Philippine National Police massacres peasants

by MC45

Philippine National Police opened fire and blasted tear gas at a labor demonstration, killing 14 peasants at Hacienda Luisita in the Philippines November 16.(1) Hacienda Luisita is owned by the family of former president Corazon Cojuangco Aquino. This is the same President Aquino who rode into office on the tide of the "People Power" movement in 1986, promising genuine land reform to the majority-peasant Philippines. This is also the same President Aquino who, once elected, exempted her own Hacienda Luisita from this phony land-reform program. And finally this is the President Aquino who presided over the notorious Mendiola Massacre one year after her election, in which the regime murdered 13 peasants when they joined with tens of thousands of others to peacefully protest the lack of a real land reform.(3)

Workers at the Hacienda Luisita sugar plantation have been on strike since November 6, and the management claims its mill is losing seven million pesos daily. The Philippine government has treated the workers' complaint like an enforcement problem; on 12 November, the Labor Secretary ordered the strikers back to work. Yet the Labor Department's jurisdiction stems from the "necessity" of sugar to the "national interest," a fact that sketches the outlines of the real problem when the Philippines is so poor that toddlers in the Manila slums spend their days picking over trash heaps for usable items.(2)

When tens of thousands of Filipinos demonstrated to bring down the u.$.-Marcos fascist regime in 1986, they were taking part in a struggle to earn enough to feed and educate their children and for other basic rights, as well as an end to military rule and an opening for democratic freedoms. The righteous struggle for land reform was aimed at breaking up the large haciendas that cover the Philippine landscape, producing agricultural goods for export via large agricultural multinationals like Dole and Del Monte. The dominance of these outside corporations in the Philippine economy means that the tillers of the land do not share in the benefits of their labor. And the Philippines economy is so geared toward production for export that the country, most of whose land is devoted to agriculture, is a net importer of rice.

The Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People's Army are working for a policy of genuine land reform throughout the Philippines. Such a policy would mean the large haciendas and redistributing the land to the people who work it. Agriculture would no longer be organized on capitalist lines, geared toward maximum profit, but toward providing for the needs of the masses.

Notes:
1. Philippine Peasant Support Network (Pesante) 19 November, 2004.
2. http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=18683; Business World 12 November, 2004.
3. http://www.etext.info/Politics/MIM/cal/news/Mendiola2003.html