Category: ninoy

ninoy & the hacienda

sychronicity: ninoy aquino’s 27th death anniversary (the filipino is worth dying for) and the hearing of the high-profile hacienda luisita case (scheme sdo) in the supreme court.

there’s good background stuff on the internet, thanks to gmanews.tv, and there’s lynda jumilla’s report on anc, salamat naman, altho sana sa free tv and mainstream media rin, ‘no?

because it’s interesting, revealing, if not really surprising, how inextricably linked the stories of ninoy and cory are with the hacienda’s masalimuot history.

read howie severino et al’s holding on: a hacienda luisita timeline from the spanish to the noynoy eras

read leloy claudio’s ninoy networked with everyone including the reds

if ninoy had lived, would he have handled the hacienda problem differently?   it would seem so, though it would have meant a major rift split rupturewith the cojuangcos, unless he could have been really creative and come up with a compromise that both cory and the farmers could live with.

now that noynoy is president, and he seems more of a cojuangco than a ninoy aquino — read carlos conde’s aquino is being shrewd about hacienda luisita — looks like the pattern could persist, which bodes ill for the farmers and the nation but bodes good for other haciendas and big landowners who continue to defy the law, what a drag.

here’s a partial list of other families owning vast tracts of land via KMP via mon ramirez:

Hacienda Zobel in Calatagan, Batangas – 12,000 hectares
Hacienda Yulo in Nasugbu, Batangas – 8,650 hectares
Hacienda Roxas also in Nasugbu – 7,813 hectares
Hacienda Yulo in Canlubang, Calamba – 7,100 hectares
Hacienda Luisita – 6,453 hectares
Hacienda Puyat also in Nasugbu, Batangas – 2,400 hectares
Hacienda Agoncillo in Laurel, Batangas – 2,014 hectares

There are more in other provinces and regions.

To get an idea of the size of each hacienda, compare them with the land areas of these four cities:

QC – 16,000 hectares
Manila – 3,955 hectares
Makati – 2,738 hectares
Marikina – 2,150 hectares

“Ninoy Aquino & the Rise of People Power”

at last, a good, no, a great, documentary film on ninoy aquino.   why am i not surprised that it’s not home-made, no, it takes a tom coffman to tell us the story of ninoy.   but thanks na rin to abs-cbn channel 2 for airing it this late sunday night, and thanks to my lucky stars that i happened to surf and switch just as it was beginning.   sana i-replay pag primetime.   sana isalin sa filipino.

SONAkakadismaya

aint enough to expose gma’s overspending and then to tell us how he’s going to streamline the system so public funds aren’t wasted or lost to corruption.   aint enough to expose how much money goes into perks for lowly-paid high-government official appointees just to shame them into resigning.  aint enough to run after smugglers and tax evaders.

not all the anti-corruption campaigns and the most judicious kind of public spending are going to make much difference, whether in the short run or the long term.   there still won’t be enough money to address the food, education, health needs of the masses if nothing is done about our increasing population, growing by leaps and bounds, and about our economic policies that are tailored more to foreign interests than national interests.   and what about our debt & payment policies, are we never going to renegotiate?   are we forever prioritizing debt payments over the the well-being of millions of disenfranchised and marginalized filipinos?

prof. clarita carlos (gma7) is right. it’s not enough to choose a straight road over a crooked one.   question is, where does the road lead?   if his message to the cpp-npa-ndf is any indication it”s like the same road every president before him has taken: rightist road, status quo.   uncle sam must so love him.

Tungkol naman po sa CPP-NPA-NDF: handa na ba kayong maglaan ng kongkretong mungkahi, sa halip na pawang batikos lamang?

batikos lang ba ang call for agrarian reform?   and better pay for teachers?   fair trade vs. free trade?   an end to oligarchic rule?

Mahirap magsimula ang usapan habang mayroon pang amoy ng pulbura sa hangin. Nananawagan ako: huwag po natin hayaang masayang ang napakagandang pagkakataong ito upang magtipon sa ilalim ng iisang adhikain.

pulbura issues from the right too, as in the hacienda luisita massacre atbp.

Kapayapaan at katahimikan po ang pundasyon ng kaunlaran. Habang nagpapatuloy ang barilan, patuloy din ang pagkakagapos natin sa kahirapan.

it’s not as if the left rose out of nothing, and then there was kahirapan.   the kahirapan was there to begin with, thanks to oligarchic rule, kaya nga dumami at lumakas ang hanay ng kaliwa.

Dapat din po nating mabatid: ito ay panahon ng sakripisyo. At ang sakripisyong ito ay magiging puhunan para sa ating kinabukasan. Kaakibat ng ating mga karapatan at kalayaan ay ang tungkulin natin sa kapwa at sa bayan.

sakripisyo nino?   ng mahihirap pa rin?   puro sakripisyo na nga sila.   those are words better addressed to his own class, his fellow elites and landowners atbp. who refuse to share the nation’s resources.

say ni teddyboy (anc) re the speech and the new prez:

“it was an indictment. When he was talking, it was Ninoy Aquino. I was with Ninoy when he was at his most flamboyant. It was like bullets flying out of a machine gun…There was no vision, but facts.”

sorry, i don’t see the resemblance.   ninoy before martial law was hot.   noynoy is cold.   at his wisest, after seven years seven months in jail, ninoy had a vision for the country that included the left, whom he never brushed off as a “noisy minority.”   a pity that the son either seems to have no idea of it or the son chooses to ignore it.   SONAkakapanghinayang.

not yet, noynoy

huwag ka sanang magpadala kay conrado de quiros o kay alex magno o kay bongbong marcos (strange bedfellows, eh?) na hinahamon kang tumakbo for president sa 2010, na para bang if you dont seize the day ay tipong you will miss the bus altogether.

i so disagree.   while it is true that you could win because of the ninoy-cory-kris connection, are you really ready?   the nation would expect great things of you.   the nation would expect you to be a president extraordinaire who would at the very least bring about a palpable improvement in the lives of millions of filipinos looking for jobs here at home and food on the table three times a day.   that won’t happen just because you aren’t a liar, a cheat, or a thief.

i agree with tony abaya, what we need is a forward-looking president, a truly revolutionary president, someone with the attributes and visions of lee kwan yew, mahathir mohamad and gen. park chung hee.

… it is someone who has the qualities of these three foreign leaders that the Philippines badly needs in order to overcome decades of consistently poor governance, restore our badly battered self esteem, and draw for us a credible vision of what we want our country to be.

We need someone like Lee Kwan Yew who was/is personally incorruptible and at the same time was/is so conversant with economics and international relations that he could speak ex-tempore and defend his policies before an assembly of multinational CEOs and diplomats and made/make solid sense, whether they agreed/agree with him or not.

In addition we need the strong sense of nationalism of Mahathir Mohamad who in the 1980s drew a vision – Malaysia Vision 2020, that sought and seeks to transform Malaysia into a fully industrialized country by the year 2020 – that he was able to convince the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious people of Malaysia to embrace as worthy of their national loyalty, beyond the narrow appeals of their tribes and ethnic groups. No mean feat, considering the catastrophic demise of equally multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious federal Yugoslavia in the 1990s that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Mahathir’s nationalism also expressed itself in his readiness to fearlessly fire back at other countries, other world leaders, as well as international agencies whenever he felt they were trampling on the national self-interests of Malaysia.

We also need the single-minded determination of Gen. Park Chung Hee to transform his impoverished, resource-poor and inconsequential Republic of Korea from 1961 to 1979 (when he was assassinated) into a fully industrialized country that is now one of the ten biggest economies in the world.

… this is what the Philippines needs, a leader who can start and lead a revolution, a peaceful one, as much as possible; a violent one, if necessary.

you could be that leader, noynoy.   given your parents, the history, the genes, the values, you, more than any other filipino, can do it, can be it.    but not without serious preparation for the role, which would mean learning not just from your mother’s successes but also from her mistakes — e.g., land reform, foreign debts, atbp. — and, most importantly, by being truly your father’s son not just in terms of his sacrifice but also of his political ideology.

when your father came home in ‘83 he had a program of action that he drafted while in exile in boston.   surely that program of action is worth looking into — other  than the dismantling of military rule, things haven’t changed much, except gotten worse, since the  80s — and hopefully, you will be up to the revolutionary challenges it poses.

forget de quiros and other hopeless romantics who urge you to run in 2010.   to do so, and to fail at non-violent revolution because you are not ready, would be the end of you.    in effect, you’d be neutralized, which would be a shame.