CARP’s emasculation: A subtle corruption

It was Christmas season, the time of the year when people are exchanging gifts. For the farmers, agrarian reform advocates and some Bishops who had staged hunger strike outside the Batasang Pambansa, it would have been a merry Christmas had they received a gift in the form of a genuine agrarian reform. But members of the Congress dampened what would otherwise be a joyous occasion for those who are clamoring for an improved Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

On December 17, 2008, the Congress passed Joint Resolution No. 19, extending for another six months the CARP, which expired in December 2008, but without the compulsory acquisition of lands for redistribution.

This was already the third time CARP was extended. Ten years after it was first implemented, CARP was first extended for another ten years in 1998. And for the second time around, it was extended for another six months until it expired in December 2008.

The CARP was said to be the centerpiece program of the Aquino Administration. On June 10, 1988, Corazon Aquino signed into law Republic Act 6657, known as Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law. It served as the legal framework of her administration’s agrarian reform program. But the passage of this law was not smooth sailing, marred as it was by haggling between the landowners and advocates.

Analysts say it would have been a different agrarian reform had Aquino taken up the task of passing the law herself instead of delegating the task to Congress.

“As President, she had a splendid opportunity to institute an agrarian reform program that would go to the root of this problem not only because her enormous popularity initially deterred active landlord opposition, but also because she possessed emergency powers under the Freedom Constitution,” Professor Francisco Nemenzo said. “Unfortunately, she chose to act as if it were sinful to govern in the absence of a legislature with which to play the check-and-balance game.”

According to Marissa de Guzman, it was “a decision that would deal a lethal blow to CARP’s prospects as the landlord-dominated Congress succeeded in emasculating it…It was a disabled and conservative version of what stakeholders and civil-society actors had clamored for.” Nevertheless, CARP took off; it is a marvel to some that it was able to reach this far and achieve some pockets of improvements given its infirmities.

No doubt, the resolution that was passed last December followed legal procedures. Deliberations were held and legislators voted upon it after successive readings. What is anomalous, however, is the way Congress used its legislative power to the landowners’ advantage. With the removal of the compulsory acquisition of land, the CARP was dead in the water. No landowner in his right mind will give up his land for redistribution. Thus it appears that the legislators, some of whom are landowners themselves, are doing a great disservice particularly to the farmers.

But the mandates of the Constitution are clear, the lawmakers are not supposed to behave that way, especially in dealing with a social justice law like CARP. The “Social Justice and Human Rights” part of the Constitution is “a desperate cry for help coming from the throats of the suffering masses,” constitutionalist Fr. Joaquin Bernas, S.J. said. “The opening sentence identifies the addressee of the cry for help—Congress.” The opening sentence reads: “The Congress shall give highest priority to the enactment of measures that protect and enhance the right of all the people to human dignity, reduce social, economic, and political inequalities, and remove cultural inequities by equitably diffusing wealth and political power for the common good.”

“Social justice in the Constitution is principally the embodiment of the principle that those who have less in life should have more in law,” Fr. Bernas said. “It commands a legal bias in favor of those who are underprivileged.”

But unlike the rights in the Bill of Rights, which are “self-executing” and “ready for use,” the social justice rights, in terms of legal effectiveness, “are primarily in the nature of claims and demands which people expect government to satisfy…[and] the satisfaction of these demands must for the most part depend on Congress,” Fr. Bernas said.

The “highest priority” clause is also a deliberate choice according to Fr. Bernas. “It communicates the message that what is expected of Congress is not just the exercise of day-to-day police power but of powers needed to achieve radical social reform of critical urgency.”

But what is clear in the Constitution is not clear for the lawmakers. On hindsight, what the lawmakers did to the CARP was a far cry from the mandates of the Constitution. Instead of satisfying the social rights of the farmers, who are among this country’s underprivileged class, they used their power to effectively keep landowners from losing grip on their lands. There is a term that refers to the misuse of public resources by a public agent for private gains: corruption.

Why doesn’t CARP’s emasculation look like corruption? Part of the answer is that we limit the application of corruption to the malversation of funds, bribery and thievery. In other words, we only recognize the Joseph Estrada-type or the JocJoc-type of corruption. We fail to see the other truth about corruption: That corruption takes place in more subtle ways than one.

The blowback is that our idiocy—the state of not knowing the truth—with regard to corruption hinders us from recognizing the kind of corruption that even takes place before us. There is no clear remedy for this idiocy, but a closer look at the meaning of corruption might help. Analyst Herbert Docena said that public agent under the traditional definition of corruption—the misuse of public resources by a public agent for private gains—can be construed in two ways. First, public agent can be an individual, such as a “government bureaucrat or politician.” Second, public agent can be a class, such as a “country’s ruling elites.”

“Whenever the ruling class in the aggregate uses the state or public resources for private gains, then—by definition—the ruling class is being corrupt,” Docena said. “When the ruling elite uses the powers of the state to pass or enforce laws and policies which preserve or promote their class interests, then that…is also corruption.”

The emasculation of CARP through the passage of the Joint Resolution No.19 is therefore a classic act of misusing the public resources by a public agent for private gains. But few dared to call it for what it is: a blatant flouting of the law to benefit the few.

The day the resolution was passed was the day the lawmakers rebuffed themselves, including their goddess, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA). GMA and most lawmakers used to bandy themselves as pro-poor, pro-farmers, protectors of the interest of the people, etc.

But the emasculation of CARP has only served to highlight whose interest they are protecting. And it certainly not the farmers’, but theirs.