I am not a Negrense, a term that refers to the inhabitants of the island of Negros, in Visayas, the Philippines. I am a Filipino, but had never visited Negros until recently. While I can speak Cebuano, the language spoken in the eastern part of the island, Negros Oriental, the Hiligaynon language spoken in the western part of the island, Negros Occidental, is a language I have little knowledge of.
My ancestors were of Cebuano origin so I had no roots with an Ilonggo tribe, whose language is Hiligaynon. However, they were the people I met on this trip. I tried to find connections between the island, its people and myself during my short stay there, but apart from the similarity of being a Filipino and being able to speak Cebuano, I realized that I was not only a complete stranger to the island but also to many of the Filipinos in my own country. I had little idea of Negros and its people.
Spending some days in the company of the locals in Negros Occidental, I was aware of my failure in comprehending the depth of their suffering and its origins—the extreme poverty and oppression they have faced for more than half a century. My belief that I had a fairly good understanding of my country’s context was now shaken and I spent a lot of time questioning myself, my opinions and attempting to find the meaning of my work and its potential impact on the lives of the Negrense so that it might be more consequential to them.
My perception and understanding of what should happen in a rule of law society had no bearing on the experiences of the locals on a daily basis. This was my failing, not theirs, and I felt sorry for myself until I realized that the very least I could contribute was to share my reflections as to how the locals live their daily lives and what makes the sharp delineation and control of the classes possible. It is, in fact, the elite who, having remained powerful over centuries, make this delineation possible.
Poverty and oppression force locals to migrate
Having spent most of my adult life in southern Mindanao, one of the over 7,000 islands in the Philippines, it was not until my recent visit to Negros that I began to understand why people from Negros migrate to southern Mindanao. My stay there strengthened my historical and anecdotal knowledge.
For years now, the island of Negros has been a place to escape from. Many of those who left the island, including my wife’s father and his siblings, left for Mindanao in the 1960s and 1970s, due to the extreme poverty. In the years to come, they settled in Mindanao and now have their own families and communities.
Sugarcane is the island’s primary agricultural produce and Negros is known for its vast plantations. It has been supplying sugar as far as Europe and the Americas since the early 1900s when sugarcane production was first introduced to the island. But it is also an island of contrast where class divides and social control are sharp and clear. There is no pretense of humility on the part of the ruling classes.
The situation of extreme poverty that prompted the migration of my father-in-law and his neighbors so many years ago has not improved today. Indeed, it was in existence for many years prior to their departure. People growing up in Negros, particularly in the villages, would rather migrate to other places than try to settle there. What I find amazing, is how the people who chose to stay manage to survive.
The dreams of most children growing up in a village would often be to either move to the island’s so-called ‘urban areas’, like the cities of Bacolod or Dumaguete to find employment, or migrate further afield to places like Metro Manila for the same purpose. Migration from the island is mostly for reasons of poverty, lack of opportunity and with the mindset that perhaps migrating could get them a better future. For the women there is also the hope that they will be able to marry a well-off person. Regardless, whether man or woman, the ultimate purpose is getting off the island.
Some are lucky, but most are not.
Control begins at childhood
From the moment a child is born into a family of sugarcane workers, he becomes an object of control in his society, community and even in his own family. For such a long time now the lives of the people have revolved around sugarcane planting and production that it is naturally assumed any children born into a sugarcane family will adapt to this way of life. It is such a certainty that they are taught to harvest sugarcane at the age of eight years.
Even the child’s very existence is meant to sustain the family’s survival. The concept that a couple give birth to a child as a gesture of love and fulfillment, to have someone to carry on the family name and tradition, is of secondary importance to sugarcane families. A child is conceived and born for the very purpose of the family’s survival. They are raised in the hopes that when they grow up they can help the family to earn money.
In reality, children are seen as beasts of burden. If cows and water buffalos are a source of milk or used to plow farmlands, children who belong to a family of farmers work to add to the family’s daily income for their mutual survival.
In Negros, the minimum wage as required by the law is Php 218 (USD 4.9) a day, but in reality the majority of the plantation workers only get Php 70 (USD1.5). The more children a family have the more income the family can generate once they are old enough to help their parents work in the fields.
But this also results in the children suffering from an early age. In one village near Cadiz City, Negros Occidental alone, a social worker said that there are over 2,000 children less than six years-of-age whose weight falls under the ‘below normal’ category, and about ten of them are clinically malnourished. This phenomenon is very common during the tiempo muerto (the dead season when the sugarcane is harvested and milled), from May to September each year. There is also the possibility that for various reasons, the family will lose their jobs at the plantation.
The government agency responsible for providing relief to these children is the local Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). However, only children falling under the ‘malnourished’ category are entitled to relief or food assistance. Malnourished children are provided with at least three kilos of rice per month as a form of relief, but this assistance stops once the child’s weight rises to the ‘below normal’ category. Also, this provision of food assistance depends on the government’s budget availability, and is not considered a priority.
Due to the extreme poverty faced by people, the notion of parenting has evolved. Parents know full well they will not be able to adequately feed, clothe or educate their children, or even simply allow them to enjoy their childhood as children and not as workers; yet they must bear children. Considering children as ‘beasts of burden’ has become an acceptable norm. To simply condemn the parents would therefore not only be insensitive, but a superficial critique of what needs to change. Under the present circumstances, this is their only way of survival.
Both the children and their parents are victims of a decades-old cycle; like the children of today, their parents and ancestors endured the same experience. Today’s adults are yesterday’s children; they were raised and suffered as their children are doing today. It is easy for outsiders to pass judgment on people, to come to conclusions based on the reality of their own lifestyles and put the blame squarely on the parents. But in reality even the children do not blame their parents. Some even tell their parents it is pointless to spend huge amounts of money for their university educations, and they should rather marry and have a family of their own as soon as possible after finishing high school.
In the Philippines the average age of completing high school is 16 years. I met a woman in one of the Negros villages I visited, who was recently married. She had only completed high school, but she spoke fluent English to my Korean colleague who was interviewing her. Her English was far better than that of the foreigners who come to study English at the universities in Negros.
For her, as for other children in the village, completing high school education must have been extremely difficult. In one of the villages I visited, children walk four hours a day in going to and from their school, often on an empty stomach. Moreover, even with ambition, children are unlikely to benefit as their parents cannot afford to send them to school, buy school supplies, books and uniforms, because their employers do not pay them decent salaries or the benefits they are entitled. In fact, by ensuring the salaries they pay to the sugarcane farmers do not allow them to properly educate their children, the plantation owners ensure that they will have laborers from one generation to the next. This is one of the many ways in which the landed elite control the farmers and their children’s lives, and this cycle has continued for years.
Decimating local values and habit
Before your airplane touches down at the Silay City’s national airport in Negros Occidental, what you see from the sky is the island’s huge plains. Negros is the country’s third largest island with a land area measuring about 13,328 km². It is divided into two provinces, Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental. The native settlers were originally Negritos, an indigenous tribe whose appearance is that of short, dark-skinned persons with curly hair. The Negritos had their own settlement in the island long before the Spaniards arrived and referred to them as Negritos. Even today, this indigenous community continues to suffer ethnic discrimination.
The Negritos, according to the locals, were either forcibly pushed towards the mountains or displaced from their communities when the Spaniards and local elites began to establish settlements and accumulate properties. In years to come these would be known as Haciendas—huge agricultural lands owned and controlled by elites where the sugar plantations and agricultural products have since been cultivated. The people who own these haciendas are but a handful of wealthy local families of Spanish descent who came into possession of ownership certificates during the Spanish colonial rule. The land ownership was passed down from one generation to another.
The entire island has since been under the control of a few wealthy elites in terms of its economy, politics, governance, culture and social life. The locals, particularly the farmers and their families who are working for the landowners, grew up in a society where they are mentally conditioned to change their own habits, attitudes and beliefs.
The villager’s gesture of bowing whenever he meets or seeks an audience with a landlord is one such example. For other societies bowing is a form of respect, but in Negros it is a form of one’s submission to authority. This practice remains deeply embedded in the minds of the people, a practice even followed by some local activists despite their progressive political and ideological education. However, while the local activists do bow to the landlords, they don’t bend forward as deeply or as long as the locals.
Another example of this mental conditioning is that young children are permitted by their parents to work in the landlord’s household without being paid. The long history of oppression and exploitation can explain how this mindset and habit developed. The perception also exists amongst the children and their parents that having worked in an elite household raises their social status.
Language is their freedom
As mentioned, the island of Negros is divided into two dominant languages—Cebuano in the east and Hiligaynon in the west. While the accent, words and meaning of the spoken word in these languages are unique and different, a Cebuano speaker like me, with some basic knowledge of Hiligaynon, can to some extent get a sense of what is being said.
A prominent historian described Filipinos as having ‘barriotic’ attitudes. Barriotic of course comes from ‘barrio’ (a subsection of a village); the attitude of being ‘regionalistic’ (based on the regional division of groups of islands of the archipelago). Both barriotic and regionalistic describe a person deeply focused on the way of life, people and the problems of his own community. This narrow focus precludes viewing the bigger picture of our country—or even considering that despite differences in our language, culture, tradition and way of life, we are all Filipinos.
With regard to the people of Negros however, speaking their own language does not mean being barriotic or regionalistic. Rather, it is something that makes them feel free. It is the ability to express their anger, demand what they want, explain their grievances and problems in their own language. This was, according to one of the locals, why despite the strong dominance of Spanish since colonial times, Hiligaynon and Cebuano have remained the spoken languages amongst the inhabitants of Negros. They are spoken even by today’s landlords and elite. These languages survive not because they are taught in schools, but because of the struggle of the people for their own survival.
When I was interviewing some of the local activists and victims’ families, I could feel what their language means to them. They consider their language to be an external expression of their freedom. Speaking in their own tongue, you could get a real sense and clear description, not only about the case details, but also of their fear and suffering. As a gesture of respect to them, I did my best to question and discuss matters in Hiligaynon. Moreover, even if you speak to them in Cebuano, they would respond in Hiligaynon; this is how strongly they feel about their own language. It means their survival and protection of their way of life.
Living in a colonial past
There are historical accounts of Filipinos being arrested, detained and even executed on fabricated or illogical charges during the Spanish colonization, for the purpose of sowing fear within the society. Filipinos were displaced from their communities and had their lands taken away. These accounts, found in history books, depict realities that continue to persist in Negros today. Unlike in the past, the antagonists of today are Filipinos themselves, exploiting their own people.
After more than a century of independence, the islanders are still living their Spanish colonial past. Emerging from one of the local communities where I had a consultation, I felt as though I had witnessed a scene from the past. When I asked whether any of them felt there “is a government for them and how do they feel about their government,” none of them answered in a positive manner. Their perception of the government and its officials is that of an oppressor and its accomplices. They have been detached for many decades from their own government due to the complete absence of governance, despite the existence of bureaucratic and organizational structures. The notion of state responsibility is non-existent, both in terms of government behavior, and in terms of a concept understood by the villagers.
The police are perceived by the locals to exist only to serve the landlords and elites. When the landlord makes a complaint against a farmer or sugarcane worker for instance, regardless of whether the complaint is backed up with proof or not, does not matter; the police take action without any questions or explanations. When the farmers or persons from a poor family file a complaint against the landlord however, the police either refuse to register the complaint or simply ignore them.
The local chief executive—city mayor, town mayor or provincial governor—is entitled to have an oversight and certain level of control over the policing in their locality, including selecting the local chief of police. The purpose of this regulation was to affirm civilian authority and supremacy. In most cases however, the appointment and allocation of funds to the police by the local chief executive has resulted in the police becoming subservient to political control.
Furthermore, there is no distinction between police officers and soldiers. Soldiers do the serving and conducting of arrests of persons facing false charges, and they are the ones who take them to detention facilities to wait for the prosecution of their case. This was the case in Cadiz City, where the farmers/sugarcane workers of a particular hacienda were demanding the ownership of the land they cultivated and lived on for many years. They were arrested by soldiers who had court arrest orders. Charges against them involve theft and the usurpation of property, due to the farmers cultivating root crops for their food and fighting for land ownership from the landlord they served.
Filing false charges against farmers and sugarcane workers has become a common form of harassment not only in Negros, but also in other parts of the country. This usually happens once the tenant/farmer claims land ownership under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL). According to this law, qualified beneficiaries can claim the land and the government would pay the cost of the property to the landlord on their behalf. The farmers would then pay back the government the amount on an installment basis. The landlords have strongly resisted the implementation of this law however.
Since most of the landlords and elite in Negros are themselves local politicians or family members of those with influence, they have the means—legally or illegally—to suppress the farmers demanding their rights and welfare.
After over hundreds years of anger at Spanish colonial rule, it is shocking that we are not more angry about the abuse and exploitation committed by the Filipino elite against their own people. We may have a democratic government and good laws but unless these laws are effectively implemented in a real sense, the question as to whether we really gained independence from our colonial past and are true to our democratic values will continue to haunt us.
Inequality before the law
The story of two elderly farmers, Marilyn Lanotes, of Hacienda Tres Hermanos and Uldarico Nalipay, of Hacienda Manuela, both in Cadiz City, Negros Occidental are just two of the many stories indicating legal inequality between farmers and landowners, and how the application of the law is abused to favour the latter.
Marilyn had been working for her employer, Rafael Lopez Vito, since the early 1970s. Vito owns the 154 hectares of land on which Marilyn and others had been employed as farm workers. The minimum wage that the law requires employers in this region to pay their employees is some Pesos 218 per day, but Marilyn and her fellow workers only received Pesos 167.
The workers endured this situation for years, before deciding to complain and demand payment of the differential. This is also one of the reasons that prompted them to file a petition to have the land they were cultivating covered under the land reform program with the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) in Bacolod City in February 2007. The DAR is a government agency responsible for the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), a law intended for the distribution of land to landless farmers and tenants.
However, due to the DAR’s failure to promptly resolve their petition and after their employer terminated their employment, the farmers were forced to cultivate 31 of the 154 hectares purely as a means for subsistence. They planted sugarcanes, intercrop vegetables (crops planted between rows of sugarcane to maximize land usage) and root crops in March and April 2009.
As a result, 62 of the workers were prosecuted for malicious mischief and usurpation of property by June and July 2009 in courts of law. These are criminal offenses under the country’s penal code that involves acts in which one destroys and/or takes possession of another person’s property. Under the arbitration rules of the DAR however, any complaints or disputes arising from the implementation of CARP should be heard in the offices of the DAR (the original jurisdiction) and not regular courts.
Also, when the farmers sought the assistance of the local police in October 2009 to prevent other workers hired by their landlord from harvesting the sugarcane planted by them, the police did not take action. They even told the farmers that as complainants, they had no right over the property. The duty of the police should have been solely to maintain law and order; all disputes regarding the harvest should have been settled with the DAR. Nevertheless, the police arbitrarily passed judgment in favor of the landlord and the hired workers were able to harvest the crops.
Marilyn and her fellow workers who had planted the sugarcane, spent their own money to fertilize the land and worked hard to ensure the crops would have a good produce ended up with nothing. They had lost their jobs, endured a lengthy and expensive legal battle over the ownership of the land and were prosecuted for cultivating the land they had been working for years. Some of the farm workers have struggled between feeding their family and remaining in hiding for fear of being arrested, including Marilyn.
In another case, Uldarico Nalipay had been farming his land since 1960. He also chairs the Manuela Farm Workers Association, a group of 20 farmers who are claiming ownership of a 60-hectare piece of land. The property had already been covered for distribution under the CARP. Their employer had in fact ‘Voluntarily Offered to Sell’ (VOS) the property for the government to pay on behalf of the farmers. According to regulations, once the landlord offered to sell the property to the government, the property would be valued to determine how much the government—represented by the Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP)—should pay the landowner, before the property was turned over to the farmers.
Due to delays in the conclusion of this procedure, the farmers planted sugarcane, root crops and vegetables covering 42 hectares for subsistence. While the landlord had expressed no opposition to the farmers’ petition to claim the land under the CARP, one day armed men employed by the landlord came to the village and destroyed the sugarcane, root crops and plants that Uldarico and his fellow farmers had planted. According to Uldarico, he saw the landlord in the company of police officers and soldiers. Since then Uldarico and his companions have been subjected to continuing harassment, intimidation and surveillance by the landlord’s armed men and paramilitary groups under the soldier’s control, the Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit (CAFGU), deployed in the village.
Uldarico then decided not to file a complaint, not because he had waived his right, but because in a small village like theirs he knew full well he would end up complaining to the same police officers he had seen accompanying the landlord. To his surprise, a week later he and his fellow farmers were charged for ‘robbery in band’ and qualified theft under the penal code. Like Marilyn, Uldarico had to go into hiding after the soldiers, carrying arrest orders from the court, started looking for him and his fellow farmers.
In this case, the actions by the soldiers, policemen and the armed men against the farmers had sown fear amongst the villagers that even to complain and to attend court could be hazardous. These are the conditions in which the soldiers and police function contrary to their constitutional duties and obligations—to serve and protect the people.
Uldarico’s decision not to complain should not be superficially dismissed as a person simply waiving his right or not knowing his rights and how to complain. It is simply that he is aware of the futility of the exercise. Like most school children in Negros today, Uldarico only completed second grade; despite his rudimentary education, he speaks and argues like any paralegal might. He knows his rights, what is due to him and what is wrong, despite having no formal education. He said that when he was a boy, he and his neighbors had to walk ten kilometers a day going to and from the school where they were studying.
The experiences of Marilyn and Uldarico demonstrate the extent to which the people in Negros have been struggling in their daily lives. They are people who have not only been subjected to control since birth, but are now being deprived of the opportunity of obtaining adequate education due to poverty. Regardless of all the setbacks they face however, they continue to fight and struggle to assert their rights and demand what is due to them.
Their struggle for their rights is an inspiration to all.
