SC help sought vs farmers’ eviction

PALAYAN CITY—Farmers facing displacement from farms they have been tilling for years inside a military reservation here have asked the Supreme Court to spare them from eviction.

On Monday, 14 farmers petitioned the high court to stop the enforcement of a Regional Trial Court (RTC) order that ordered them to vacate a 200-hectare property in the villages of Caballero and Ganaderia here.

The farmers said they have been growing crops on these lands for years without incident, until the Armed Forces of the Philippines asserted its rights to the reservation in 2013.

The AFP said it is the rightful owner of the reservation since 1955 when then President Ramon Magsaysay issued Presidential Proclamation No. 237 to reserve the area for military purposes, according to court records.

The proclamation was amended on March 13, 2006 by Presidential Proclamation No. 1033, which incorporated the disputed 200-ha property as part of the military reservation. It was reserved as an off-base housing site for Army soldiers.

The farmers first went to court to sue outgoing AFP chief of staff, Gen. Gregorio Pio Catapang Jr., and several Army officers for trespassing in March 2013 after soldiers based in Fort Magsaysay entered their farmlands “by means of threat and intimidation and without any authority from the Department of Agrarian Reform and the courts.”

Later, however, the farmers said their farmlands were flattened by bulldozers after the soldiers took over the area.

More than 200 farmers faced displacement, but they won the trespassing complaint filed against the AFP in the Municipal Trial Court in Cities (MTCC) on Oct. 8, 2013.

However, the MTCC ruling was reversed and set aside by RTC Judge Evelyn Turla in a Dec. 9, 2014 order which addressed the issue of ownership, land registration and the eviction, according to records.

The farmers said they went to the high court after the Court of Appeals’ 12th Division, in a June 16 resolution, merely noted their petition to review Turla’s decision.

The 14 petitioners, accompanied by 20 other farmers, were accompanied to the high court on Monday by their lawyer, Emmanuel Ypil, and Palayan City Mayor Adrianne Mae Cuevas.

Cuevas said it was not right for the military to take away the livelihood of the city’s farmers.

“We toiled for years to produce food on these lands, but now that rice self-sufficiency became a program under the Aquino administration, this was the time they decide to take away our lands,” said farmer Paul Bautista, 78.

Just as the AFP began claiming the farmlands, the government launched small water impounding projects for irrigation, the farmers said. The Palayan government also built a farm-to-market road in the area. Armand Galang, Inquirer Central Luzon