De los Santos: Corona and Hda. Luisita

Saturday, February 25, 2012

IF SENATOR Franklin Drilon has any amount of delicadeza, he should join the prosecution panel instead of masquerading as a senator-judge. Instead of asking clarificatory questions like the rest of the impeachment court, his questions are meant to corner the witness into revealing information damaging to Corona. What the prosecution fails to elicit, he labors hard to squeeze out of the witness.

From his efforts to convict Corona, Drilon only succeeds in showing where his passion lies. It is not farfetched to guess that he is doing an errand for Noynoy Aquino, who obviously wants to get Corona out of the Hacienda Luisita case.

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The amount at stake in the hacienda’s motion for reconsideration against the Supreme Court decision granting the same to the farmer-beneficiaries is mind-boggling.

The Supreme Court – or the Corona Court – in its November 22 resolution, says Inquirer columnist Rigoberto Tiglao, said that just compensation for the hacienda due for distribution to the farmer beneficiaries, will be determined based on its 1989 value or P40,000 per hectare, which was how the Cojuangcos valued it to determine the farmers’ stocks in its bogus land reform model of that year. That would have placed the hacienda’s total value at P173 million.

The Cojuangos filed a motion to clarify and reconsider, arguing against its own 1989 valuation. Now, it wants its 2006 market price to be the basis for just compensation, arguing that since 1989, Hacienda Luisita had grown into an industrial complex, with an industrial park, malls and high-end residential areas. After all, President Gloria Macapagal had built the Subic-Clark Tarlac Expressway with an artery exclusively built for Hacienda Luisita. Now, the Cojuangcos insist, it’s now P2.5 million per hectare.

If a Supreme Court without Corona yields to this demand of P2.5 million per hectare or an astounding P9.75 billion and if the P9.75 billion is not paid right away, their “innocent” “Motion for reconsideration” is demanding a 6 percent interest rate from 2006, or P580 million annually. If the Hacienda is finally paid at the end of 2012, the total interest would jump to P3.5 billion or a total of P13 billion.

If you were Drilon, won’t you, even if you are made to walk on all fours like a dog, labor to get even a two percent cut on that?

And if you are Aquino, wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to remove the road block to your getting P13 billion?

*****

There is nothing like a tragedy to move our leaders in Negros Oriental to give so much of themselves to come to the assistance of its victims. The harrowing calamity in Negros Oriental has once more demonstrated this altruism. Bacolod City sent its engineering equipments to clear the earthquake’s debris. Others, like Cong. Albee Benitez, gave half a million from his personal resources, aside from raising another half a million from outside sources to make the lives of the quake victims bearable somehow.

Bacolod City responded too, although what it gave is minuscule given its resources. It sent a bulldozer and a couple of engineers. Well, as they say, better than nothing.

The earthquake demonstrates our vulnerability in the face of nature’s fury. While we can institute safeguards, they cannot ensure against nature going berserk. More advanced countries, like the United States and Japan, have recently suffered worse. Japan’s tsunami washed away buildings and practically everything along its path. Typhoon Katrina in the US devastated an entire state. And there was nothing their superior technology and wealth can do to arrest the unleashed fury of the elements.

What makes earthquakes more frightening is that up to today, it is beyond even the most advanced science to predict. Unlike typhoons and other such calamities, where the public is more or less warned about their approach, earthquakes come without warning and its strength is known only after the fact. What is left for man is to gather the pieces after it has left.
Quite tragic.