LA CASTELLANA -- Task Force Mapalad issued a press statement yesterday morning claiming victory for the installation of its members in Hacienda Velez-Malaga in Barangay Robles here, but when that failed, they cried "Double cross" and reiterated their call for the immediate resignation of Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman. The TFM statement said Pangandaman called off their installation yesterday despite massive security back up from the police and military.

Jerry Cahilig, a farmer-beneficiary, claimed there was no apparent reason for Pangandaman to call off the installation because an advanced platoon of the Philippine National Police-Regional Mobile Group had already secured the hacienda, while a company of soldiers from the 303rd Battalion was waiting for his order to enter.

Cahilig said that although landowner Roberto Cuenca brought in truckloads of farm workers from "his other haciendas", there was no way that they could have prevented the installation if Pangandaman called in the military.

The media who were at Hacienda Velez-Malaga and who interviewed the workers on the trucks were told that they came from farms of other landowners from Sagay, Cadiz, La Castellana, La Carlota and Pontevedra.

The workers said they wanted to show their support for those opposing the TFM moves as the peasant federation was also messing with the manner in which land reform is being implemented in their areas.

TFM president Jose Rodito Angeles said Pangandaman was merely using flimsy alibis to justify his failure to install the farmer-beneficiaries.

"We are deeply upset and disappointed because DAR itself, through Assistant Secretary for Legal Affairs Delfin Samson, had issued last March 1 a clarification that there is no legal hindrance to the installation, there is no preliminary injunction to speak of, the case pending in the Supreme Court is not a bar to the installation, and there is no provision in the law that prevents the DAR secretary from installing the farmer-beneficiaries," he said.

Angeles added: "Pangandaman should immediately resign because he cannot perform his duties as DAR secretary. We will launch an active campaign for his resignation. We will mobilize support from civil society groups to compel him to resign, because as long as Pangandaman sits at DAR, the Velez-Malaga farmers cannot hope to be installed."

At the town public plaza here about 100 TFM members staged a protest in support of the farmer-beneficiaries of Hacienda Malaga-Velez.

If the TFM Malaga-Velez beneficiaries are not installed they will continue to stage their hunger strike at the DAR office in Manila, TFM member Dorita Vargas said. If the farmer-beneficiaries die in Negros from bullets, they might as well die from hunger in front of the DAR that has failed them, she added,*CPG

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