KARAPATAN vowed its unflinching solidarity with thousands of peasants marching in Manila as they denounced the intensifying military operations in the countryside and violations on their right to protest in the hands of the police.
The peasants, who are in Manila to mark National Peasant Month, were driven out of their protest camp at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources on October 16 and faced another dispersal when they set up camp at the Department of Agrarian Reform on October 19.
This year’s commemoration of National Peasant Month comes as farming and indigenous communities are being buffeted by military operations unleashed to protect encroaching mining interests and dubious development projects being pushed by corporations masquerading behind environmentalist jargon.
In Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya, mining firms in cahoots with the courts and the police, have been breaching protest barricades put up by local communities protecting their livelihoods and their lands from the environmental destruction they have already witnessed in other towns previously ravaged by other mining companies.
In Camarines Sur, farmers are reeling from wind energy projects that ostensibly provide cheaper and cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels, but at the expense of the harassment, intimidation and restrictions on the freedom of movement of farmers whose lands have been usurped.
In Palawan, indigenous people whose ancestral lands are now occupied by an EDCA (Enhanced Defense Ccoperation Agreement) site, face a two-pronged disaster—heightened militarization by AFP troops protecting the newly constructed US military facility, and a devastating drought brought about by El Niño.
Marcos Jr.’s fevered endorsement of the US’ Pax Silica initiative and the Luzon Economic Corridor, which will trample on peasant and indigenous lands and siphon mineral, water and other resources across three regions, can only further stoke the fires of protest among the peasants and indigenous people in these areas.
Yet the Marcos Jr. regime’s response to the plight of peasant and indigenous communities has been more military operations and rank intolerance when farmers act collectively to air their grievances in the centers of power in the cities.
Malacañang is sending a chilling message with the suppression of peasant and indigenous people’s protests from Kasibu to Manila: that it will not hesitate to violate the people’s right to protest especially with the impending visit of its master, US Pres. Donald Trump.
The peasantry’s collective reply to Malacañang, from the barricades of Kasibu to the marching ranks of peasants in Manila, is more defiance and a firm demand to end military operations in the countryside and the suppression of peasant protests in the cities.