What is Happening to the Farmers in Hacienda Yulo?
Written by Shariful Mansul
On January 24, armed goons of the San Cristobal Realty Development Corp torched down the houses of Freddie Cacao and Mario Mangubat, residents of Sitio Buntog in Brgy. Canlubang in Calamba, Laguna, in the latest display of a series of shameless harassment in Hacienda Yulo. Since July 2020, the Yulo farmers are constantly receiving threats of death and eviction from the Seraph Security Inc., henchmen of the Yulos and Ayalas.
The roots of the peasant struggle, however, are far from recent as they trace their vain ground-tilling in the 1910 eruption of the Taal volcano.
- Talisay residents whose communities were devastated by the Taal eruption settled in what is now Sitio Buntog in Canlubang and began planting coconut, coffee, corn, and different vegetables.
- In 1912, the American colonial government, after having acquired it from the Spanish friars, sold the land to the foreign businessman G. Milne. He then converted it into a sugarcane field called Calamba Sugar Estate.
- In 1927, Jose Yulo began serving as the estate’s lawyer. As World War II approached, another conniving businessman, Vicente Madrigal, took interest in the large swath of land and managed to acquire it with colonial backing.
- In 1948, when the peasant call for a just land distribution began taking concrete forms, he sold it to his own lawyer, Jose Yulo.
- With the Yulos at its helm, and their intemarriage with the Aranetas, they managed to further intensify their land-grabbing, expanding from its original 100-hectare size to its present 7,100-hectare. The entire Hacienda Yulo encompasses three cities in Laguna — Calamba, Cabuyao, and Santa Rosa.
- Despite the various agrarian reforms spearheaded after the 1946 Philippine independence, nothing effectively hit the cunning of the Yulos. Under the Macapagal administration, Jose Yulo organized a fake demonstration featuring a handful of paid peasants from the Hacienda to ironically show that the peasants themselves were against owning the land they were tilling for decades.
- In 1981, a zoning ordinance declared the Canlubang part of Hacienda Yulo as residential, a precondition to further evade land reforms including the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in 1988. This was, however, but the workings of the Yulos holding key government positions to prevent attempts in CARP inclusion.
Today, Hacienda Yulo has been divided among competing estate corporations including Ayala Land, Lucio Tan’s Eton Properties, and the Lopezes taking interest in it. The 200-hectare portion comprising Sitio Buntog is set to be turned into a residential subdivision. Not even the pandemic could trigger a sense of empathy among the goons of the Yulos, as they have been incessantly harassing the Canlubang residents through death threats, arson, and baseless arrests despite the ongoing crisis.
Both Freddie Cacao and Mario Mangubat are brothers of the spokesperson Leo Mangubat of the SAMANA-Buntog (Samahan ng mga Magsasakang Nagkakaisa sa Buntog) which has been calling for reforms since the 1990s. But with the Yulos’ close ties with those in power both in public office and the country’s capitalist landscape, the legal attempts were all falling in vain.
The claws of colonialism, imperialism, and bureaucrat-capitalism are dug deep in the saga of the Canlubang peasant population as they face forced eviction in a land they are tilling for more than a century. With the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB) thrown into oblivion by the Duterte administration, the diminishing of the agricultural livelihood of farmers continues to accelerate in the country.
Together with SAMANA-Buntog and the entire peasant population in Canlubag being harassed by the Yulo-Ayala goons, we amplify the call for genuine agrarian reforms that exempt no corporate player. With the agricultural sector being at the centerpiece of the Philippine economy, the state’s neglect of our farmers is one of its biggest betrayals.
