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Any honest student of history will understand that the conflict afflicting Negros did not rise from a vacuum. It stands on a longstanding theater of feudal order, brutal power, and impoverishment.
“It cannot simply be that the military’s account is accepted at face value when there are witnesses and evidence pointing to a different truth. What happened in Toboso must be investigated clearly and impartially."
It is tempting to reduce this to a “security success” or a “counterinsurgency incident.” But such language hides more than it reveals. Armed conflict in Negros did not begin with guns. It began long before, in conditions that have shaped the lives of generations.
They constitute attacks against human rights defenders, as well as environmental and food defenders, who are working to protect land, livelihoods, and the environment for present and future generations.”
In Negros, agricultural lands are being converted to make way for a city project, palm oil plantation and solar farms, threatening local farmers’ livelihood.
Karapatan said that two-thirds or 59 out of the 87 victims of extrajudicial killings under the Marcos Jr. regime are farmers. Most of them were either red-tagged prior to their killing or were accused of being armed combatants in “false encounters.”
John Milton Lozande, secretary general of National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), was freed Nov. 11. Anne Krueger of alternative media Paghimutad and organizer of BPO Industry Employees Network Philippines (BIEN) and Danilo Tabura, NFSW paralegal officer, walked out of jail yesterday, Nov. 12 while Roberto Lachica, NFSW staff, was released this afternoon.
Karapatan called the raids part of a “full-blown crackdown on activists and red-tagged legal organizations.”
"The use of search warrants have become a trend increasingly used in Negros, which makes offices and individuals vulnerable to the planting of evidence."
The living conditions in the Negros island have been – time and again – a glaring example of government’s failure to implement genuine agrarian reform.
Ni JHIO JAN A. NAVARRO Siyam, isa, labing-apat, higit pa sa Sagay, Kabankalan, Sta. Catalina Guihulngan, Canlaon at kung saan pa nilingkis, kinalos ni Sauron sa bungkalan, tubuhan, tahanan sa harap ng asawa, anak, magulang-- tinadtad ng bala sa ulo, sa mata, sa...
“As the Duterte regime continuously intensifies its attacks, the killings and arbitrary arrests in Negros is setting a very dangerous precedence – that State forces can do whatever they want against poor peasants and communities, and brazenly promote tyranny and violence.”
The violence that erupt from time to time in Negros is but a painful reminder of the longstanding land problem and unjust system operative in Negros.
"The deployment of more state security forces in the province and in the whole Negros Island would not lead to the so-called peace and order. They are there primarily to protect the interests of big landlords who still lord over the Island.”
The telenovela spin of state security forces never erases the fact that the Sagay massacre is yet another proof of the failure of government to render social justice to the tillers of the land.
In commemoration of the 13th year of the Luisita Massacre on Nov. 16, Bulatlat posts this article on recent experiences on collective land cultivation as a form of struggle against land monopoly, and their compilation in a book.
By JANESS ANN J. ELLAO
Big landowners in Negros Occidental have found another way to retain and re-concentrate the land in their hands: file criminal cases against peasants and farm workers.
Farmers from Negros, Southern Tagalog, Tungkong Mangga and Hacienda Luisita protested in front of the Department of Agrarian Reform office in Quezon City on Saturday, and blamed the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (CARPer) for causing massive landlessness, poverty and hunger, marking what they dubbed as World “Foodless” Day.
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