News Analysis
The Hacienda Luisita Massacre, Landlordism
and State Terrorism
The public outrage
ignited by the Luisita Massacre should also keep an eye on other potential
flashpoints that could lead to similar acts of state terrorism. There are
several other plantations, large estates as well as development projects
and mining exploration areas in many parts of the country that have
been militarized.
By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat
Hacienda Luisita strikers scamper for safety
from police and military gunfire (left), as workers carry the bloodied
remains of a fellow worker (right)
Video grabs courtesy of SIPAT
The violent dispersal
of the strike of Hacienda Luisita farm workers on Nov. 16 that led to the
death of 14 farmers including women and children and the wounding of 200
others was a massacre bound to happen.
The labor dispute that
pitted, on the one hand, the hacienda’s 5,000 farmers and 700 milling
workers who were demanding among others the reinstatement of 300 workers
and on the other, the management that has rejected every inch of their
demands was in a deadlock. With their families living on starvation wages
and themselves threatened with a mass lay-off, there was no way by which
the workers could push their cause except by staging a strike.
From the very
beginning, it appeared that the only response that the powerful Cojuangcos
– including former President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino – had in mind was by
military means. Most of the accounts that have been reported about the
Nov. 16 massacre have overlooked the fact that the 6,000-hectare hacienda,
known in the past as Asia’s largest sugar plantation, has been militarized
since the beginning. The military detachment that was put up at the
hacienda reportedly carried out harassment operations against union
leaders particularly in the thick of the election of union officials.
Union officials were accused as “NPA rebels” or “sympathizers” – a
demonization campaign that, in the military’s counter-insurgency strategy,
is usually the prelude to the summary execution of progressive activists.
Just across the
commercial complex that adjoins the hacienda along the MacArthur Highway
in Tarlac is the Philippine Army’s Camp Aquino. Camp Aquino, while serving as the
headquarters of the Army’s Northern Luzon command, virtually guards the
vast hacienda and its units are at the beck and call of the Cojuangcos and
other powers-that-be in the region during times of labor unrest or during
election.
Other flashpoints
Yet the public outrage
that the Luisita massacre has generated should also keep an eye on other
potential flashpoints that could lead to similar acts of state terrorism.
We refer to the fact that there are several other plantations, large
estates as well as development projects and mining exploration areas in
many parts of the country that are under militarization. These are areas
where the lands of farmers were either grabbed from them or where
agricultural estates due for land distribution have been subjected to land
conversion schemes.
These are also areas
where communities of upland farmers and indigenous peoples are displaced
to pave the way for so-called energy, irrigation or similar development
projects and mining exploration activities. In these areas, landlordism
and transnational corporate power cast a net of terror backed by
government agencies, local officials and military and police forces and
often also by paramilitary and private armies.
Thus, in Negros for
instance, farmers and human rights groups have accused another Cojuangco –
former Marcos crony Eduardo Cojuangco, Jr. – of using his political
influence to use the military, police and even a gun-for-hire “rebel”
group to protect his landholdings and corporate property. On Mindoro island over the last few years, scores of activists, community
organizers including human rights volunteers have been killed reportedly
by government troopers and their assets. Today the island has once again
been opened for the entry of transnational mining corporations out to
exploit Mindoro’s mineral deposits.
In Siocon, Zamboanga
del Norte where the Arroyo administration has allowed the Canadian firm
Toronto Ventures, Inc. (TVI) and Benguet Corporation to conduct mining
exploration and production, military and paramilitary forces have been
deployed to block attempts by the Subanons to stop the destruction of
their communal and sacred lands.
In these and many
other provinces, counter-insurgency has been used as a ploy by civilian
and military authorities to suppress the resistance of hapless farmers and
indigenous peoples. Too many cases of human rights violations have been
committed against unarmed protesters in the name of counter-insurgency.
“Outnumbered”?
In the Tarlac
massacre, government has said that the soldiers and police units deployed
at the height of the strike were “outnumbered” by the protesters who were
able to mass up 4,000-strong. And so sword had to be unleashed: an APC (armored
personnel carrier) rammed through the workers’ picketline while machine
gun and snipers’ bullets were fired into the crowd from several directions
coming – so surviving victims and eyewitnesses said – from atop buildings
of the hacienda. Apparently, the strike was violently broken to allow at
least 50 truckloads of sugarcane to be milled, also inside the hacienda,
and hence allow the Cojuangcos to continue reaping some more money.
Used ammunition slugs
and tear gas canisters from the Nov. 16
massacre of Hacienda Luisita
strikers
Photo by Dabet Castañeda
The ghosts of the past
have returned. The whole of Central Luzon – which includes Tarlac province
– has probably the most number of massacres that have taken place in
recent memory. The list takes you all the way from the Philippine-American
war at the turn of the 20th century where whole communities
were raided and pillaged and their inhabitants murdered without mercy by
U.S. mercenary troops, to the massacres perpetrated by soldiers and
constables under the command of then Defense Secretary Ramon Magsaysay and
CIA operative Col. Ed Lansdale as well as during the Marcos dictatorship
and until today.
One of the most
gruesome cases was the massacre in Lupao, Nueva Ecija in the early part of
the Aquino presidency, where 17 farmers including women and children, were
killed by Marines on suspicion that they were NPA rebels. Before that in
January 1987 – the second year of the Aquino presidency - 13 farmers were
shot and killed by Marines and policemen as some 10,000 farmers from
Central Luzon and Southern Luzon marched to Mendiola to demand genuine
land reform.
Central Luzon used to
host the biggest U.S. military bases outside the U.S. mainland – Clark
Airbase in Angeles City, Pampanga which is some 20 kms from Tarlac, and
Subic Naval Base in Olongapo City, Zambales. The military bases were there
not only because of the vast valley’s strategic location but because their
presence was supported by the powers-that-be, such as the Cojuangcos and
Aquinos.
More important however
is that Central Luzon has been historically dominated by traditional
oligarchs with big landowners maintaining haciendas not only here but in
other regions as well most especially in Pangasinan, Iloilo and Negros.
Some of the country’s presidents – including the current one – come from
here. Indeed the elite power that originates in Central Luzon casts its
tentacles far and wide.
In Congress,
landlord-representatives were the first to emasculate the much-touted
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), reducing it, as organized
farmers said, into a mere scrap of paper. At the village level, town and
agrarian officials colluded with judges preventing large landholdings from
being subjected to CARP through trickery and other machinations. The myth
about President Aquino’s sympathy for the peasant masses through her
“centerpiece” CARP quickly crumbled when she unleashed her total war
policy where tens of thousands of peasant families bore the brunt of
militarization and atrocities. She and her successors hyped about land
reform while the sword of war was pointed against the peasantry.
Landlordism has made
Central Luzon as having one of the biggest populations of tenants and farm
workers and the displacement in the livelihood of many others is being
made possible by the bulk importation of cheap rice, corn, vegetables and
even salt, no thanks to President Arroyo’s trade liberalization policy.
Probably the only flicker of hope that an ordinary family can grope for
today is a contractual work abroad. The region is thus where many overseas
Filipino workers now in Iraq and other Middle East countries
come from. From them one can sense the strong will to survive despite the
hopelessness they leave at home: “Di baleng mamatay sa
Iraq hwag lang magutom ang pamilya sa
Pilipinas” (It’s better to die
in Iraq [by having a job] than see my family starve to death at home).
Widespread poverty,
landlessness, union repression and state terrorism help fuel the armed
revolutionary movement here. One cannot mourn of the Hacienda Luisita
massacre without thinking that this would ignite some kind of a prairie
fire that would engulf the entire region once again – as it has been in
recent past. Bulatlat Analysis
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