KARAPATAN is in solidarity with the delegation of peasant organizations from Central Luzon who will be trooping to the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) today, March 26, 2025 at 1:00 p.m. to air their grievances and seek redress about the violations of their rights.
Ranging from their right to association, freedom of opinion and expression and land and economic rights, these continue to be violated under the current regime of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Then and now, state forces have responded to the peasants’ grievances by threatening, harassing and intimidating the peasants and subjecting peasant organizers to enforced disappearance.
Three of the more recent cases of abduction and enforced disappearance occurred in Central Luzon. On November 6, 2021, under the Duterte regime, land rights activist and peasant organizer Steve Abua was abducted in Lubao, Pampanga and remains missing to date. On September 2, 2023, under the Marcos Jr. regime, environmental activists Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano were abducted in Orion, Bataan. The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) coerced them into signing an affidavit claiming that they had surrendered, but the two activists turned the tables on their abductors and told the truth when they were surfaced in a press conference.
At least two of the festering agrarian cases to be raised by the Central Luzon delegation are those of Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) in Tarlac and Barangay Anunas in Angeles City.
The Cojuangco-owned HLI epitomizes the evils of the hacienda system and the lengths and breadths to which landlords will go to preserve their control over their estates.
Former Pres. Corazon Aquino, a member of the Cojuangco clan, concocted under her term a way to evade land distribution through a “stock distribution option” where sugar workers of HLI purportedly became co-owners of the hacienda. The blatant injustice led to the infamous Hacienda Luisita Massacre in 1995 that claimed the lives of at least seven persons and caused injuries to more than a hundred. Hundreds of hacienda and sugar mill workers who had struck for higher pay and more humane working conditions and were joined by thousands from their community were assaulted by soldiers and police. In the next several months, eight more people who either supported the strike or provided evidence on the massacre were extrajudicially killed by state agents. HLI remains heavily militarized.
Barangay Anunas, on the other hand, is a classic case of landgrabbing by big corporate interests in cahoots with the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). At least seven persons have been injured in a series of violent evictions perpetrated by combined forces of police and goons hired by Clarkhills Properties Corp., a real estate company. One of the victims later died of complications from a gunshot wound sustained in the evictions. Clarkhills has been trying since October 2023 to take control of a 72-hectare landholding that had already been awarded to the farmers. The DAR, however, later reversed its ruling, leading to the series of violent attempts by Clarkhills to seize the land from the farmers.
KARAPATAN decries the fact that peasant families from Central Luzon have been crying for justice across several regimes, with the more recent cases starkly showing that nothing has changed from Duterte to Marcos Jr.
KARAPATAN calls on the CHR to listen to the Central Luzon delegation’s pleas. KARAPATAN will not relent in supporting the aggrieved peasants of Central Luzon in their quest for a just resolution of their struggles for their economic, political and civil rights.