No Luisita, please

Violence broke out last Monday in  Cebu’s midwest  after farmers of the 140-hectare Hacienda Gantuangco in barangay Bonbon, Aloguinsan town, resisted what they saw as another strike for their eviction.

At least 39  men and women including students and two minors were jailed after a melee erupted when policemen backed by fire trucks and bulldozers broke the human barricade made to stop the court-ordered fencing of the hacienda.

No one died, but many protesters and policemen were injured.

That agrarian reform-related violence reared its ugly head again—reminiscent of the deadly dispersal of farmers in the Cojuangco clan’s Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac province  in 2004.

The government’s record  is indeed anemic when it comes to redistributing property to tillers of the land.

Eighty-six farming households comprise the San Roque Farmers’ Association (SRFA) that tills Hacienda Gantuangco, says the Redemptorist congregation’s Fr. Cris Mostajo, chairman of the Farmer’s Development Center. The land, he says, was tilled by their parents since the 1910s.

“In the ’70s farmers were given Certificate of Land Transfers as supposedly beneficiaries of the government’s agrarian reform program PD 27 Operation Land Transfer,” Mostajo says in a recent briefing.

“In the early 1990s, farmers were threatened with eviction by the ‘claiming landowner’ Gantuangco ordering them to stop harvesting their corn produce.”

“Then in 1993, the  farmers, fed up with the oppressive treatment of the Gantuangcos, decided to organize themselves to assert their right. They formed the SRFA and collectively succeeded in harvesting their produce.”

Until last Monday.

Based on police accounts,  the riot started when a farmer threw a mixture of water and human urine at the demolition crew. A  policeman later suffered acid burns on his back while another police officer, a fireman and backhoe driver were hit by slingshots.

Community organizer Susan Altos said  women were dragged down the road and men were mauled. Three  college students  were among those arrested.

With over 200 anti-riot policemen called in from four towns and cities to protect a demolition crew  hired to establish a perimeter fence versus a human barricade of about 250 protestors, we haven’t seen this kind of pathetic, large-scale dispersal in Cebu since the pre-1986 Edsa years.

Property rights and the entitlement of 89 heirs of the Gantuangco clan  are at stake in the Toledo Regional Trial Court, whose sheriff was enforcing an order authorizing the fencing of land in the hacienda.

But the bigger picture of rights of farmer occupants and a government’s broken promise of agrarian reform  are even larger issues that need sorting out.

In the conflict between tillers and private claimants,  the primal cry for justice carries even more pain with the unnecessary use of violence.