NOYNOY NIXES CORY REGIME'S MENDIOLA MASSACRE RE-INVESTIGATION
MANILA, JANUARY 23, 2011 (TRIBUNE) By Aytch S. de la Cruz - Even as groups of farmers and peasants continue to seek justice for the 13 peasant-farmers who were massacred during their demonstration on Mendiola during the early days of the Cory Aquino regime, while seeking a closure through a government probe and to bring the perpetrators of the cold-blooded murders, Malacañang yesterday thumbed down the probe of the decades-old massacre under incumbent President Aquino's mother's reign.
The Palace signified it has no interest in having the 1987 Mendiola massacre reinvestigated, claiming that it does not help the government to reopen cases they believe have already been resolved years ago.
Relatives of the massacre victims and Hacienda Luisita farm workers reportedly asked the Department of Justice (DoJ) to conduct a reinvestigation on this case so justice can finally be served but which, according to Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Secretary Ricky Carandang, is not a practical idea.
Carandang said the Palace will not stop any concerned party from seeking legal redress through the courts and the DoJ, for that matter, as Aquino has left the issue up for Secretary Leila de Lima to address.
The DoJ, however, answers to the president, and given the track record of its chief, Leila de Lima, she does what the chief
executive tells her to do.
It is therefore more than likely that De Lima will be dropping the idea of having the Mendiola massacre reinvestigated.
"You know, I don't think it's helpful for us to regurgitate issues that have been resolved years ago. We cannot keep revisiting issues over and over again. If someone wants to file a case in the court and ask the courts, it's really up to the courts to do that," Carandang said.
"I think we should ask the DoJ if it is inclined to do that. But our position is, you know, their (victims') issues have already been (resolved) and there really is no practical point in bringing them up again. Again, if the DoJ feels that there is merit to it, then the DoJ can act," he added.
De Lima, according to online reports, confirmed that she indeed received a letter from a farmer's group seeking the reinvestigation of the case and her initial response to it was to refer the case to a special task force on extra-judicial killings.
The Mendiola massacre happened on Jan. 22, 1987—an event which is believed to have foreshadowed the Hacienda Luisita killings 17 years later in November 16, 2004 in which 12 farmers along with two children figured among its casualties.
To recall, Malacañang through presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda also regarded the Hacienda Luisita massacre as a closed case since a resolution was supposedly executed already by the Office of the Ombudsman which absolved then Tarlac Representative and now incumbent President Aquino of any accountability in the murders of the peasants who were only fighting for their right to just compensation.
The Mendiola massacre traces its history 24 years ago when several peasants working for the Cojuangco-Aquino clan's vast sugar plantation, the Hacienda Luisita, marched toward Malacañang in protest of then President Corazon Aquino who reneged on her promise to subject their estate to her land reform program 11 months after assuming the presidency.
The protesters, however, were violently dispersed and shot out with live bullets by policemen from Manila's Western Police District leaving 13 people dead while injuring 51 others.
Cory Aquino, during the presidential campaign in 1985 while running against then sitting President Ferdinand Marcos, promised that her Hacienda Luisita would be parceled out to the farmer tenants under her then planned Comprehensive Agarian Reform Program.
This promise was never delivered, as even as she signed a Carp law in her first year as absolute dictator, being the sole government and the sole law. In that decree, she exempted her hacienda from land reform.
In her, and her relatives' insistence on retaining Hacienda Luisita and not parceling this out to the farmer-tenants, as the Marcos government, then representing the farmers, already won the case in the lower court, ordering the distribution of the hacienda land to the farmers, .Cory Aquino, as president, ordered her then solicitor-general, Frank Chavez, to have the case dismissed by the appellate court, with the GSIS, then headed by Cory appointed Sonny Belmonte as head, as well as the Central Bank that was then headed by Jobo Fernandez, who was related to the Cojuangcos, withdrawing from the case, even when they had already won it.
Even after an Agrarian land reform law was passed by Congress the following year, Cory Aquino still fought off distributing hacienda land to the farmer-tenants by coming up with the stock distribution scheme, where farmers, with the military hovering over them during the balloting, were said to have voted for the SDO.
Another massacre occurred at the Hacienda Luisita some years back, when soldiers and police shot dead farmer-peasant demonstrators calling for an end to the SDO and seeking their share of the hacienda land.
Under the Gloria Arroyo regime, her Agrarian Reform Secretary revoked the SDO, which now left the Cojuangco-Aquinos to distribute the land to the farmer tenants. But predictably, there was again some kind of voting where the Cojuangco management offered money instead of land.
The case has been brought up before the Supreme Court, which is expected to finally rule on the matter very soon.
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Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
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