Int’l activists take up cudgels for Luisita farmers

MANILA, Philippines—International activists have added their voices to the chorus of dissent against the Supreme Court ruling ordering a referendum to determine the fate of Hacienda Luisita’s tenants, and pushed for the distribution of the sugar estate to its farmers.

Participants in the 4th International Assembly of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) approved a resolution urging President Benigno Aquino, whose family owns the sugar estate, to distribute the land to the farmers.

In the resolution, they said the high court’s ruling was the “biggest joke of the millennium as far as agrarian reform in the Philippines is concerned.”

The court ruling invalidated Hacienda Luisita’s stock distribution option wherein its workers received shares of stock in the estate, but the high tribunal also directed the Department of Agrarian Reform to conduct a referendum to ask farmers if they wanted land or shares.

The ILPS delegates said the court ruling would allow the Cojuangco family, of which Aquino is a member, to keep its control of Luisita.

“The decision shows political conspiracy and that the politics of compromise and accommodation are clearly working in the Philippine system, and such is imprinted in the decision in a vain attempt to save the class interests of the landed regime in the Philippines,” they said.

The delegates said the rightful owners of the land were the farm workers who had tilled the soil for decades. The land should be distributed to them unconditionally in the name of social justice, they said.

“There is no amount to compensate for the five long decades the farm workers had been through at the hands of the Cojuangco family which employed different tactics to deny them their rights, including the use of government institutions such as the state armed forces to carry out viscous attacks on their civil and political rights,” the ILPS said.

The owners of Hacienda Luisita should also be directed to return the 33-percent share of the farm workers in the lands that had been converted to other uses, including the portions that became the Luisita Business Park and the right of way of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway that passes through the estate, they said.

“The Chief Executive should stop all land conversion orders making null and void all transactions made by the Luisita management regarding the use of the remaining land,” they added.

The ILPS delegates came from the United States, Canada, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Venezuela, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Greece, Denmark, Spain, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Palestine, Cambodia, Burundi and the Philippines.