YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SUPREME COURT

            By Mauro Gia Samonte

(Author wrote this article in November 2011, after the Supreme Court issued the ruling partitioning the Hacienda Luisita among its tenants. In light of the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato C. Corona, Author takes it as a veritable duty to post this article once again.)

   

Tears of thanks from 80-year-oid Virginia Paligutan

for the Supreme Court ruling on the Hacienda Luisita

tenancy problem.

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Yes, Virginia, there is a Supreme Court, but there is also a President whose vast powers can render its decision null and void. He did it on the case of a former president just a week ago. He can do it to defenseless masses he may perceive as stabs into the heart of the Aquino wealth.

Quite the opposite of the 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon who captured the imagination of the world when to her question if Santa Claus was true the New York Sun replied in a heart-tugging editorial September 21, 1897 that, yes, there was a Santa Claus, our Virginia today is  80-year-old  Virginia “Lola Inyang” Paligutan, a tenant of Hacienda Luisita who that Thursday braved the rigors of the long travel from Tarlac to come to the Supreme Court profuse with tears of thanks.

            The High Court had issued a ruling  on Nov. 22 ordering the management of Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) to distribute 4,915.75 hectares of the sugar estate to 6,296 registered farmworker-beneficiaries in accordance with the CARL passed more than two decades ago under President Aquino’s mother, the late President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino.

            Lola Inyang is one of those 6,296 benefited by the ruling. When she learned of the decision, she cried tears of joy, recalling the death of her son, Valentino, one of the most ardent advocates for the distribution of the largest sugarland in Asia to its tenants.

            “My son, we have won,” the Inquirer quoted her in an interview among the throng of Hacienda Luisita tenants who trooped to the Supreme Court to express their gratitude for the decision.

            According to Virginia, Valentino had gone to the hills to join the New People’s Army and eventually got killed in an encounter with government troops in 2005. The Supreme Court ruling has a way of assuaging her pain over her son’s death.

            The Hacienda Luisita stands as a monument of landlord oppression of the peasantry and a testimony to how the government has actually been the most effective instrument of such oppression.

            In “Knowing Ninoy,” an essay meant for publication as a book, the author narrates how Jose Cojuangco, Sr., Cory’s father, gained possession of Hacienda Luisita, named after the wife, Luisa Bru y Lasus, of its original owner, Don Antonio Lopez y Lopez, who was the first Marques de Comillas of Spain.

            Back in 1949, the seventeen-year-old Benigno  S. Aquino, Jr. successfully brokered for then Secretary of National Defense Ramon Magsaysay the surrender of Huk Supremo Luis Taruc and the rebellion he headed. For that feat, the adolescent Ninoy was appointed adviser for peasants affairs when the defense secretary became President of the Republic in 1954. By that time the brothers Fernando and Eugenio Lopez, the richest in the Visayas, were ready to buy the hacienda from the Spanish owners. Through intercessions by Ninoy, President Magsaysay offered the sale of the property to the father of Cory, Ninoy’s wife of three years.

            The sale was funded by dollar loans from the Manufacturer’s Trust of New York as well as from the GSIS amounting to P16 million on guarantee by the Philippine Central Bank. The condition for the CB guarantee was that within 10 years, the hacienda would be distributed to the farmer tenants.

            As history would have it, Ninoy eventually became the manager of the hacienda. Way past his death, the hacienda never got distributed according to the bank loans agreement.

The next time the Hacienda Luisita farmers figured again in the news was in the infamous Mendiola Massacre on January 22, 1987. Led by the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, farmers marched to Malacanang, where now sat Cory as president, to press for genuine agrarian reform, the distribution of the Hacienda Luisita to its farmers being among the demands. Courageously breaching the police and military containing forces, the protesters were fired at mercilessly, a carnage that, along with the scores wounded, resulted in the killing of thirteen – Hacienda Luisita farmers included.

Cory was no longer president on November 16, 2004. On that day, 3,000 sugar mill workers and  hacienda farmers went on strike demanding better wages and  improved working conditions as well as the implementation of the Central Bank loans condition to distribute the hacienda to the tillers and farm workers. The strike was broken up with Simba tanks from which came the heavy fire that wounded over a hundred and killed 14 strikers.

That 2004 carnage had gone down in history as the Hacienda Luisita Massacre, unmatched in ferocity and casualties  until the killing of 57 in the Maguindanao Massacre.

The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) was passed under the administration of Cory June 10, 1988 – but oddly enough, just the following August 23, the Hacienda Luisita was converted into a corporation.  In that conversion, which effectively brought the hacienda out of coverage by Cory’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), the peasants’ claim to the land was converted into shares of stocks under what was known as stock distribution option (SDO).

The hacienda farmers, now called workers, protested the scheme, insisting on the terms of the Central Bank-guaranteed loans: distribution of the land to the farmers, not stock distribution option. Ploys like referenda were employed by hacienda administrators in order to make it appear that majority of the hacienda farmers favored the SDO.

Our Virginia should feel relieved now that with the Supreme Court ruling, it would seem no further bloody violence can visit the Hacienda Luisita peasants. Recognizing her age, she declares that the benefits from final settlement of the sugar estate problem are no longer for herself but for her 13 grandchildren.

Never mind if the highest magistrate, Chief Justice Renato Corona, has a dissenting opinion: that the majority decision did not rule on the constitutionality of the SDO, which according to him is unconstitutional.  This simply means that if some powerful man directly hit by the Supreme Court ruling causes a reversal of it, the SDO stays implementable.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Supreme Court, but there is also a President whose vast powers can render its decision null and void. He did it on the case of a former president just a week ago. He can do it to defenseless masses he may perceive as stabs into the heart of the Aquino wealth.

Yet, Virginia, as the New York Sun editorial advised, we cannot forever live in skepticism.  It said:

 
      You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united  strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy,  poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

Particularly in your case, Virginia, you are 80 years old. All your life you’ve spent fighting for your peace, and we are one with you in believing you have earned it at long last. So as your 8-year-old counterpart inspired the New York Sun editorial more than 100 years ago, your life-long struggle to have land inspires us now to quote the whole beauty of that  message verbatim but for the license to substitute “Supreme Court” for “Santa Claus”:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Supreme Court. It exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that it abounds and gives to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the country if there were no Supreme  Court. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Indeed, between 8 and 80, what is there but common pure, innocent child’s joy. How nice to have long-cherished gifts, like dolls you never had before – or land you can now call your own.

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