CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga—The firm managing Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac has not enforced its Oct. 30 deadline for some 5,000 farm workers to leave the sugar estate owned by the family of Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.

The conflict worsened after Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) directed the farm workers to register so that those who were on the hacienda illegally could be weeded out.

HLI’s deadline for registration was moved to Nov. 15, but the scheme is being resisted by the workers amid a pending agrarian dispute between HLI and the United Luisita Workers Union (ULWU) before the Supreme Court.

The recent move by HLI seeks to weed out the illegal tillers and prioritize the potential agrarian reform beneficiaries, said Teofilo Inocencio, director of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) in Central Luzon.

The illegal tillers rent lands from farm workers and village officials, Inocencio said. This followed a strike in 2004 when farm workers demanded the cancellation of the stock distribution option (SDO) and distribution of lands.

As in the Oct. 30 deadline, ULWU members have been defying the registration, said Lito Bais, union chair.

“Signing up may be a ploy for another disadvantageous agreement like the SDO,” Bais said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Bais said the displacement in October was stopped because ULWU started a dialogue with the provincial DAR.

HLI has “no legal basis” to impose a registration because of the pending court case, said Roy Morilla, spokesperson of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP).

ULWU and KMP members served a cease-and-desist order at the Cojuangco Building in Makati City on the latest move to force farm workers out of the sugar estate.

Talk to us, Noynoy

“The best way to settle this dispute is if Noynoy will talk to us and not to Danding,” said Bais, referring to Aquino’s uncle Eduardo Cojuangco, the chair of San Miguel Corp. and chair emeritus of the Nationalist People’s Coalition.

Cojuangco, he said, is eyeing the vast estate for his food conglomerate.

Aquino, who is running for president under the Liberal Party, earlier said he wanted the estate to be distributed to the farm workers but stressed that the decision would involve other members of the Cojuangco family.

Leftist groups in Manila have taken up the cause of the hacienda workers.

In a press release at the weekend, Anakpawis party-list Rep. Rafael Mariano urged Aquino to immediately intervene “to avert a looming confrontation in the hacienda.” He said human rights and church groups in Central Luzon were supporting the farmers.

“Knowing the despotic way of the Cojuangcos,” Mariano said, “the Luisita management would again employ the military and police to destroy the farmers’ crops, put up barricades on the more than 2,000 hectares now planted with rice and other crops, or worse, repeat the Mendiola and Luisita massacres.”

KMP deputy secretary general Randall Echanis said that “Aquino’s statement that his family only owned a minority in HLI is an unacceptable excuse.”