Peping: Luisita has yet to receive complaint

TARLAC CITY – It has been more than a month now since the controversy over the stock distribution option of Hacienda Luisita cropped up, but the management of the sugar estate owned by the family of former President Corazon Aquino, has yet to formally receive a copy of the supposed complaint farmworkers filed with the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).

"All that we know are bits and pieces of information (about the complaint), which we have picked up from press statements of (Agrarian Reform Secretary Horacio) Morales published in newspapers," said former Rep. Jose "Peping" Cojuangco Jr., Mrs. Aquino’s younger brother.

Cojuangco also denied that the hacienda is besieged by labor unrest.

"Boy Morales is even welcome to visit us here in Tarlac so he can see for himself that the unrest he has been talking about is just a product of his hallucination," he said.

Cojuangco said he has received information that almost all of the estimated 200 anti-Luisita rallyists who took to the streets last Nov. 30 "were not at all legitimate residents of any barangay in Luisita, and I doubt if all of them are legitimate farmworkers."

He added that even the failed ambush by suspected communist assassins on Francisco Sigua, president of the United Luisita Workers’ Union, and SPO3 Ramon Molina, his police bodyguard, has not affected labor-management relations at the hacienda.

Cojuangco said the attempt on Sigua’s life "was not at all connected to the labor unrest being pictured by Morales," adding that Sigua told him that he (Sigua) did not take part in the anti-Luisita rally organized by former activists allegedly connected with Morales and former Tarlac governor Mariano Un Ocampo III.

Police have filed frustrated double murder charges against Nelson Mesina, said to be the provincial commander of the New People’s Army, in connection with the ambush.

The charges were based on a statement of one Serafin Magdiwang, spokesman of the NPA’s Josepino Corpuz Command, who said that "Sigua has long been meted the punishment of death by the revolutionary movement" for being allegedly responsible for the disappearance of peasants and youth activists in Hacienda Luisita in the 1980s.

"It is very obvious that the Estrada administration is just using this issue for black propaganda and blackmailing purposes," Cojuangco said.

Cojuangco helped Ilocos Sur Gov. Luis "Chavit" Singson in exposing alleged multimillion-peso payoffs President Estrada received from illegal gambling operators, while Mrs. Aquino is one of the leading figures of the nationwide oust-Estrada movement.

But Dienrado Dimalibot, director of DAR’s Special Concerns Staff, said the inquiry into Hacienda Luisita’s stock distribution option is not an attempt to get back at Mrs. Aquino and Peping, but to give "justice" to farmworkers of the hacienda.

"The DAR was simply acting on the legitimate complaints and demands of the hacienda workers and performing its tasks based on its mandate under the Constitution and the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law," said Dimalibot, who heads the investigation team.

He said Mrs. Aquino should not take the inquiry personally because the DAR was merely acting on a petition the farmworkers submitted to the DAR last month.

Dimalibot said that as early as May, or four months before the jueteng scandal broke out, the DAR had already created a task force to look into the implementation of the SDO scheme in general because of mounting complaints from farmer-beneficiaries. — With Jose Rodel Clapano, Rocel Felix