As I was reading this article I remembered the paper I had to write for one of my Communications class when I was still in college. I remembered the video of the shooting. I remembered the pleas of the farm workers. I remembered the frustration... the anger I felt as I was browsing through the articles I read for my research paper.
Years after that blood-stained day in the Tarlac area where farm workers were injured and killed, I wonder, what happened to them? Have the Cojuangcos done anything to better their condition? Have the people forgotten about this incident? Noynoy Aquino is running for president in the Philippines' 2010 elections. What has he done to help those people working in Hacienda Luisita?
The following is an excerpt from the article I read. What do you think?
THE GRASS IS YELLOW OUTSIDE THE GATES OF HACIENDA Luisita. Jesus walked here once.
His father watched him die, almost five years to this day. Nov. 16 was when close to 15,000 tenants gathered to protest their treatment under the Cojuanco-owned Hacienda Luisita. Dispersal units charged with a thousand soldiers in full battle gear. The Northern Command numbered over five hundred. Stones and shouts, water cannons, tanks that barreled into gates. It was three in the afternoon. The sun burned yellow. The father heard it first: rifle cracks, a barrage of bullets punching through bodies. Jesus died that day, one of seven reported union deaths. They tell me there are more whose names were never reported (read more...)
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