Farmers ask gov’t: Stop toll in Aquino kin’s land
CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Philippines—The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas on Friday challenged the Toll Regulatory Board (TRB) to stop relatives of President Benigno Aquino from collecting toll on a road inside Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac that links up with the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway (SCTEx).
“The TRB should muster the guts to stop the President’s relatives’ arbitrary and illegal acts [which are] tantamount to extortion and corruption,” Danilo Ramos, KMP secretary general, said in a statement to the Inquirer on Friday.
The Cojuangco family-owned Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) has imposed a P20 service-tax-on-users of the San Miguel access road. This “shows the Cojuangcos’ greed for profit,” Ramos said.
The 5-kilometer San Miguel road was extended by another 2.5 kilometers in 2006 by the HLI, according to one of the company’s owners, Jose “Peping” Cojuangco Jr.
Cojuangco, an uncle of the President, said the toll collection was proper because the HLI needed funds to maintain and repair the San Miguel road. He also said government has no jurisdiction over it because the road is inside private property.
Lawyer Arnel Casanova, president of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), said the agency was leaving the matter to TRB.
But he said the agency and HLI president, Pedro Cojuangco, had acknowledged that the San Miguel road was “for public use, since the BCDA agreed to build there the Luisita interchange to be able to connect the Luisita Industrial Park to the Clark and Subic economic zones.”
“We would not have built the interchange there if they had not agreed to build the access road,” Casanova said.
HLI was formed by the Cojuangcos in 1988 to distribute stock shares to farm workers inside the 6,000-hectare sugar estate. Stock distribution is one of the options offered to landowners by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), which was passed during the term of the late President Corazon Aquino, a member of the Cojuangco clan.
The Cojuangco’s Tarlac Development Corp. (TDC) owns 67 percent of the shares while farm workers hold 33.3 percent.
Mr. Aquino has no shares in HLI, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission document. His shares in TDC represent 0.0088264 percent as of 2009.
Ramos said Peping Cojuangco’s claim that the 6,000-hectare sugar estate is private land was “totally incorrect.”
“It was covered by agrarian reform and is now in agrarian dispute,” he said.
He added: “After profiting from the highly questionable sale of more than 80 hectares for the SCTEx, the Cojuangcos are bent on profiting from the people and commuters who only want to access the government road project.”
Ramos said Luisita farm and mill workers, who mounted a strike in 2004, have opposed the SCTEx and have never consented to the sale of portions of the estate for the project. Tonette Orejas, Inquirer Central Luzon
