Between a landlord and a farmer

More than fifty days to his presidency, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III appears to have stumbled on his path towards defining his presidency. Even his “no more wang-wang” directive (no blazing sirens and motorized cops to escort public officials) whenever he takes the road is looking more and more like a mere sound bite.

After all, if he really wants to navigate Manila’s heavy traffic like the ordinary or average Filipino, then he should take the jeepney or public bus or the rail transit, which is the mode of transport for ordinary working citizens. Working Filipinos don’t travel in a chauffeured car, much more with the blasting din of sirens. His “no more wang-wang” policy is an empty and meaningless gesture for a president who wants to appear he’s one of the ordinary people.

It seems that President Aquino’s handlers are trying too much to cultivate a populist image for the new leader. More like Ramon Magsaysay, endeared in the hearts of the Filipino people as their champion or president of the masses. Regarded as the most popular president of the Philippines ever, Magsaysay was the first president to open the doors of Malacanang to everyone. Compared to his disliked predecessor, Elpidio Quirino, who was a better chief executive and more effective leader in managing the country’s economy. Or to his successor, Carlos P. Garcia, the nationalist president who left us with his legacy, the Filipino First policy.

Perhaps, Noynoy Aquino’s advisers want to cast the president in the mould of “Erap para sa mahirap” (Erap for the poor) before Joseph Estrada was convicted of plunder by the Sandigangbayan.

What has President Aquino III done so far?

The President’s adversarial team of lawyers backed up by the Commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Kim Henares, appeared overeager to push their chief’s agenda by bringing up four highly contentious matters to the Supreme Court to decide. These four cases involve the first three executive orders issued by President Aquino and his plan to impose a tax on road toll.

The executive orders, all challenged or subject of a temporary restraining order, include: No. 1 – creating the Philippine Truth Commission to investigate corruption in the Arroyo administration; No. 2 – firing all “midnight” appointees of former President Gloria Arroyo; and No. 3 – voiding the previous administration’s order granting state lawyers with automatic Career Executive Service Officer (CESO) Rank III without taking CESO examinations.

A 12 per cent value-added tax (VAT) on road toll was scheduled for implementation by the Aquino government early last week, but was stopped by a temporary restraining order by the Supreme Court. Refusing the advice of VAT law authors and tax experts, BIR Commissioner Henares claims that the VAT on road tolls is allowed by the Comprehensive Tax Reform Act of 1997 and the Expanded VAT Law.

“This is not a good beginning,” lamented Senator Joker Arroyo, the first executive secretary to Noynoy’s mother, the late President Corazon Aquino. Arroyo, no relation to the former president, deplored the new president’s inability to grasp the difference between the law and state policy.

By now, President Aquino would probably be best remembered for doing nothing in his young days in office, especially when opportunities presented upon him to reverse dramatically the course of Philippine history early in his term.

Two missed opportunities stand out.

First is Oplan Bantay Laya (OBL), a military counterinsurgency plan of President Gloria Arroyo which expired when her term ended last June 30, 2010. Assailed by many quarters for encouraging extrajudicial killings and the forced disappearances of hundreds of activists suspected to have links with the local insurgency movement, OBL was singled out by Philip Alston, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, as a major reason for human rights abuses by the Philippine military. OBL fails to distinguish between combatants and civilians and legal and underground organizations, thus, engendering human rights violations.

Instead of keeping his election campaign promise to respect human rights, President Aquino simply caved in to the decision of his generals to extend Oplan Bantay Laya up to January 2011, and who knows until when. The Philippine military has consistently denied responsibility for the summary killings and disappearances of suspected activists, which President Aquino has no problem accepting at face value instead of launching a serious investigation akin to the Truth Commission he established to probe into the corruption during the Arroyo administration.

President Noynoy Aquino had the chance to dismantle OBL, a relic from the martial law regime his mother helped to topple through the People Power Revolution. Ignoring all the documented extrajudicial killings and disappearances, Aquino chose to appease the military establishment and did nothing to protect human rights.

Fifty-one days in power, five activists and one journalist have already been killed, adding to the more than a thousand still unsolved cases of extrajudicially killed and forcibly disappeared. Last February 6, 2010, the military arrested and detained 43 health workers conducting a health training program in Morong, Rizal, including two pregnant women. Until now, all 43 are still in detention for suspicion of links with the communist insurgency. Doing nothing to protect human rights seems almost natural and good enough for this President.

Perhaps, it is the second opportunity that is the easiest for President Aquino to seize. The transfer of Hacienda Luisita to its rightful owners, the farmers who had been given land distribution rights under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). It would have enabled the newly-elected president to define a major thrust of his government and solidify his own mother’s legacy of comprehensive land reform, but for his family’s continuing saga of stubbornly holding on. President Aquino’s cousins have petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the 2005 decision of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) to scratch the stock distribution option (SDO) reached under CARP in 1989.

With the Supreme Court yet to decide, a compromise agreement was struck by the management of Hacienda Luisita with the farm workers, retaining the SDO in lieu of a piece of the 1,400 hectares, or a third of the plantation that was up for distribution. The settlement was condemned by the more vocal farm workers in the plantation as dubious and suspicious, alleging that the farm workers were bribed and tricked to sign the agreement.

The Cojuangcos bought Hacienda Luisita in the late-fifties using a GSIS loan and a guarantee from the Central Bank with the stipulation that the land was to be redistributed to its tenants after the loan has matured ten years later (or in 1967), something that has yet to happen.

With a single stroke of the pen or some persuasive small talk to his family, President Aquino could have changed the course of land reform in the Philippines. Hacienda Luisita is a microcosm of the land reform problem in the country. Imagine its huge impact if Noynoy Aquino would be able to return the land that rightfully belongs to its small tillers.

As in the case of Oplan Bantay Laya, President Aquino has washed his hands of the ongoing Hacienda Luisita conundrum. Instead, the President insists he is no longer a party of interest in the dispute since he has divested his shares in the company owned by his Cojuangco relatives. That he would not interfere in the land dispute because he did not want to impose himself on the farmers and workers of the Hacienda.

President Aquino spoke of the straight and crooked paths during his first state of the nation address. Here was the opportunity for him to tell his relatives to take the straight path.

No president in this modern age could possibly achieve what Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, has accomplished in his early days in office. Morales, an Aymara Indian and coca farmer, became the first indigenous president in a country with an indigenous majority.

The election of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia represented a radical shift in the country’s history. A few months after taking office. Morales put Bolivia’s natural gas fields and other key resources under state control, against the wishes of foreign investors and multinational companies. He has pushed for constitutional and land reforms, and set out the rights of the indigenous population, which have worried much of his middle-class opponents.

The difference between Evo Morales and Benigno Aquino III is striking. From where they came from, one is dirt poor; the other, to the manor born. Morales is an indigenous Aymara Indian, a coca farmer — the exact opposite of the landowning, schooled, and bred-in-comfort Noynoy Aquino who represents the upper crust in Philippine society.

Who do you think will speak for the poor and champion genuine land reform for small farmers? The farmer or the big landowner?

The accidental president –Part 2

After coming to Toronto sometime in 1987, I read a story published in one of the city’s major daily newspapers endorsing General Fidel Ramos as the most likely successor to President Cory Aquino, one who could continue the country’s arduous path toward a full-pledged democracy and stability. The story credited Cory Aquino for restoring democracy in the Philippines after almost 20 years of dictatorship.

Fresh from our experience with the sporadic coups against the Aquino government at that time, and struggling through the repressive Marcos regime, I wrote to the newspaper to demystify the belief that Cory Aquino saved the Philippines from the throes of a dictatorship and delivered a new era of democracy. My main argument was that Cory Aquino was a reluctant leader, who ascended to the presidency by accident, that it was the Filipino people’s sentiment and debt of gratitude to her husband Ninoy for his martyrdom that gave her their vote.

Now, history is repeating itself. Noynoy Aquino, the son, also rises on the strength of his parents’ legacy. An inconsequential and do-nothing member of Congress, both as a congressman and senator, Noynoy is at the cusp of becoming the country’s next president. Early results of last Monday’s election gave Noynoy an insurmountable lead over his opponents.

The present political reality in the Philippines is not a rarity. When Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India, was assassinated, party members loyal to him wooed his wife Sonia to succeed him. Sonia refused, perhaps for fear for her life and family. Her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, suffered the same fate that befell her husband Rajiv. Sonia Gandhi later became the president of the Indian National Congress and currently serves as chair of India's ruling United Progressive Alliance.

Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike was the world’s first female head of government, ahead of British PM Margaret Thatcher. Bandaranaike was the widow of a previous Sri Lankan prime minister, and the mother of Sri Lanka’s third president, Chandrika Kumaratunga.

When Kim Sung-il passed away, his son Kim Jong-il ascended to the leadership of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Everyone in North Korea now considers Kim Jong-il as their “Supreme Leader.”

Even former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yee of Singapore did not leave his post quietly. He ensured that his eldest son Lee Hsien Loong would become the country’s third prime minister when he stepped down from power.

This is the same narrative of politics in the Philippines. It runs in and around the family. Almost every congressman or senator is a member of a political dynasty. Noynoy Aquino happens to be the most recent of scions of a political family to assume the reins of government. He will be succeeding another president who came to power on the coat tails of her father’s name and tenure in Malacanang.

But what is so different in the case of Noynoy Aquino?

Prominent among Noynoy’s serious shortcomings is his continuous self-denial of the right of the thousands of farm workers to own their piece of land at Hacienda Luisita. Because of the Cojuangco family’s intransigence, Hacienda Luisita has earned an infamous place in the history of agrarian reform in the Philippines.

The Cojuangco family took ownership of Hacienda Luisita from Tabacalera y Compania in 1958 through a loan from the Government Service Insurance System and a private loan from the Manufacturers Trust Company of New York under a guarantee by the Central Bank of the Philippines. It was President Ramon Magsaysay who offered the sale of the hacienda to the Cojuangcos through his protégé, Ninoy Aquino, a Cojuangco son-in-law. The sale was consummated during the term of President Carlos P. Garcia.

One of the terms of the loan agreement between the Cojuangcos and their creditors was the transfer of the hacienda to the hands of the farmers by 1967. This never happened.

When Cory Aquino ran for president, she promised to redistribute the hacienda’s land to its farmers under a comprehensive land reform program. After assuming the presidency, Cory Aquino changed her heart and the Cojuangcos continued to hold ownership under a stock distribution option, which meant that the farmers would be considered co-owners through stock ownership and the hacienda would be exempt from land reform because it was now a corporation. Stock options were never distributed and the farmers were never considered co-owners.

Noynoy Aquino insists that there are no tenants or farmers in Hacienda Luisita based on the stock option plan, hence there is no need to redistribute the land. If there were any land, according to Noynoy, it would be too inefficiently small to distribute among more than 5,000 farmers. Thus, it was unrealistic to give every farmer one hectare of land to till. But Noynoy Aquino doesn’t understand that the farmers can still own the land as members of a farmer’s co-operative, which is in existence and operates in Hacienda Luisita.

To insist and to deny that there are no tenants or farmers in Hacienda Luisita reveal something is definitely awry in Noynoy’s frame of mind. Some of his opponents voiced their concerns about reports that Noynoy was seeing a psychiatrist and raised the issue of competence. There is nothing wrong about consulting a psychiatrist, and even if this were true, would not prove Noynoy’s incompetence for the highest position in the land.

What could be more damning evidence of incompetence than Noynoy’s continuing resolute defence of his family’s stake in Hacienda Luisita? The father of one of the victims of the massacre during the farm workers’ picket at Hacienda Luisita on November 16, 2006, aptly summed up Noynoy Aquino's incompetence when he said: “How can Noynoy lead the country when he cannot manage to solve our problem here at Hacienda Luisita? This is a small piece of land, a very small problem compared to running the country. Yet, he can’t do anything about it.”

For the farmers who have been tilling the hectares of land at Hacienda Luisita, the continuing ownership of the Cojuangco family mirrors the oligarchic control of the country by its powerful few. To them, the agrarian dispute at Hacienda Luisita stands out as an issue of competence for Noynoy Aquino.

But the presidential election would soon be over in a few days, and when all the votes have been counted, Noynoy Aquino will be proclaimed the country’s new president. Just as reluctant as his mother Cory to lead the country, expect Noynoy and his accidental presidency to yield nothing more than a mandate of false hopes and empty rhetoric to Filipinos.