Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:22:00 07/24/2009
The Inquirer’s July 19 editorial titled “Like foreign bases” erroneously viewed the opposition of the “radical sectoral representatives” to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (CARPer) as an unholy alliance with landlords. This is the second time an Inquirer editorial tagged us as being in cahoots with landlords. We detest this biased and misinformed view.
“Unholy alliance” suggests expediency. But our position on CARPer is not based on expediency but on our study and on the actual experience of peasants and farmworkers. Our position is founded on the historical struggle of the Filipino peasantry for genuine land reform and the continuing quest for justice for the martyrs of the Mendiola and Hacienda Luisita massacres.
Since its passage in 1988, we have drawn the lines against CARP, a bogus land reform program that allowed big landlords a legal escape to evade the breakup of vast tracts of land. CARP catered to the World Bank’s view of market-oriented land reform that led to the proliferation of leasehold agreements with foreign agri-businesses, and made the country most vulnerable to global land grabbing. Further, CARP was used as a counterinsurgency program to water down the Filipino peasantry’s legitimate and just struggle for land ownership.
The struggling farmers’ experience in militarized haciendas like Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, Haciendas San Antonio and Santa Isabel in Isabela, Hacienda Looc in Batangas, Hacienda Yulo in Laguna, to name a few, are concrete proof of CARP’s failure.
We firmly hold on to this principled position and espoused it in the halls of Congress by filing House Bill 3059 (the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill). We defied so-called “popular” public opinion on CARPer to the extent that we even participated in the Catholic Church-sponsored National Rural Congress, articulating our opposition to CARP.
In the House of Representatives, transcripts of the deliberations on CARPer, from the committee hearings up to the plenary debates, will show that we engaged in principled debates, forcing the bill’s proponents into admitting the “congenital defects” of the law and the failure of the so-called “reforms” in the bill to address these defects.
House records will show how many landlords voted for CARPer on the ground that its sham agrarian reform is acceptable to them, some of them echoing the proponents’ line that it is better to have a law that gives the illusion of reform than to have no illusion at all. Can there be an alliance more unholy than they who speak with the same tongue?
By reducing our principled stand against CARPer as an “unholy alliance with landlords,” the editorial insulted the farmers who are struggling for genuine agrarian reform; in fact, the imputation is shallow and baseless.
—RAFAEL “KA PAENG” V. MARIANO,
party-list representative, Anakpawis;
chair, Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas,
South Wing 602,
House of Representatives,
Batasan Hills, Quezon City
URL: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/letterstotheeditor/view/2009...