ROXAS City – Some 100 farmers in Capiz will finally be able to own land.
Yesterday, the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) cleared the legal hurdles for the peasants to take control of the 188-hectare portion of the Nemesio Tan Estate in barangays Dulangan and San Esteban in Pilar, Capiz and Barangay Culilang in the municipality of President Roxas as ordered by the Office of the President (OP) in a 2020 ruling, upholding an earlier order issued by former DAR chief Rafael Mariano.
“We are thankful that President Rodrigo Duterte and DAR finally made this happen. We thought this day won’t come. The wait took a lifetime, spanning four government administrations,” said farmer-leader Teresita Billonid of the Montecarlo Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Organization (Montecarba), a member of national peasant federation Task Force Mapalad (TFM).
“Our fight for land took life and limb. Many of us, who grew old and weak tilling the hacienda, died hungry and landless,” she added.
On June 29, 2020, through an 18-page decision signed by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, Malacañang dismissed the petition of Nemesio Tan’s heirs to retain ownership of the sugar plantation, cancel the certificates of land ownership award (CLOA) issued to the farmers, and stop the DAR from implementing agrarian reform in the property.
In the same order, the OP found no merit to uphold the ruling of the Regional Trial Court-Branch18 Special Agrarian Court (RTC-SAC) in Roxas City that declared that the DAR had erred in implementing the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in the estate because it carried out the CARP in reverse by generating CLOAs for Montercarba farmers, instead of first notifying Tan that his property had already been placed under the program and compensating him in exchange for his land.
The OP upheld the May 15, 2017 order of then DAR Secretary Mariano that asserted that while the CLOAs were issued ahead of the certificate of deposit of just compensation for Tan, in violation of the procedures under Section 16 of Republic Act 6657, the procedural infirmities did not invalidate the coverage of the landholding under the CARP.
In the same decision, Mariano rectified the procedural flaw by having the Register of Deeds (ROD) cancel the CLOAs and simultaneously transfer the ownership of Tan’s landholding to the government by issuing land titles named to the Republic of the Philippines.
Immediately thereafter, Mariano also ordered the Provincial Agrarian Reform Office of Capiz to generate new CLOAs in the name of the Montecarba farmers and register the same with the ROD./PN
