Is this finally the end of the Luisita drama? 

Examining the SC's decision on Hacienda Luisita requires sifting through PR, propaganda, sloganeering, and their intersections – various levels of unspeak that, as Orwell notes, affronts not only prose style but also political transparency. For one, Chief Justice Renato Corona and his lawyers are deceiving themselves when they claim the present impeachment trial is a result of the CJ's decision on Luisita. Corona is being tried for corruption and for protecting a criminal ex-president. Obfuscation and conspiracy theories are usually for liars and hucksters; all it takes is for one to look at CJ's SALN to ascertain how committed he is to truth. That PNoy would run after a chief magistrate to protect his family’s land – expending enormous amounts of political capital in the process – is preposterous. If he were so obsessed with keeping Luisita, why did he appoint an agrarian reform secretary who has been supportive of distribution? For all his vacillations on the matter, Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes is not an enemy of the Luisita farmers, nor is he a plaything of landlords. Before Corona begins to believe his sycophants, may I remind the Chief Justice of the legalese he and uninspired legal scholars/newspaper pundits have hitherto deployed in his defense: SC rulings are collegial decisions and must not be attributed to single justices. Among the list of magistrates who voted to distribute Hacienda Luisita was PNoy's appointee, Associate Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno. Finally, what right does CJ have to play the hero card when he counts among his defense lawyers a counsel for Hacienda Luisita Incorporated (HLI)? Of course the Cojuangco-Aquino family is not homogenous, and some of them exhibit the landlord mentality that the far Left and CJ attribute to PNoy. On Twitter, presidential sister Kris Aquino compared the ruling on her family's land to the persecution her father suffered under Ferdinand Marcos. The statement is shocking and offensive; it's Kris exhibiting her trademark verbal diarrhea, excessive melodrama, and, well, just plain excess. Kris is singular in many ways. But to equate Ms. Aquino's sentiments with her more sagacious brother's is to neglect the melange structure of the Aquino government, which consists of various factions with different interests. Besides, there's a reason why one sibling is in the presidential palace and the other on the cover of Preview Magazine. Within the government, there are people with much longer histories of solidarity with the Luisita farm workers than the self-anointed judicial king of agrarian justice (out of diffidence, I will not mention what my party, Akbayan, has done in this regard). This does not preclude PNoy from holding anti-peasant sentiments. Who knows what thorough psychoanalyses of our public officials would reveal? Quite a lot perhaps.  But since the presidential conscience is not like a SALN that can or must be open to public scrutiny, we are left to look at actions. And the evidence is clear on this matter: PNoy qua president has done little to prevent the distribution of Luisita. Conversely, though, he has done little to ensure its distribution. My own limited and peripheral interactions with the Aquino campaign reveal how difficult it is for agrarian reform to gain traction in PNoy's crowd. I once brought the most conscientious member of the Aquino campaign's communications team to the plantation, and he saw for himself the poverty in those 6,000 hectares. He became a lonely advocate for Luisita distribution within the team, while Manolo Quezon continued to claim that the unfair Stock Distribution Option (SDO) was a "middle ground" between outright distribution and no distribution. That a middle ground constitutes just grounds is a leap in logic, which the now undersecretary - usually more careful and brilliant in his commentary - did not consider. The PNoy government's treatment of the Luisita issue is a massive grey area. It is not only clichéd but downright wrong to pass off his motives as that of a scheming landlord. The new generation of political elites are no longer provincial hacenderos bound by sentimental nostalgia to the fields stolen by their ancestors. However, it is equally incorrect to say that PNoy is a modernizer capable of addressing the long-standing issue of rural poverty. Seeing as he almost never mentions agrarian reform in his speeches and public appearances, I would not be surprised if he viewed it as a concoction of the Left, neglecting the history of successful rural land distribution schemes implemented by American bureaucrats in post-war Korea and Japan. But, as I said, this is neither the space nor the time to psychoanalyze. Nuance aside, the final decision to distribute Hacienda Luisita is cause for celebration, for almost everyone. Once you distribute the land of the president’s family, it will be more difficult for less prominent landowning families to evade agrarian reform. Hopefully, this provides the needed push that will allow DAR to aggressively distribute land in places like the Bondoc Peninsula. Furthermore, the distribution of Luisita under the legal framework of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (CARPER) proves that a legal framework for agrarian reform is a precondition for rural justice. For once, we can equate Luisita with good news. It has been more than five decades since Juan Ponce Enrile – then working for the Cojuangco family – found the first legal loophole that allowed PNoy’s grandparents to avoid the promised distribution of a sprawling sugar plantation in Tarlac. It has been almost three decades since Ferdinand Marcos ordered the immediate parcelling of that same plantation, only to be replaced by a benevolent democrat who unfortunately forgot about her own backyard. I could fill pages with narratives of heartbreak from generations of farm workers in forlorn fields, where sugarcane burns alongside stock deeds. Both the sugarcane and the deeds were burnt by farmers who, in moments of seething clarity, realized that neither sugar nor stocks could feed families of five. Yet for the first time, that plantation is not redolent of despair laced in the folds of intergenerational time. For the first time, people are raising their Red Horse bottles to a better future. Luisita might just become free.  Leloy Claudio completed a Phd in History at the University of Melbourne. He conducted ethnographic research in Hacienda Luisita for his doctoral thesis.