The most insulting attempt at drawing the contrast between Gloria and Cory happened two days after the latter’s burial.
President Arroyo signed the law for the nth extension of the agrarian reform program on August 7. Party-lister Rissa Hontiveros quickly dared Gloria to distribute to farmers the Arroyos’ 1,000 hectares of agricultural land in Negros Occidental. This would be “the real barometer of her sincerity,” Hontiveros said.
Around that time, Migs Zubiri’s spin from a few days earlier had not died down—that the Senate prioritized the approval of that expanded land reform law “as tribute [to] and respect” for Cory Aquino, “who made it her flagship program during her administration.”
Cory being honored for land reform? What plunged these people into collective amnesia?
If there was anybody to blame for defeating genuine land reform, then it had to be Corazon Cojuangco Aquino. If there’s anything by which we should measure any president’s sincerity about land reform, then it had to be by his or her resolve to distribute the Cojuangcos’ Hacienda Luisita to farmers.
Because Hacienda Luisita—that roughly 6,500-hectare expanse that’s reportedly the second biggest contiguous piece of agricultural land in the country—actually belongs to the Filipino people.
According to published research and reports, the Spanish owners of the Tarlac estate and the azucarera wanted to sell in 1957. Then President Ramon Magsaysay, afraid that his political rivals from the Visayas would acquire these, asked Jose Cojuangco Sr., father of Cory, to beat other buyers to it. The offer was coursed through Ninoy Aquino, Cory’s husband, who was very close to Magsaysay.
The old man Cojuangco didn’t have to shell out his own money. The Central Bank of the Philippines and the Government Service Insurance System provided the money—$2.12 million for the azucarera, and P3.98 million for the land. It was taxpayers’ money; it was pension money of government employees.
The release of the money was tied to a well-documented condition that the lands would be distributed to farmers within 10 years.
President Carlos Garcia, to whom Ninoy was also very close, aided this deal after he assumed the presidency in 1957 upon Magsaysay’s death. Hacienda Luisita was placed in the Cojuangcos’ hands by 1958.
On the eve of the 10th year, the government inquired about the progress of the land distribution. Cory’s mother, Doña Demetria (of the Sumulong clan of Rizal), stood her ground. Using technicalities (“tenants” are different from “farm laborers”) and questioning the wording of the resolutions that released the money (there was no mention of “farm workers”), she said no condition existed that would merit putting up her family’s land for distribution.
In 1980, the Marcos government filed a case to finally take back the land that the government clearly owned. In December 1985, a Manila court ruled that Hacienda Luisita had to be distributed to the farmers.
Before the court order could be enforced, however, Cory was swept to power within two months. She named her family’s lawyer in the Luisita case, Sedfrey Ordoñez, as the solicitor general. So there he was with the unenviable task of being the government’s chief lawyer who was supposed to work for the recovery of the hacienda, from the private clients who used to pay him to keep the same property out of government’s reach.
CORY OWES US, TOO
A year into her presidency, which we credit for bringing back democracy in this country, 13 farmers who were marching toward Malacañang to demand genuine agrarian reform were killed by police and soldiers.
The following year, in 1988, Cory signed Republic Act 6657, the comprehensive agrarian reform law. It allows owners of agricultural lands to keep only up to 5 hectares for themselves, and an additional 3 hectares for each child who is older than 15 years and is personally cultivating the land. Everything in excess of that should be divided among the farmers who have been tilling the land.
So what was the president to do?
Cory’s law provides landowners an alternative scheme, where they instead give the farmers shares of stocks in the companies managing the lands, and therefore share in their earnings.
The lands, precious lands, therefore remain with the landowners. As for the earnings, the law lists down several ways the landowners can say they didn’t earn enough and have nothing to distribute. The Cojuangcos many years later would, in fact, invoke that the business was losing.
It was “the first time in agrarian history,” Bulatlat.com noted a few years ago, that land reform didn’t involve farmers actually owning the lands they were tilling.
She seemed bent on keeping it that way.
I remember senior journalists who covered Cory Aquino recounting that whenever they questioned her on any policy decision or any other matter, she would refer them to her Cabinet officials or advisers for the answers. But when it came to agrarian reform issues, they swear, Cory could, and would, answer anything and everything—“No matter how we phrased and re-phrased the questions,” one former Palace reporter said.
Anyway, majority of the farmers were persuaded to agree to the stock distribution option. (What did we expect when the Cory-appointed governor and mayors were there to “help” explain the options to them?)
During the term of Fidel Ramos, who owes his presidency to Cory, practically half of Hacienda Luisita’s area was subject to rezoning for commercial and industrial use. Later, 500 hectares were actually approved for conversion from agricultural classification, exempting them from land reform. It was 1995, and the governor of Tarlac was Margarita Cojuangco, wife of Cory’s brother Peping.
During Joseph Estrada’s time, I distinctly remember that Cory was slow in joining civil society’s calls for his resignation. That was, until somebody whispered to Erap (it was probably his agrarian reform secretary, Boy Morales, who is a Tarlaqueño) that he should probably look into distributing Luisita to boost his popularity.
In 2004, Cory was not ready to condemn Gloria Arroyo for her and her family’s reported excesses and excessive compromises (and Kris endorsed Gloria, remember?). That year, the government had sent cops and soldiers to Luisita to break up the rally of striking farm workers. Fourteen were killed.
In 2005, because Gloria practically admitted cheating in the presidential elections, Cory called on her to resign. The next thing we knew, the agrarian reform department issued an order revoking the stock distribution in Luisita. The case is pending with the Supreme Court.
CONTRASTING LEGACIES
This is one reason I can’t honestly join the yellow crowd in exalting the virtues of Cory Aquino. This is why I won’t have any of those “Kris or Noynoy for President in Whatever Year” trial balloons that they released on Cory’s burial day.
What I saw when Cory was buried was a chance for us, as a people, to finally exorcise the illusion being painted by her allies that leadership in this country’s fight (for whatever that is now) is a monopoly of Ninoy’s and Cory’s family, that their intentions for the country are always better than yours and mine.
If for one second we will think straight and ask: Which was clearly funded by taxpayers’ money—Gloria’s 2 dinners in the US whose exaggerated cost estimates congressmen have claimed paying for, or Cory’s 6,500-hectare farm and sugar mill that were bought by central bank dollar reserves and government pension fund? We’d go for Hacienda Luisita, hands down.
And if we had to judge between 2 evils: Who’s more virtuous—Gloria feasting on steak, lobster, caviar, and wine for a few days while some of us are getting hungry or were mourning a former president’s death; or Cory using her power and influence to keep her family’s hold on government-funded lands that should have been given to farmers more than 40 years ago? We’d surely go for the lucky, fine-dining “bitch.”
I had always feared the day would come when I’d look at Gloria just a bit more kindly. No thanks to people who inflict their double standards on the public, that day has come.
Because this game that they started, of comparing the 2 woman presidents, reminded me of the other, not so pretty things that Cory represented.
Cory, out of “honor,” refused to repudiate the debts that dictator Ferdinand Marcos left behind. For the next 2 decades, the government had to allocate less for poverty alleviation and economic development because around half of its yearly budget had to go to debt repayments. In Gloria’s watch, the government finished paying those old foreign debts.
Cory’s administration plunged us into 6- to 8-hour brownouts daily on its last year. Gloria’s government is trying to take over Meralco, and hopefully get the convolutedly explained “systems loss” item out of our outrageously high electric bills. Gloria’s administration has also tapped indigenous sources of energy; Cory’s brownouts gave good business to her trade secretary Joe Concepcion’s generator business.
Cory passed away without anybody suggesting that she be brought home to Tarlac so her kababayan could bid her farewell (just like they did, overwhelmingly, to Ninoy in 1983). Maybe the memories of farmers killed—and the un-honored ownership of Hacienda Luisita—are still fresh in the minds of her province mates.
Gloria, for her part, has gone home to Pampanga 21 times these past months. And you know what? Her kabalen embrace her.
As for us non-Gloria-loving do-gooders, we can only eat our heart out. No matter how loud the noise we create at this time about her expensive dinners and insincere land reform, it seems it remains that way—a noise. Because there is such a thing as timing for these accusations to stick.
And now is not the time. Not for me. I’m still busy exhaling Cory.
(P.S.: Rissa Hontiveros, who spoke of insincere land reform as if Gloria Arroyo was the most guilty of it, was later announced as one of the senatorial candidates of the Liberal Party for 2010. Noynoy Aquino of the Hacienda Luisita family was there to applaud the announcement.)
Miss Go 