AQUINO AND HACIENDA

The Hacienda Luisita has a long story to tell, and definitely Nonoy Aquino has nothing to do with whatever is going on with this massive land that his family owns.

All we can tell was that the Spaniards,Compaña General de Tabacos de Filipinas (Tabacalera), sometime in the 1950s owned this huge track of land of more than 6,000 hectares and was obliged to sell the land because of the huk balahap rebellion during the Ramon Magsaysay regime. It was Ramon Magsaysay who asked the Cojuangco patriarch Jose Cojuangco to purchase the land for $2.1 million.
The government through the Central Bank provided the assistance for the Cojuanco's to acquire a dollar load from Manufacturer’s Trust Company New York with the understanding that the land will be distributed to the tenants as part of the Agrarian Reform program. (Dr. James Putzel did extensive research on agrarian reform in the Philippines between the late 1980s to the early 1990s. He is currently a Professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics.)

So there started the hacienda Luisita Agrarian reform controversy. The government understanding with the Cojuanco's that land will be distributed to the poor never transpired. there was even a time when Marcos filed a case against the Cojuancos to compel them to commit what they have promised to the peasants but it was misconstrued as harassment to the Aquino's. It was also the time that the EDSA tragedy was in the offshoot which of course known to be the EDSA People Power.

The case never prospered and Ninoy was assassinated and then Cory became president. . She eventually dismissed the case that Marcos filed against her family of course with all the powers vested in her as president of the land. Cory Aquino had all the hopes of the Luisita peasant to finally be given the land reform they have always longed to have, but what they received was instead the stock options for the Luisita farmers. The Cojuancos argued that these farmers would not survive with small parcel of land with less than a hectare if it was subdivided among them. They argued further that they never new anything about management and agriculture therefore it would be more beneficial for them to be in a corporation.

Now what can Noynoy do to resolve the agrarian reform issue. He can sacrifice his family heritage and pursue the land reform as originally planned by then Magsaysay and Jose Cojuanco ( his great grand pa) or forget about invoking his parents as the catalyst of justice and truth because after all the yellow ribbon had stains of red lies on it as well.