Travel Reference
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and the southeastern province of Negros Oriental. The demarcation came when early
missionaries decided the thickly jungled central mountain range was too formidable to
cross, and is still felt today with each side of the island speaking different languages
- Cebuano to the east and Ilonggo to the west.
Today Negros is known as “Sugarlandia”, its rich lowlands growing two-thirds of the
nation's sugar cane, and you'll see evidence of this in the vast silver-green expanse of
sugar-cane plantations stretching from the Gulf of Panay across to the gentle foothills
off the volcanic mountains of the interior and beyond. The mountains rise to a giddy
2465m at the peak of Mount Kanlaon , the highest mountain in the Visayas. For the
intrepid this means there's some extreme trekking and climbing on Negros, from
Mount Kanlaon itself to Mount Silay in the north.
From Bacolod , the capital of Negros Occidental, you can follow the coastal road
clockwise to Silay , a beautifully preserved sugar town with grand antique homes and
old sugar locomotives. Much of the north coast is given over to the port towns through
which sugar is shipped to Manila, but at the southern end of the island around
Dumaguete there are good beaches and scuba diving, with a range of excellent budget
accommodation. The southwest coast - the heel of the boot - is home to the island's
6
THE BITTER HISTORY OF SUGAR IN NEGROS
Land reform - or the lack of it - has been at the root of simmering discontent on Negros
that began in the 1970s under Ferdinand Marcos and continues to this day. All of Negros's
sugar-producing land is held by two percent of the people and half the arable land by
five percent. Negros's gentry see the land as a way of life, while the Church, the New
People's Army (NPA; see p.445) and various peasant organizations see it as a source of food.
The NPA has been screaming about land reform for years, intimidating hacienderos and
seizing land. The hacienderos have responded with private armies and acts of repression,
turning Negros into a battleground for the struggle between rich and poor, in which the
rich have all the guns.
In the 1970s and 1980s this struggle was played out against the background of Ferdinand
Marcos's thieving dictatorship. Marcos monopolized sugar trading, placing it in the hands of
crony Roberto Benedicto , who ended up controlling 106 sugar farms, 85 corporations, 17
radio stations, 16 television stations, a Manila casino, a Holiday Inn and a major piece of the
national oil company. Known as the Sugar Czar, he effectively controlled the supply chain,
allowing him to steal tens of millions of dollars from his neighbours on Negros by paying them
a quarter of the price he received when he resold their sugar. For good measure Marcos gave
him control of the bank that was the planters' principal lending agency.
In 1974, as prices of sugar on the world market rose steadily, Benedicto began hoarding,
speculating that the price would continue to rise. When sugar prices plummeted in 1984,
Benedicto responded by paying planters less for their sugar than it cost to grow. The planters
took their land out of cultivation and as a result, production in 1985 was half that of ten years
earlier. Thousands were thrown out of work and hunger and malnutrition set in on a massive
scale. Benedicto got out of the sugar business and was promptly appointed Philippine
ambassador to Japan.
In 1981 the Pope visited Negros and thrust the island into the international limelight with
his words of condemnation (“injustice reigns”), in stark contrast to Imelda Marcos's message
that “Negros is not an island of fear, but an island of love”. Five years later Marcos was
overthrown, and Cory Aquino gave the impression during her election campaign that she
was willing to give up her family's hacienda north of Manila in the name of nationwide land
reform. But once elected she produced a watered-down land bill which she dumped in the lap
of a newly elected Congress dominated by landed oligarchs. “She might as well have
appointed a crack addict to run her drug treatment programme,” said an opposition senator.
As for Benedicto, under a deal struck with Aquino's Presidential Commission on Good
Government, established to recover the ill-gotten wealth of Marcos and his cronies, he was
allowed to keep US$15 million of the fortune he amassed. He lived quietly in Negros until his
death in 2000.
 
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