“Exactly 24 hours since Rodrigo Duterte affixed his signature on the draconian Terror Law, the first arrests were made on activists who held a peaceful protest against the dangerous law.”
The local organization was able to confirm that a certain Harold Diaz had links to NTF-ELCAC when another suspected agent of the task-force went to the SIKKAD K3 office to invite him to the Barangay San Jose Annex building. A few minutes later, no less than 20 soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Infrantry Division in full battle gear and armed with rifles arrived at the office, forcibly made their way towards Diaz and whisked him away.
“The combination of backwards tradition, capitalist commodification, and class contradiction all help create a culture where women are not only sidelined but are crushed by a vice and deprived of their right to voice out, to quote Alexandra Kollontai. Rape culture and bourgeois society are inherently linked, because both enable a system where a patriarchy,…
“It is martial law without martial law, but worse: it is legalized butchery, targeting peasants and workers whose attempts to seek redress for their systemic exploitation have been criminalized.”
“In the five years that the union has existed, it has succeeded in the struggle for regularization when the workers went on strike in 2017, sorted out the union fund after the previous leadership left nothing, conducted multiple series of educational discussions to help the workers understand their rights, its leaders have studied how to best run the union in order to serve its workers, and advanced the struggle for livable wages and benefits through [Collective Bargaining Agreements].”
“It is distressing that the community of barangay San Antonio would lose somebody like Hon. Froilan Reyes, especially now when his leadership is needed during a time of great crisis brought about by COVID-19.”
The challenge for American activists and organizers is to now elevate these contradictions towards the primary question of class struggle; something that hasn’t been done since the Black Panther Party of the 1960s.
The students were subjected to abuse and intimidation, with one student choked by an officer in plainclothes while he was trying to explain. One student was also labelled as a “recruiter for the New Peoples’ Army.”
On the same day that Kadamay Secretary General Carlito Badion was killed, members of urban poor groups in Rizal province were summoned by the military to clear their names from the list of alleged communists.
Labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno slammed the “double standard on the implementation of ECQ rules,” pointing out that this was not the first time police “exercised brutality instead of compassion amid the COVID crisis.”
“Filipino migrants are tired of being treated as milking cows by the Philippine government. We will continue to protest the unjust provisions of the law until it is totally scrapped.”