HERE’S an interesting fact. These October peasant rallies we see started through a Marcos decree.
On October 21, 1972, a month after Martial Law was declared, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared that day as Peasant Day as he issued Presidential Decree 27, which he declared as the first agrarian reform law.
But redistributing land from landlords to tenant farmers did not happen. Instead, Martial Law saw the brutal killings of farmers like Escalante in Negros Occidental in 1985 and Sag-od in Las Navas, Samar in 1981.
After People Power, Cory Aquino made CARP her landmark law to help emancipate the farmers. But Mendiola happened and Lupao in Nueva Ecija too, in 1987. Then there was Hacienda Luisita in 2004. Whatever happened on that promise of a landmark law was buried in the bodies of those farmers.
We also had Kidapawan in 2016. Farmers barricading the highway asking where the food relief in the time of El Niño is as politicos were busy with election. Their demand for food was answered with bullets.
Thirty years since, and seven out of ten peasants still do not own the land. In Negros Oriental, nearly 80% of the agrarian land are still under control of haciendero families, this according to fellow SunStar columnist and NUJP Chair Nonoy Espina.
This is the context of why Sagay happened. As sugar farm workers try to till other crops during the down season of harvest, they got killed instead. Nine farmers, including two minors and three women, were resting that night of October 20 after tilling their land, where brutally shot. Three bodies were burned.
When incidents like this happens, we look at a failed state. An agriculture secretary brags that this Duterte presidency is the “golden age of agriculture” yet it is importing “bokbok” rice and limits subsidies for farms.
It is a failed state when farmers and Lumad who assert their collective ways to sustain agriculture are met with suspicion and repression. As the Concerned Artists of the Philippines points out, are we not in crisis?
They point out there is a “crisis of lack” as farmers beg for food and are buried in debt. There is a “crisis of loss” when farmers are silenced, “quiet murders become as cyclical as the seasons of summer and rain?” There’s also a “crisis of truth” when authorities blame the victims and blame rebels instead of solving the problem.
The problems of the farmers are cyclical, but the bloody seasons are longer and more reprehensible. The problems of failed politicos and their rhetoric worsen with the seasons, not even the words of Change is Coming or Martial Law had brought the change and security of the tillers of the land.
This only sprouts more struggles, and protests, with peasants and Lumad marching under an October red sky.