IT HAS been days after the bloody carnage in Kidapawan, North Cotabato wherein state troopers opened fire at the barricade of thousands of farmers. The demonstrators were demanding government amelioration in the form of rice subsidies to help them tide over the severe effects of the El Niño drought.
When the smoke from the police dispersal cleared, three farmers lay dead, hundreds injured, in another lamentable episode of state violence where unarmed civilians in a legitimate protest action are mowed down by government troops.
There is regularity to the occurrence of these incidents of state terrorism especially whenever farmers in the thousands go out into the streets and make legitimate demands. There must be something about the specter of thousands of peasants coming down from the countryside to the cities that generate the deepest fear among the country’s political and economic leadership both at the local and national level for they are quick to seek recourse from their armed functionaries by way of the Philippine military and police.
During the incumbency of the current president’s mother in 1987, thirteen farmers were also mercilessly gunned down right at the doorstep of Malacañang in a demonstration that pressed for agrarian reform. Farmers’ blood is also spilled in their family’s own hacienda in Tarlac in the massacre of workers at the barricades of Luisita’s sugar mill last 2004. The farm workers were pressing for higher wages and a halt to the land conversion of the borrowed agricultural property being transformed into the Aquino’s private industrial estate. In these two instances, the farmers had the gall and temerity to directly challenge the powerful political family’s base of political and economic power causing the extreme retribution from state forces.
Thousands of miles away last April 1st, 2016, in the Southern island of Mindanao, the incumbent governor and Liberal Party stalwart whose family also belongs to the landlord class and is reportedly in control of vast tracts of rubber plantations in the province of North Cotabato, ordered the violent dispersal of protesting farmers who barricaded the road close to the National Food Authority warehouse where tons of government rice are stocked. The farmers were there to assert their right to government subsidy after the declaration of the state of calamity in the province since last year because of the long-drawn El Niño drought.
The Kidapawan farmers also had the same gall and temerity to question the benevolence of the governor cum feudal lord who seem to have other plans for the province’s calamity fund while whole communities within her constituency are reeling from hunger because of the drought. They had to be dispersed by all means even if it required the use of automatic rifles spewing bullets indiscriminately from the state’s police forces.
There are consistencies in the actors, motives, and contexts in these cases of landlords backed by official state power who preside over the massacre of farmers who challenge their political and economic dominance. There must be a psychology to the workings of the mind of the members of the landlord class facing legitimate challenges to their authority that is yet to be documented and studied, but it reeks of feudal impunity. For the state military machinery to be conscripted to protect their interests and do their bidding, in these sordid circumstances – the massacre of farmers – is a subject that has well been covered by tracts on the role of the state and the military in reproducing the existing relations of production. The Kidapawan massacre is but the latest in the long list of cases when the monopoly of violence of the state is employed to quash challenges to the existing feudal economic relations that is the base of both national and local political power.
However, of greater importance, to my mind is the persistent display of courageous resistance by the opposing interest who call out from within themselves “the gall and temerity” to question the given order of things as members of their class. The farmers who demonstrated in Mendiola in 1987 calling for genuine land reform, the farm workers of Luisita who asserted the right to a decent life in 2004, and the Kidapawan farmers now in 2016 who were bravely exercising their political right to access what is their due in the face of a natural calamity, all these were courageous displays of an alternative power – one that government and its functionaries, given their limited vocabularies of understanding, can only label as rebellion.
While we grieve for the death of the farmers and stand militantly with them as they continue to face repression, it is best that we call to mind the acute observations of John Berger on the nature of mass demonstrations as hopeful practices that point us to a new social horizon. Commenting on the massacre of hundreds of workers, women, and children in Milan in May 6, 1898, the cultural critic wrote in 1968: “The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution... rehearsals of revolutionary awareness.”