hacienda luisita: 1,527 hectares still owned by cojuangcos

everyone was expecting pained remarks from the aquino-cojuangco camp after the supreme court ruled that compensation is to be based on 1989 valuations.  but, nothing.  i wondered if maybe because they had read alex magno’s “Hacienda” where he says The price for the blood-soaked land is probably ridiculously low. That might be what social justice requires. 

Recall that the agreement in the fifties, in exchange for government financing acquisition of the hacienda, was for the landowners to distribute the land to the farmers by 1968. Since that time, the matter was tied up in litigation.

It will probably take at least a year for the land to be actually redistributed. That means that all of 45 years was lost to the farmers fighting this case in the courts.

Any day added to the waiting and any peso added to the price of the land will be an injustice. A more militant position on this issue might have pegged land prices at their 1968 levels — the year the land was supposed to have been redistributed.

In addition, a portion of Luisita land was sold earlier by its owners to a private company. The farmers, who have been stockholders in the meantime, demand a share of the proceeds from that sale. Hacienda Luisita claims the money made from the sale have all been expended. But if the farmers deserve a share of that, the amount due them might be discounted from what they have to amortize from here on.

or maybe they read solita collas-monsod’s “Screwed coming and going” where she points out that in 1989 the cojuangcos used that same 40,000 per hectare valuation which gave the family absolute control of the new corporation, Hacienda Luisita Inc., and the farmers only one-third ownership.

which is really some kind of poetic justice, no?  but wait.  tila unfinished, incomplete, ang justice, after all.  read mareng winnie’s punchline.

Remember: The total land area of Hacienda Luisita that should have been subjected to agrarian reform was 6,443 hectares, but the actual area reformed was 4,916 hectares. Which means that the owners of Tadeco, with the approval of the DAR, were allowed to keep for themselves 1,527 hectares of land.

That’s a heck of a lot of land. Even if one deducts 66 hectares that supposedly comprise the sugar mill land, 263 hectares supposedly unfit for agriculture, 266 hectares of roads and creeks, and 121 hectares “given” to the farmers for home lots, there would still be 811 hectares of land left for the owners of Tadeco.

Eight hundred eleven hectares of land is larger than most of the other sugar plantations in the country.

Which leads to the question: Shouldn’t the DAR reform that land, too? The original decision of the Supreme Court gives it the authority to do so. I sincerely hope that Agrarian Reform Secretary Gil de los Reyes is made of stern stuff.

wow.  ang coconut and rice lands, someone correct me if i’m wrong, 7 hectares lang ang puwedeng i-retain ng landowner.  ano ba yan, iba pang kaso?  talaga naman.  pahirapan.  state of the nation.

Thanks for the memory

By Elmer Ordonez

Then it came to me – the pre-war song “Thanks for the Memory” sung by Bob Hope with another, a favorite which Elenita (Tita) and I included in our CD album of songs of remembrance, our giveaway at our golden anniversary in 2006.

I first heard the song on radio in 1937 ( I was seven then) and it became a theme song of Bob Hope — the first strains of which signaled his entrance in performances on TV and in overseas appearances before homesick GIs in three wars (WWII, Korean, and Vietnam). He was hilarious with his one-liners and his skits with crooner Bing Crosby.

Songs become touchstones of time and place and occasion. Elenita and I have at least fifty of them in our anniversary album – each one marking a period or moment in our lives that conjoined since 1956. “Thanks for the Memory” with lyrics memorable to Hope evokes in listeners memories from their own repertoire of shared experiences.

Ours include stints abroad, four years in Madison, Wisconsin, two one-year teaching assignments in New York, a year in Oxford, England, a year and a half in Malaysia, and twelve years in Montreal. We lived abroad for a total of 20 years before settling down in the “old country”, as expats say, to teach 15 more years before retirement in Imus.

The Hope song catalogues incidents, moments, details, impressions. I should be writing my own lyrics to the song. Not being a lyricist, I will do it in prose. Not quite the same though.

We treasured the seasons in Madison, like autumn when we first arrived. From our first apartment in what Eddie Reyes called “Dickensian”, we could see the autumn leaves from our window with our eight-month old Mo, the radio playing “Tammy” by Debbie Reynolds.

We had our first snow in Eagle Heights, a new housing for graduate students and their families, and made halo halo from the newly fallen white flakes. Autumn almost over, we walked through the woods to Picnic Point, and trod on the thick carpet of fallen leaves. We felt the chill in our bones, thinking a sweater would do in the open.

We had our first blizzard December that year, thankful that our apartment was well insulated, and we had just done our groceries so our small fridge was well stocked. We bought only the cheap cuts of meat good for soups and stews. Our only treat was at McDonald’s once a month.

I hated waiting for the school bus in winter when five minutes in the bus stop was an eternity. Good thing we got warm coats from the Salvation Army. I envied your staying home with Mo, reading Dr. Spock to her or letting her watch on TV the Mickey Mouse show or the Friendly Giant while you kept house. I was grateful for the hot beef stew or chicken soup you prepared when I got home from the campus. .

In Potsdam, New York, we would drive on weekends to see the St. Lawrence Seaway locks where at the viewing deck we could chat briefly with Filipino seamen on ships going to the Great Lakes. In the Adirondacks we visited Saranac Lake where Quezon was remembered as El Presidente.

We had no central heating in Cowley, Oxford, and made do with coal in the fireplace and electric fires in the bedrooms. We had to wear our overcoats inside theaters and endure the cigarette smoke. Good thing we had no asthma then but we stank after every show. On weekends we toured the English countryside with a Minor 1000 that still used a crank to start a stalled engine. .

In May 1967 we began our “grand tour” of western Europe with three kids and Minda. From the start the car handle broke and I had to secure it with a string so it wouldn’t fall off. The camp ground atop the cliffs of Dover was still frozen and we all slept in our tent with our winter coats on.

Camping grounds in northern France had not yet opened and we stayed in a small hotel with a full view of Amiens cathedral. Our “petit dejeuner” was a pitcher of warm fresh milk and a big bowl of croissants. The children still talk about it. And the juiciest weiners in Munich.

British soldiers in lorries waved at us in the Minor 1000 with its roof rack fully packed with our things. We guessed ours was the only Minor 1000 they had seen on the road in Europe. .

In southern France we checked in a camp site and wondered about the caravans with curtained windows and the big American cars which should have told us they belonged to gypsies. They became friendly when you talked to them in Spanish.

We crossed the Pyrenees to Spain late afternoon and had to check in an auberge at the border. We woke up that morning to see our Minor 1000 covered with snow. In sunny Zaragoza you marveled at tent sites, each canopied with roses. We did see the sky in Toledo as El Greco saw it.

Two more weeks we toured Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Belgium where we took the ferry back to Dover just as the Six-Day War began. We vowed to revisit Spain and Italy later on, and we did. A flood of memories of other places, other times. Thank you, Elenita, thank you so much.

(A memorial gathering for Elenita, 79, will be held tomorrow morning at 10, at the Island Cove, Binakayan, Kawit, Cavite.)

eaordonez2000@yahoo.com

 

mario taguiwalo (1951-2012)

i had not seen mario in a long time, since 1985, to be precise, but over the years i had a sense of what he was up to.  reading now the obits and eulogies, i am not surprised that he had become a civil-society celebrity.  mario was a rare one, very keen, and a lovely lovely man.

…Health technocrat
By Quasi Romualdez

LAST Sunday, Mario M. Taguiwalo, health technocrat par excellence, died, years away from retirement age. Mario was a much sought after health consultant who participated in almost all of the significant changes that took place in the health sector during the past three decades.

Armed with a master’s degree in economics, Mr. Taguiwalo was introduced to health work as an adviser to Intercare, then a subsidiary of the famed consulting group of Bancom. After the EDSA Revolution, he became the highest ranking non-physician in the Department of Health ever when he was appointed Undersecretary of Health and Chief of Staff to then Secretary of Health, Alfredo Bengzon.

Mario’s firm understanding of the dynamics of the health sector enabled him to become one of the architects of the most wide-ranging reforms of the government’s health services during the turbulent period immediately following martial law. His ability to articulate health concepts and issues coupled with a calm and soothing personality soon made him a favored participant in most important health events. Even after he left the Department of Health in 1992, Mario became a most valued adviser and consultant to all succeeding Secretaries of Health.

As well, Taguiwalo became one of the most favored consultants/advisers to almost all health development agencies in the country – foreign as well as local, multilateral as well as bilateral.

Mario played a key role in developing and advancing the concepts and the cause of universal health care – an idea that now frames the health agenda of the Aquino government. As one of the key figures providing technical inputs to politicians and bureaucrats alike, Mario’s premature demise has left a void that will be very difficult to fill even as the country moves towards the dream of equal access to health care services for all Filipinos.

Mario Taguiwalo, 1951-2012 by Jessica Zafra
Obituary: Mario Taguiwalo, leading thinker in the Cory Aquino administration by Howie Severino
‘Never again’ by Rina Jimenez-David

china challenge 2

The bad news is that the Philippines remains trapped in the framework of “special relations” with America and is demonstrating the fact before the world. Hell, the bad news is that the Philippines remains an American stooge and takes pride in parading it before its neighbors.

In response to the crisis, Foreign Secretary Alberto del Rosario and Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin are preparing to meet with their US counterparts Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta in Washington next week.

The Balikatan war exercises are also currently taking place here, and while that was planned long ago, Beijing is interpreting it to be a response to the crisis. “Anyone with clear eyes saw long ago that behind these drills is reflected a mentality that will lead the South China Sea issue down a fork in the road towards military confrontation,” said the People’s Liberation Army newspaper. US Ambassador Harry Thomas Jr.’s comment that the Balikatan exercises are about “working together in the spirit of the Mutual Defense Treaty” could not have helped to dispel it. The Mutual Defense Treaty calls on the United States and the Philippines to go to war if one or the other is attacked.

But in fact, the Mutual Defense Treaty is an exercise in stupidity. At the very least it’s useless. It’s completely one-sided, the Philippines being perfectly willing to go to war for the United States but the latter being unwilling to do so for the Philippines. Or indeed back us up in our territorial disputes with other countries. We were willing enough to go to war for America in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, but it was never willing to go to war for us over Sabah, or support our claims to it. It won’t go to war over the Spratly island group for us, or back up our claims to it.

At the very most, it cannot endear us to our Asian neighbors. Certainly, it cannot raise us in their esteem that we can espy one bully but not another, that we can see that China is trying to steal from us a group of tiny islands up north but not that America almost stole from us an entire chunk of territory down south. And will continue to try. God helps only those who help themselves. So do the other Asian countries.

Quite apart from that, it cannot earn for us much goodwill from them that we mean to embroil America in a confrontation with China. America may be a comforting presence to us, military and otherwise, but it is not so to our neighbors. Certainly, it is not so to Vietnam, a good deal of its population it decimated in the name of giving them democracy. And which is now probably more democratic, in the sense of its people partaking of the bounties of its earth, than most other countries in Southeast Asia, including us. And certainly it cannot be so to Malaysia and Indonesia, two Muslim countries, given that America’s definition of terrorists, who are largely Islamist fanatics, often forget the part about fanatics.

The Chinese word for crisis is the same as opportunity, and we would do well to heed it. This crisis offers us an opportunity to prove ourselves. Two paths lie before us, one of them well-trodden and the other not taken. The well-trodden path has always led us to perdition, and will continue to bring us there. Isumbong mo kay Uncle Sam is a lose-lose prospect: It will bring us neither the help we want nor the respect we need.

The other path is to show a newfound independence and make our appeal to the other Asian countries in that light. I don’t know that it is a win-win prospect, but I do think it offers at least a win-lose one. It might not get China to accept our claim to the disputed territory, but it might just get the rest of Asia to accept our claim to be part of it. That is not so today, notwithstanding our participation in Asian affairs. We are as alien to it as Australia, and Australia is probably less alien to it than us. At least Australia’s foreign policy is an extension of Australia, but our foreign policy is an extension of America. Who knows? Maybe we take the path less traveled and might lose the dispute but earn the respect.

that’s from conrado de quiros’s inquirer column today, Battle, war, a realistic take on our so-called “mutual” defense treaty with america.  his recommendation though, that we take the path less-, or is that never-, travelled, vis a vis china & panatag — i.e., get the rest of asia on our side vs china — seems to me doomed for as long as we welcome, suffer, whatever, the american presence.

read, too, aljazzera‘s Without question: US military expansion in the Asia-Pacific
william esposo’s: Factor these when dealing with China 
asia sentinel‘s China’s Skewed View of South China Sea History