From Four Nodes of History: The Human Rights Challenge in the Philippine Security Sector unrest, the chief social cause of the Philippine Revolution of 1896. When the US took control of the Philippines, it sent Howard Taft to Vatican where the US government bought all the friar lands from the Vatican Pope. Most of these lands were then sold to hacienderos (plantation owners) instead of being distributed to their former tenants whose ancestors were the original owners. A hacienda economy was encouraged. Commonwealth Act No. 141 of 1939 or The Public Land Act confiscated all lands owned, sold or assigned by the Muslim Sultans and Datus of Mindanao and the ancestral lands of Indigenous Peoples. Only titles that emanated from the former Spanish Crown were recognized. The virgin lands in Mindanao were opened to agricultural corporations and would-be landlords and settlers from Luzon and Visayas. Because of the tedious paper work requirements in obtaining land patents, land acquisition favored the educated and the rich. These acts were done deliberately to make the Philippines a backward nation, so the Philippines would not be self reliant and be a competitor of the United States in the production 70 of commodities. They were motivated to produce a nation of poor tenants instead of creating the conditions that would bring about industrialization through agrarian land reform (redistribution of land and the provision of financial and technical support to farmers). The Malolos Congress of the Philippine Republic had decreed the confiscation of all friar lands, to be subdivided at a later date among the former tenants. Agrarian reform would have increased the income of farmers, enabling them to send their children to school and engage in entrepreneurial activities, a natural development which would have led to national industrialization. This however was cut short by the PhilippineAmerican War. The effect of these Commonwealth laws and policies can be best illustrated in the provinces of Central and Southern Luzon, the traditional center of peasant unrest in Luzon. In 1939, the percentage of cultivated and farmed lands by tenants were as follows: Pampanga, 67%; Bulacan, 66.5%; Nueva Ecija, 67.8%; Cavite, 58.5%; Tarlac, 52.4%; Bataan , 46.7%; Batangas, 47.8%; Laguna, 44.5%; Rizal, 39.01%; Quezon, 45.7%; Pangasinan, 33.8%; and Nueva Vizcaya, 25.5%.22 Overall, the national average of tenants in the Philippines hovered between 50 to 60 percent up to the 1960s.