The Cojuangcos bought Hacienda Luisita in 1957 on a promise to sell it to tenants, and the Supreme Court ordered it handed to 6,296 farmworkers in 2011

In 1957 the Spanish tobacco company Tabacalera sold Hacienda Luisita, a 6,443-hectare sugar estate in Tarlac, with its sugar mill. The buyer was José Cojuangco Sr., through the Tarlac Development Corporation. Justice Arturo Brion recorded that the Central Bank backed his dollar loan on condition that the land go to farmers within 10 years. The state pension fund GSIS lent 5.9 million pesos on condition that the lots be subdivided among the tenants. On 5 February 1958, at Cojuangco's urging, GSIS changed the wording to a sale to the tenants "should there be any". Ten years later nothing had been distributed; the family said there were no tenants. Cojuangco died in 1976^†. In 1980 the Marcos government sued, and in 1985 a Manila court ordered the land surrendered. His daughter Corazon Aquino^† became president in 1986, and in 1988 her government dropped the case. In 1989 the family company gave farmworkers shares instead of land. On 22 November 2011 the Supreme Court ordered the land distributed to the 6,296 original farmworker-beneficiaries and the company to pay them the 1.33 billion pesos it had received from land sales, less deductions. In July 2013 the agrarian reform department began drawing beneficiaries' names from a raffle drum; the final list held 6,212 names. In 2016 a farmers' group said the government had paid the Cojuangco family 471.5 million pesos for 4,099 hectares.