‘Eruption of social volcano’ feared

Chief Justice Renato Corona, warning against “the eruption of a social volcano,” said in a dissenting opinion a stock distribution option (SDO) in lieu of land distribution at the sugar plantation owned by the family of President Benigno Aquino III was unconstitutional.

“Our action here today is not simply about Hacienda Luisita or a particular stock distribution plan,” Corona said in his opinion posted on Wednesday on the Supreme Court website after the magistrates voted 6-4 on Tuesday to call a new referendum in the estate.

“Our recognition of the right under the Constitution of those who till the land to steward it is the court’s marching order to dismantle the feudal tenurial relations that for centuries have shackled them to the soil in exchange for a pitiful share in the fruits, and install them as the direct or collective masters of the domain of their labor,” he said.

“It is not legal, or moral, to replace their shackles with mere stock certificates or any other superficial alternative,” he said. “History will be the unforgiving judge of this court. We cannot correct a historical anomaly and prevent the eruption of a social volcano by fancy legal arguments and impressively crafted devices for corporate control.”

The majority opinion also was posted Wednesday on the court website, a day after its spokesperson, Midas Marquez, faced TV cameras to give a briefing instead of releasing the documents, a departure from the usual practice of simply allowing the court to speak through its decisions, not through its mouthpiece.

The magistrates dismissed a petition by Hacienda Luisita Inc. urging the court to revoke an Arroyo administration order in 2005 scrapping the SDO under the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

But the court said it could not “turn a blind eye” to an earlier vote upholding the SDO and called for a new secret balloting under the supervision of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to determine once and for all what the farmers wish.

At the same time, the tribunal rejected the farmers’ contention that the stock option was unconstitutional, saying it was too late now to raise the issue 16 years after the arrangement was adopted.

The then Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) had said the SDO failed to improve the lives of the more than 6,000 farmers at the 6,500-hectare plantation under the late President Corazon Aquino’s social justice initiative to address rural unrest.

The PARC order followed a strike in 2004 in which seven workers were killed by security forces in the hacienda, which Mr. Aquino’s family acquired in 1958 from its Spanish owners who sold out fearing a bloody labor unrest and a communist rebellion.

The Cojuangcos on the President’s mother side had secured the estate on loans guaranteed by the government on condition that the estate be distributed to tenant tillers at cost after 10 years under its social justice program.

Judicial review

The martial law regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. had moved to seize the land to enforce the loan condition by filing a case in court, but the Edsa People Power Revolution in 1986 ousted him. The first Aquino administration two years later called for the scrapping of the state suit saying that the issue had become moot under the CARP.

Corona rejected the majority view that it was now too late to raise the constitutionality of the agrarian reform initiative, which the king of Spain in 1751 had first sought to implement against friar lands in its Pacific possession fearing a “most potential source of disorder in the islands.”

“While the sword of judicial review must be unsheathed with restraint, the court must not hesitate to wield it to strike down laws that unduly impair basic rights and constitutional values,” he said.

“It is a well-established rule that a court should not pass upon a constitutional question and decide a law to be unconstitutional or invalid unless such question is raised by the parties,” Corona said.

Litmus test

“Hacienda Luisita has always been viewed as a litmus test of genuine agrarian reform,” he said.

Under the new CARP law with reforms passed in 2009, the DAR has five years to complete implementation of the program.

Critics of corporate schemes under the CARP said Tuesday’s court ruling would impact on government efforts to redistribute some 1 million hectares of the country’s largest estates that have so far eluded coverage of the 1988 program.

In a separate dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Maria Lourdes P.A. Sereno said that while agrarian reform was aimed at placing the poor farmers on parity with the landowner, the Hacienda Luisita arrangement made them “subservient and minority stockholders, who continue to be beholden to the good graces of the majority corporate landowner.”

Sereno, Mr. Aquino’s recent appointee to the high tribunal, said the failure of the SDO to fulfill the promises of agrarian social justice “leaves no other legal option than to order the unconditional and complete transfer of agricultural lands” to the farm workers.

“In ordering the immediate redistribution of the Hacienda Luisita agricultural lands, what is sought is the reinvigoration of the constitutional mandate for agrarian reform and the empowerment of the farm-worker beneficiaries by giving them the means to determine their own destiny,” she said.