Karapatan said that two-thirds or 59 out of the 87 victims of extrajudicial killings under the Marcos Jr. regime are farmers. Most of them were either red-tagged prior to their killing or were accused of being armed combatants in “false encounters.”
“The ecological agriculture that landless farm workers have painstakingly carved out of the vast monoculture plantations of Negros sugar barons have been irrigated with blood and bullets.”
“We are the victims and survivors yet we are the ones being accused and slapped with cases.” – Rene Manlangit, chairperson of NFSW in Barbara, Sagay
The telenovela spin of state security forces never erases the fact that the Sagay massacre is yet another proof of the failure of government to render social justice to the tillers of the land.
“We came here for a very urgent reason, we came here to verify mounting reports of rights abuse against peasant and Lumad communities perpetrated allegedly by military elements. No wonder the military people do not want us here.”