre – to stoke anti-government sentiment and generate sympathy for the rebel movement.

This is what happened on Saturday night at Hacienda Nene in Barangay Bulanon, according to the Philippine National Police. As of yesterday, this remained the PNP explanation of events, with Director General Oscar Albayalde saying they have a witness to back the narrative.

The PNP said the nine fatalities were fresh recruits of the NFSW, a group set up in 1971 and described by the police as a communist front. The Reds, on the other hand, claim the PNP is using the massacre to discredit the communist movement.

The NPA has engaged in deadly purges in the past, with factional wars between the forces of Communist Party of the Philippines founding chairman Jose Maria Sison and his rivals suspected in the assassinations of certain CPP-NPA personalities and sympathizers.

Until the killers of the nine farmers are caught, however, with their stories backed by material evidence, it’s the word of the Reds against the government.

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Meanwhile, life goes on for the millions of Filipinos who continue to live a hand-to-mouth existence.

The soil is rich across our archipelago, and the weather is great for growing life-sustaining crops – except, of course, when typhoons, storm surges and torrential floods strike.

But first, one needs land – to grow crops and build a home. The sugar lands of Negros have been hotbeds of peasant unrest for decades. Farmers’ groups count 45 peasants, including the nine victims, murdered on Negros Island during the Duterte administration alone.

The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, passed during the presidency of Corazon Aquino, allowed farming estates such as her family’s Hacienda Luisita, the largest sugar plantation in the country, to avoid redistribution to tenants.

Hacienda Nene covers 75 hectares and has avoided redistribution. The nine fatalities, according to initial reports, were part of a group that occupied what they considered idle land to till for their personal use.

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I have a distant relative in Camarines Sur, my Tsinoy mother’s home province, who has lived all her life in a small farm that she has planted to rice and vegetables, and where she raises livestock mostly for personal consumption.

Such modest farms are self-sustaining. But many other people who eke a living out of farming don’t own the land. They set up huts at the foot of mountains, where the threat of landslides keeps out those with money to buy property, and grow crops in land that no one owns.

In recent years the crop of choice, which fetched high prices in the wet markets and with a relatively long shelf life for farm produce, was ginger. Today it’s bird’s eye chili or siling labuyo, which has always been in high demand in the Bicol region.

The pre-mechanization ditty that planting rice is never fun is true; manual farming is backbreaking work. So those who make a living from agriculture look for high-value crops to cultivate.

For those in areas dominated by large agricultural estates, there is little room even for backyard farming from which they can earn a living.

These are people who can easily buy the promise of ownership if they simply pitch a tent and occupy the land.