One group went to Hacienda Luisita, which I blogged about earlier as owned by a clan connected to Aquino and embroiled in the violent killing of striking workers.
Interestingly, a bunch of voting machines all coincidentally failed at about 12:58pm, and were still not working as of 3:45 pm. The Hacienda is 6,000 hectares and encompasses multiple barangays, but, interestingly, this economic power did not translate into an overwhelming vote for Aquino. Some labor union leaders were told “If Noynoy wins, you better watch out.” The union recognized that if Aquino won, any hope of legal redress or land reform of this hacienda would go out the window. It seems that it was strong enough to convince its members to vote against Aquino in numbers large enough to swamp the mysteriously failing voting machines.
We have been told that the source of the 2004 labor conflict was an attempt by the Luisita management to rezone the area in order to escape the land reform law. They bundled shares in the Hacienda with their labor contract, so that their employees were actually counted as owners. Therefore, they were not eligible for land reform under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. Genius!
There's something very Filipino about that somehow.
My last trip there involved a hard look at supply chains in the pharmaceutical sector. You'll be shocked, shocked to hear that this lucrative sector is a de facto oligopoly dominated by a very few actors. A while back the Philippines got criticized for not having an effective competition law. They solved that problem by passing a law and then perpetually forgetting to appropriate money to enforce it.
Doug M.
Posted by: Doug M. | May 15, 2010 at 03:29 PM