125 farmers can’t own Luisita land

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—Farm workers, some of them leaders of the group that filed the landmark case that led to the distribution of lands in Hacienda Luisita, have been disqualified as land reform beneficiaries.

Sentro para sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo (Sentra) has protested the exclusion of 125 farm workers, including leaders and members of Alyansa ng mga Manggagawang Bukid sa Asyenda Luisita (Ambala), as beneficiaries of more than 4,000 hectares in the sugar estate, which had been owned by relatives of President Aquino until 2012.

In that year, the Supreme Court ordered estate lands to be divided among qualified claimants.

Jobert Pahilga, Sentra lawyer, said the group challenged the disqualification notices sent out by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).

Anthony Parungao, DAR undersecretary for legal affairs, said the 125 farm workers were disqualified for their failure to sign and swear to the required application to purchase and farmer’s undertaking (Apfu), a document containing a list of the obligations of a beneficiary under the law, including the obligation to pay amortization.

They represent two percent of the more than 6,100 farm workers who made it to the DAR’s final master list, records showed.

“It was never an option for the DAR to distribute land without amortization. This is expressly required by law and the [Supreme Court] decision did not say otherwise,” Parungao said in an e-mail in response to the Inquirer’s questions.

“We can no longer wait indefinitely for everyone to sign the Apfu and heed the directive of the DAR, in the execution of the [high court’s] decision,” said Parungao.

“Moreover, the finalization and full rollout of the support services framework and activities depend on the completion of the land distribution process, not to mention the completion of the setting of monuments on the awarded farm lots as well as the installation of all the beneficiaries thereon,” he said.

Parungao said the DAR, once it receives Sentra’s motion, would endorse the complaint to the high court.

He said the DAR observed due process in disqualifying the farm workers.

“Upon the completion of the lot allocation activities in August 2013 (the results of which were posted in all the villages and the three towns covered by Hacienda Luisita), numerous notices were given in the form of either tarpaulin streamers installed in strategic places in all villages… hand-carried letters and even a public information campaign through published [advertisements] in national and local newspapers and the distribution of leaflets to all those who had not yet claimed their respective lot allocation certificates or signed their Apfu to do so on or before Feb. 15,” he said.

“In fact, we even bent over backwards, so to speak, by agreeing to the written requests of 46 [beneficiaries], submitted long after the final deadline, to sign their respective Apfu,” he added.

But Pahilga said Republic Act No. 6657, or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law, which was amended by RA No. 9700, “does not provide as basis for disqualification of a beneficiary the failure or refusal of the farmer to sign the Apfu.”

“In the same vein, their failure to claim their lot allocation certificate or even their Certificate of Land Ownership Award, is not a ground to disqualify farmers,” Pahilga said.

The Ambala lawsuit had convinced the high court to uphold the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council’s decision to revoke the stock distribution program, the first mode of agrarian reform in Hacienda Luisita in 1989. This led the court to order the allocation of Hacienda Luisita lands.

Florida Sibayan, Ambala chair and among those disqualified from receiving land here, said she and other farm workers should not be obliged to pay for the land.

“Our ownership was affirmed when [we] were declared stockholders of Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) in 1989 and entered agricultural lands as our share, composing 33 percent of [HLI]. Moreover, [farm workers] have already paid HLI for the value of the land by their labor and man-days (amount of work done for particular periods),” Sibayan said.

She said the farm workers should not be asked to pay because the Supreme Court affirmed that the owners of Hacienda Luisita owed them P1.33 billion from the sale of 581 ha to Luisita Industrial Park Corp., Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. and the Bases Conversion and Development Authority.

The court has designated a panel to do the audit but the findings have yet to be released.

Pahilga said the DAR issued the disqualification notices while the motion of Ambala questioning DAR’s lottery system was pending in the high court.

The DAR made the farm workers choose lots randomly by raffling off lot numbers in a “tambiolo.” This, said Parungao, was the “fairest, most transparent and most appropriate way of doing so for the most number of people, considering that the subject landholding in the Hacienda Luisita case was run as a plantation and not tenanted with specific lots.”

Sibayan said this resulted in farm workers getting lands outside of and far from their villages, or losing lands they had cultivated with vegetables and palay since after the 2004 strike in the sugar estate.