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2 The Question of Land Ownership

Without a doubt, the most crucial issue that has motivated the Philippine peasantry to self-organization and self-activation is the question of land ownership.

Under Spanish rule, extensive land grants were given the Crown’s favorites who became the big landlords. Later, they also became the big capitalists: middlemen, moneylenders, bureaucrats, and limited industrialists. But because of the agrarian nature of the economy, land wealth is the prime source of all wealth and privilege; arid, conversely, landlessness – the basic status of the oppressed.

And so, out of sheer necessity, the Filipino peasants in different parts of the: country and at various time had to ask the basic moral question: What is just with regard to the land?

A peasant sits under the mango tree and stares blankly at the void before him. Except for his fellow peasants, not too

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many others realize that he is asking questions, searching for meanings. Why can he not own the land he tills and which his ancestors had tilled before him?

Mang Guimo, another peasant, is drinking lambanog (a native wine) with his neighbors. The landlord is asking for higher rentals, and some of the other peasants have to be evicted because the landlord will mechanize a portion of his lands.

Mang Guimo shares his thoughts with his drinking peers. Before Don Jose (the landlord) and I were born, the land was already there. When Don Jose and I shall die, the land will still be there. Whose is the land really?

When you and I were fighting as soldiers during the last war, Mang Guimo rambles on, we thought we were fighting for the Philippines. Now that the war is over, where is our Philippines?

For, indeed, while Don Jose can own seven hundred hectares, Mang Guimo cannot own even one square meter of land.

And what about the Church? She always tells us that she may never take sides. She may never side the poor even as they try to get their rights. She is after all, Mang Guimo continues in sarcasm, the common mother of both the rich and

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the poor. What does a good mother do if she sees her older boy always beating up the younger, weaker son, and taking food? Shall she say, “I am the mother of both of them, I may not take sides in their quarrels”?