PCIJ WebAlert #34.2008

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W H A T ' S N E W @ www.pcij.org
4.December.2008


---------------[ i Report Special Report )------

DISPUTE OVER HACIENDA BACAN
Mike Arroyo Claim Stalls Land Reform in Negros
by Annie Ruth C. Sabangan

THE Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law is now on its 20th year but
farmers continue to mount protest marches to assert full and fair
implementation. Last Thursday,the police arrested and detained at a
Quezon Ciy jail nine farmers who trekked to the Department of Agrarian
Reform to demand certificates of land ownership over Hacienda Bacan in
Isabela town, Negros Occidental.

The 157-hectare estate is among the pieces of agricultural land owned
by the First Couple, spouses Gloria Macapagal and Jose Miguel Arroyo
and their families. In 2001, the President promised to distribute
Hacienda Bacan and other Arroyo landholdings to farmers under the
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

Our latest offering, a story by Annie Ruth C. Sabangan, PCIJ senior
researcher-writer, looks at the seven-year delay in the effort of the
farmer-beneficiaries to claim the hacienda that Mr. Arroyo acquired in
an auction in 1994, when Mrs. Arroyo was still a senator.

In 2007, Mr. Arroyo issued a “declaration of trust” where he disowned
claim or interest in the estate and posed no objection to its sale or
auction by Rivulet Agro-Industrial Corp. that appears in the land
title as owner of the property.

But as the Land Bank started processing a P42.3-million certificate of
cash deposit (COD) as compensation, the Negros Occidental Register of
Deeds insisted that Mr. Arroyo should also be named as a payee. Lawyer
Ruy Alberto Rondain, counsel to both Rivulet and Mr Arroyo, says that
the Department of Agrarian Reform neither served notice nor conducted
any hearings “to determine just compensation.”

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