YouTube video slams Aquino, kin over Hacienda Luisita

There’s a new video on YouTube that assails  President Benigno Aquino III and his family for their ownership of Hacienda Luisita, among other things.

The 15-minute video titled “Aquino-Cojuangcos: Facts They Don’t Want You To Know,” was uploaded on October 21 by “PinoyMonkeyPride Productions” and at presstime has gotten nearly 232,000 views.

Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said he suspected the video was “possibly meant to distract attention from controversies like the departure bid of former President Arroyo.”

Arroyo, now a Pampanga representative, is seeking permission to leave the country to receive medical treatment abroad for a spine problem. She is facing charges of cheating in a past election.

But Abad was quick to add that he did not know who was behind the 15-minute video.

The video gives an account of how President Aquino’s maternal relatives—the Cojuangcos—came to possess  Hacienda Luisita, how they have kept it within the family, and how they reneged on a promise to distribute it to small farmers as agreed upon more than 50 years ago.

It claimed that from 2004 to 2005, several persons who sympathized with Hacienda Luisita workers demanding that the land be distributed to them were killed.

The video also slammed the Philippine Daily Inquirer and ABS-CBN for being behind what the video calls the “yellow propaganda” that depict President Aquino as a “rock star” and his late parents, former Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino III and former President Corazon Aquino, as a “hero” and a “saint,” respectively.

The producers of the video also described Mr. Aquino’s father as “dying because of his personal ambitions” and his mother as coming up with a Constitution that the video said “only benefited oligarch families like the Cojuangcos.”

President Aquino’s performance in his first year in office, on the other hand, was criticized as being marked by “credit grabbing” and hyped as a “blame game.”

Abad told the Inquirer the YouTube video was apparently a new one. He said that during the presidential campaign of 2010, a video was circulated in compact disc “by the tens of thousands” and “by the sack” to local officials with the same theme.

After viewing the new YouTube video, Abad said: “While it’s professionally done, it’s terrible.”

“There is so much bitterness in it against the Aquino family. Those who produced it went overboard. They succeeded more in proving its wholesale black propaganda,” he said.

Mr. Aquino’s political adviser Roland Llamas, who was in Germany when contacted, said he had not seen the video. But he said it “must be the work of forces who are now being threatened with numerous cases.”