Landmark decision

For the farmers of Hacienda Luisita, the wait for justice was long. The Supreme Court decision was sweet nevertheless.

When the Cojuangco family acquired the sprawling sugarcane estate using loans and guarantees from government, a clear condition was agreed upon. After ten years, the land was to be transferred to the farmers.

That should have happened sometime in 1968. Since then, the farmers have marched, reveled, petitioned the courts, negotiated with the hacienda bosses and took casualties on the picket lines. For more than four decades, they waited and waited and waited, dreaming of that day when the land they tilled will be theirs.

Some of those farmers joined the armed rebellion. Others were killed in protests that were violently suppressed. Still others simply passed away, succumbing to age, disease and poverty. Most of those who might finally receive the land, see a title to their name, are of another generation. The wheels of justice, indeed, grind exceedingly slow.

The Marcos dictatorship, even as it inaugurated a land reform program, could not find the means to actually transfer the land. The matter was locked in the courts which the regime chose to respect.

After the Edsa Revolution, the Cory Aquino government launched a comprehensive agrarian reform program as its centerpiece undertaking — but exempted Hacienda Luisita by contriving the device of a share distribution option to skirt around actual land transfer. Revolutions, this demonstrates, need not begin at home.

Reacting to the violent suppression of the farmers’ strike at Luisita, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered her agrarian reform department to include the controversial hacienda in its land transfer program. Her relationship with Cory Aquino turned from cold to hostile. Cory, who survived several coup attempts against her presidency, turned up outside Marine headquarters when a mutiny was brewing, throwing her support behind those who, according to allegation, were embarking on a coup.

The final ruling of the Supreme Court on the Hacienda Luisita case was long expected. When it was finally released, it was a decision backed by a rare consensus on the bench.

If the land is finally transferred sometime soon, it will happen when a member of the clan that owned it and resisted the transfer for decades sits as President of the Republic. That is the irony that laces this landmark decision. As has become usual over the past 500 days, the President was both unseen and unheard on an eventful day.

Benigno Simeon Aquino, as President of the Republic, ought to have sided with the farmers as state policy dictates even if he was heir to the contested manor. He could not bring himself to do that and, to the end, hid behind the meaningless argument that he divested his shares in Luisita after assuming the highest post. That was such a diffident stance. The opportunity to demonstrate statesmanship simply passed.

Unfortunately, the SC ruling on Luisita was released at a time that there is some tension between the executive and judicial branches of government. It is tempting, but wrong, to link that ruling to the immediate context of inter-branch tensions.

It will be more accurate, and just, to characterize the ruling as an exemplary exercise of judicial statesmanship. The constitutional and legal framework that made this ruling inevitable is so clear that to taint the decision with the smear of politicking will be an act of malice.

Partial

Early this week, the Ateneo School of Government did something thoroughly unscholarly and extremely unjust. They organized a forum on “The Future of Mining in the Philippines” that featured only the greenies who have built a cottage industry out of griping about mining to the exclusion of those who actually invested in this industry.

It is unscholarly because this was a partial conversation among those sharing the same bias. It was unjust because, on a subject where public education is much needed, the forum represented only one side of a vital debate.

Because they did not invite anyone from the mining industry to present their side of the debate, this forum can only be called an incestuous intellectual intercourse. It is the equivalent of a cult gathering of the Ku Klux Klan where the speakers, the discussants and the audience were all white supremacists.

In which case, the forum was inappropriately titled. This was not at all about the future of the mining industry. It was a recital of the chorus of those voices that wanted no future for the industry. That chorus appropriately calls itself Alyansa Tigil Mina (Alliance to Stop Mining).

We do have an existing framework that defines the future of the mining industry in the country. It is called the Philippine Mining Act of 1995 — the most environmentally conscientious legal framework in the world.

Much work was put into framing this law so that the economic opportunities presented by the mining industry might be reconciled with the sustainability of our precarious ecology. In this framework, much national wealth might be created without depriving future generations of a bountiful environment.

The Mining Act, in turn, provides the basis for the industry and its regulators to further develop the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI). This is the truly important matter that the non-government organizations must engage with technical competence and economic sensibility. It is the evolving rules-of-the-game that will truly shape the future of mining here.

Of course, the EITI was not discussed in the Ateneo forum. In which case, this forum could only be an orgy of the uninformed.