Initial master list of Hacienda Luisita tillers out soon

Hacienda Luisita workers. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—The government is poised to release the initial master list of farm workers who stand to receive land from Hacienda Luisita by the end of October, but the final list will likely be out in another two to three months’ time, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) said.

“We are still well within our schedule in the distribution of Hacienda Luisita,” Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes told a press briefing on Thursday.

Once the preliminary master list is released and published in the last week of October, a second verification process involving the inclusion or exclusion of beneficiaries will commence, De los Reyes said.

“This means that anyone who has questions about the inclusion of other beneficiaries on the list or anyone who believes they should be included on the list will be given a chance to prove their case,” he told reporters.

This second process will take two to three months.

De los Reyes said his department was still in the process of verifying and matching the two lists of farm workers given shares of stock instead of land in 1989 under the stock distribution option (SDO) of Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI), which was later struck down by the Supreme Court.

In May, the high tribunal upheld with finality the resolution of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) in 2005 to scrap the SDO and distribute 4,915 hectares of Hacienda Luisita to 6,296 farm workers.

Since that decision was handed down, the DAR has sought to match two lists of farm workers with the records of the Social Security System (SSS) for their membership contributions.

The first was the “master list” containing the names of the farm workers who accepted shares of stock instead of land as they were supposed to under the government’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), while the second list was the one submitted by HLI when the case reached the Supreme Court in 2005.

HLI was formed by the Tarlac Development Corp., which was originally owned by President Aquino’s grandfather, Jose Cojuangco, who bought Hacienda Luisita and its sugar mill using a government loan and guarantee in 1957.

The final list of beneficiaries will be put up in public areas in the sugar estate’s 10 barangays in Tarlac City and Concepcion and La Paz towns and at the DAR Tarlac office. The list will also be published in national newspapers.

In a related development, the DAR has awarded a P19.9-million contract to FF Cruz and Co. Inc. to start a segregation survey of Hacienda Luisita. It will plot roads, irrigation canals and other facilities, and housing and farm lots in the sugar estate.