Only 20 percent of the country’s original forest cover remains, making the Philippines the only country in Southeast Asia with the thinnest forest cover. An environmental group in Aurora foresees that all forest cover will be gone by the end of this decade (or 2010) if logging operations continue at their present pace.
The labor secretary’s “assumption of jurisdiction” power is being used to ban all strikes and has caused bloodshed in the workers front. This is like reliving martial law, militant labor unions say.
After several minutes of searching in the shadows, we finally find them, with lights from their gas lamps flickering through sack-covered bunkhouses. They stay by the edge of the Cojuangcos’ sprawling sugar plantation in Tarlac, far from the estate’s factories and barrios.
Shots shattered the evening calm as a peasant leader, Marcelino Beltran, went out of his house to greet some “visitors.” The visitors pumped bullets into his body and he died two hours later – the eighth to fall following the Nov. 16 massacre of seven farmers at Hacienda Luisita.
BULATLAT INVESTIGATIVE REPORT Farm workers of Hacienda Luisita dispute the claim by the Cojuangcos that SDO has been good for their thousands of farm workers. Farm workers say they have been losing their jobs, receiving pitiable pay and may lose their own homes,...
The Versolas continue to support the strike, visiting the picket line to watch documentaries on the massacre, help in the kitchen chores or just exchange views with anyone.
From the testimony of a worker at the front lines of the Hacienda Luisita picket and the unedited version of a footage taken by an independent media practitioner, police started firing at the strikers during a lull in the fighting. The scenes from the unedited...
A community of readers and supporters that help us sustain our operations through microdonations for as low as $1.