The candidate's top five accomplishments and contributions for the last 15 years or so

Public Office

Castriciones initially joined the Duterte administration as interior and local government undersecretary in 2016 but was forced to resign amid corruption allegations from anonymous subordinates. He is suing a Rappler journalist for libel over the alleged malicious imputations in his news reports that Castriciones and the two other undersecretaries received P100,000 salaries despite being on floating status, allegedly deliberately omitting to add that Castriciones was still the chairman of the bids and awards and grievance committees. Other news organizations had also reported on such complaints by subordinates.

He was then appointed agrarian reform secretary, mandated to lead the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program and required to have at least five years of experience in land redistribution. Castriciones’ appointment was met with opposition by agrarian activists during the confirmation hearings when he admitted that his law practice involved acting as legal counsel for landlords and land tenants.

Castriciones oversaw administrative updates such as streamlining the legal procedures in the processing of land reform cases, including applications for land use conversion, with the DAR announcing on Feb. 18, 2020, that 100% of its pending cases had been resolved after the zero backlog program was launched in January 2019.

He also resolved pending appointments of DAR officials and employees arising from the DAR rationalization plan in 2013 and conflict between the DAR Employees Association and DAR administration.

Castriciones secured the president’s approval of Executive Order No. 75 in 2019 for the redistribution of idle government-owned lands to qualified beneficiaries without the need for amortization payments. Peasant rights activists, however, complain that Castriciones seems to be neglecting the distribution of private agricultural land, which compose 92% of DAR’s land acquisition and distribution balance.

Further, Castriciones claimed to have recorded the largest single-day land distribution on Dec. 29, 2018, involving 11,443 hectares of agricultural land to 6,424 farmers from 18 towns of North Cotabato, breaking Bukidnon’s previous record of more than 10,000 hectares distributed in September 1990. Upon questioning, DAR failed to provide data to support the claim of record-setting distribution, partly because there is no specific tabulation compiling DAR’s figures in single-day distributions since the start of CARP in 1972 to the present. According to a report by Rappler, disputed figures were not in the data provided by DAR as the page containing them is missing. The claim seems to have been based on estimates and recollections of regional office personnel.

In July 2019, the National Bureau of Investigation revealed that it was investigating Castriciones over an alleged P5 million payoff to exempt property from the CARP. The NBI report was forwarded to the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission. While denying the accusation, Castriciones admitted to the NBI probe and volunteered to undergo a lifestyle check by the PACC. Castriciones then set up a task force to investigate alleged anomalies in land conversion transactions.

By that time, he had earned the president’s ire over the slow land conversion and distribution process, including the 2,200 hectares of government land that Leyte Governor Leopoldo Dominico Petilla said were available to former New People’s Army rebels. In October 2019, peasant group Task Force Mapalad also noted that the Duterte administration recorded the lowest land acquisition and distribution in its 1st three years compared to other administrations.

Private Sector

Castriciones maintained a private legal practice for more than 23 years as a general practitioner, becoming senior founding partner of Castriciones Legal Consultancy, for which his children now practice law. He also taught law and wrote a number of books.