The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) today issued the following statement condemning the killing of seven striking workers at Hacienda Luisita:
CPP Condemns Hacienda Luisita Massacre
Communist Party of the Philippines
November 17, 2004
In a show of extreme class hatred and contempt, the big landlord and bourgeois comprador owners of Central Azucarera de Tarlac (CAT) and Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) in collaboration with the reactionary Arroyo regime, employed its fascist mercenary troops to inflict armed violence in breaking a strike and protest rally by CAT and HLI workers and their relatives and supporters living within barangays � inside the sprawling Hacienda Luisita complex.
The CPP joins the Filipino people in condemning in the strongest possible terms the series of savage attacks on the strikers, with yesterday's assault so far exacting the highest toll on the workers. At least ten strikers were killed, scores injured, more than a hundred arrested while many still missing as seven truckloads of military and police forces shot at the workers, lobbed tear gas bombs, bombarded them with water cannons and truncheoned them.
In a blatant display of collusion between the comprador-landlord Cojuangco family and minions of the reactionary state, police and military troops violently enforced a return-to-work order issued by the anti-worker Department of Labor and Employment.
For many years now, Hacienda Luisita has been the arena of sharp class conflict: on one side are the thousands of factory and farm workers and peasants who have been carrying out mass actions and strikes to demand wage increases, genuine land reform and an end to the deceptive "stock distribution" scheme; and on the other, the handful of haciendero and comprador owners of HLI who have been using both deceit and violence to inveigle the masses into accepting the increasingly intolerable conditions in the hacienda, and failing this, to brutally suppress their struggles.
Yesterday's violent dispersal of the strike led by the CAT Labor Union and the United Luisita Workers' Union was a desperate attempt to smash the workers' militant struggle and compel them to submit to the wishes of the Cojuangcos.
It will be recalled that under the regime of Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, whose family owns Hacienda Luisita, the "stock distribution" scheme was concocted to exempt haciendas like HLI from being distributed to tenants as provided by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL).
Taking advantage of the numerous loopholes in the CARL, the Cojuangcos employed legal chicanery to nominally transform the family-owned Hacienda Luisita into a corporation in 1987. Upon receiving a small amount of stocks, mill and farm workers were supposed to have become part-owners of HLI. Unlike real stockholders, though, the minuscule dividends they receive from HLI depend not on the company's profits but are tied to their number of workdays and ensuing productivity. HLI, of course, resorted to various tricks to depress its declared profits and progressively reduce the number of days a worker could be employed each week.
By organizing genuine unions and carrying out militant collective undertakings to demand a wage increase and other rights due them, CAT and HLI workers have torn asunder the veil of deception that is the "stock distribution" scheme. Their experiences in struggling against HLI's deception provide valuable lessons for workers and peasants subject to similar deceptive schemes and violent suppression in other enterprises, haciendas and corporate farms owned by other despotic landlord-compradors, notably Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco, a cousin of HLI's owners. Danding Cojuangco has vast agricultural interests in Isabela, Negros and other areas in the country.
More than anything else, HLI's sugar mill and farm workers have grasped a great lesson: that their big landlord and big comprador class enemies will never, for one moment, have the benevolence to grant them their right to enjoy living wages and humane working conditions. Whatever they gain will be the result of every ounce of sweat and blood shed in bitter struggle.
