Saturday, 12 December 2009 22:13
In June, the leader of the farmers of Sumilao, Bukidnon, who marched to Manila to demonstrate at the Department of Agrarian Reform, was murdered. At about the same time, sympathizing land reform activists were violently evicted from outside the Batasan.
The killing of peasant leaders asking for their right to have the land they and their grandfathers have been tilling is the original reason why we have a Communist New People’s Army Rebellion. Though these are more ideologically grounded than the early peasant rebels, the Huks, land reform is still one of the present-day communists demands.
Even during the Spanish colonial regime there were already peasant uprisings—and massacres of the farmer protesters.
In 1931 there was the revolt of the Colorums of Tayug, Pangasinan. Like Spanish-era peasant rebels, the Colorums got their nickname because they too had religious chants taken from the Latin Mass and anting-anting charms and necklaces that they thought would save them from being killed by bullets.
National Artist Frankie Sionil Jose wrote in his Star column that he “interviewed the Colorum leader Pedro Calosa twice in Tayug in the 50s when I was with the old Manila Times. It was the harvest season and I came upon him and his wife at work in the fields just outside the town. He was small and very dark. In his youth he had gone to Hawaii like so many young Ilokanos to work in the sugar and pineapple plantations there. While in Hawaii, he organized the farm workers. Deported home, he worked the land as a tenant farmer and started organizing the barrio folk.
“Pedro Calosa claimed that the spirits of Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini—all these illustrious dead—had entered his body. Why these heroes? Because they sacrificed for this land. We see in this simple explanation then the nationalist can’t become flesh.
“Calosa also said all the peasants in the country were bonded together by the soil and when the Colorums struck, they expected the entire peasantry would rise with them. It did not happen for though suffering had fired them, the rest who were oppressed had become comfortable with their chains. The Colorums holed up in the Catholic Church until the following day when a Constabulary company from Manila arrived and dislodged them.
“Like Rene Peñas of Sumilao, Pedro Calosa of Tayug was murdered; his passing evoked no outcry even from the poor he so tenaciously defended.”
Then there was the Sakdal revolt. It was crushed only after the members were massacred by the forces of the law.
I went to Taft Avenue in 1967 and saw how the Manila police and the Philippine Constabulary and some other law enforcement units were going to deal with Valentin de los Santos, the leader of the Watawat ng Lahi —Rizalista faction, later known as the Lapiang Malaya. He and his band of old men had announced
that they were going to demonstrate in Malacañang demonstration.
In their red and white uniforms, armed with long bolos, they were stopped at Taft Avenue near Libertad.
They were in gaudy red and white uniform with yellow capes, and were armed with long bolos.
After hours of being asked to disperse, the shooting began. More than 30 of de los Santos’ followers were dead. De los Santos was arrested. He was found to be quite mad and confined in the Mandaluyong Psychopathic Hospital. There he was murdered.
Here is an account from Bulatlat of the Hacienda Luisita massacre:
Award-winning photo taken by The Manila Times’ Rene Dilan on November 3, 2006 shows a violent dispersal of a rally in Hacienda Luisita.
After launching a volley of tear gas grenades, Army riflemen fired point-blank into the picketers’ front lines using live ammunition. A 60-calibre machine gun was also used. Truncheon wielding police chased migrant workers into their barracks and later combed the 10 barangays (villages) where hacienda workers live. “Soldiers were allegedly ‘zoning’ Barangay Motrico, dragging men out of their homes and lining them up to be arrested,” the Philippine Daily Inquirer (17 November) reported.
Dead bodies were found scattered all around the main gate and the barracks. A total of 14 people were reported killed, including two children suffocated by the tear gas, and some 200 injured, over 30 with gunshot wounds. A total of 133 strikers and their supporters were arrested.
The Hacienda Luisita massacre is the worst slaughter of Filipino workers in recent years. It underlines the fraud of bourgeois “democracy,” which rains death on the exploited and oppressed fighting for their rights. It is all the more significant because the police and army attack was ordered directly from the central government by Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas, and was carried out on behalf of the Cojuangco family, prominent landowners including former President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino. The current president, Gloria Arroyo, responded to the mass killing with empty platitudes and “prayers.”
Spokesmen for the Hacienda justified the bloodbath as a “legitimate exercise of state power,” saying the work stoppage was “illegal and left-inspired.” Plantation workers had gone on strike on November 6 demanding the reinstatement of some 327 unionists, including nine union leaders, fired 10 days earlier by the management of the hacienda and the sugar mill (Central Azucarera de Tarlac, or CAT). As thousands of strikers and their supporters occupied the facilities, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) declared it was assuming jurisdiction for the dispute and ordered in three military battalions to take down the picket lines and disperse the strikers.
Hacienda Luisita tries to sell itself as luxurious modern resort, complete with covered tennis courts, swimming pool with Jacuzzi, a championship golf course, business park and “simple yet elegant” hotel, “your hacienda home.” Yet this “fusion of agriculture and industry” is based on the super exploitation of workers who live a miserable existence enforced by an age-old system of “landlordism and state terrorism,” as the magazine Bulatlat (21 November) put it.
The Philippine Army’s Camp Aquino, headquarters of the Northern Luzon Command, is located just across the MacArthur Highway from the plantation. When Corazon Aquino was president in January 1987, 13 members of a left-wing peasant group were killed by Marines at the Mendiola Bridge in Manila as thousands marched on the Malacañang presidential palace demanding land reform. The 1987 march was led by agricultural workers from Hacienda Luisita. Later, 17 farmers including women and children were massacred by Marines in nearby Nueva Ecija province on “suspicion” that they were guerrillas of the Maoist-led New People’s Army. Now Arroyo, whose husband’s family owns plantations in the sugar island of Negros Oriental, has her first crop of martyrs.
(End of Bulatlat article from The Internationalist.)
The Mendiola massacre
The Mendiola massacre is also called Black Thursday. It happened on January 22, 1987.
Police and deputized military anti-riot forces dispersed a farmers’ march on Malacañan Palace. Thirteen of the peasants were killed and many wounded when government forces opened fire on the marchers.
This was less than a year after the late President Cory Aquino had taken office after the People Power Revolt removed Ferdinand Marcos.
The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) demanded, as they still do now, genuine agrarian reform from the government.
Encamping at the Ministry of Agrarian Reform (now the Department of Agrarian Reform) in Diliman, Quezon City, the KMP led by its President Jaime Tadeo met with Agrarian Reform Minister Heherson Alvarez on January 20, 1987. Tadeo presented his peasant unions demand and Alvarez promised to take the demands to President Aquino.
But on January 22, the farmers decided not to deal with Alvarez anymore but to go straight to Malacañan Palace. The KMP was then joined along the route by various other militant organizations.
Various police forces had been posted to defend Malacañang from the demonstrators numbering between 10,000 and 15,000.
There was a clash between marchers and security forces.
Twelve marchers were immediately confirmed dead. Later it was discovered that there was one more fatality. Thirty-nine marchers had gunshot wounds and 12 had minor injuries.
President Cory Aquino convened a commission to investigate. Former Justice of the Supreme Court Vicente Abad Santos was the chair. The commission recommended the prosecution of all commissioned officers of the Western Police District and the Integrated National Police Field Force who were involved.
In 1988, a Manila Regional Trial Court dismissed a P6.5-million class suit filed by relatives of the victims. In 1993 the High Court upheld the regional trial court’s decision.
Many other massacres or killings arising from agrarian issues are in the files. Nolasco Galang CONTRIBUTOR
http://www.manilatimes.net
