On farmers’ appeal for land and justice, Duterte is mum

For ten days (Oct. 16-25) peasants from Mindanao, Visayas, and Luzon motored, sailed, and trekked to the National Capital Region in what they called “Pambansang Lakbayan ng Magsasaka para sa Lupa at Laban sa Pasismo.”

 Having camped outside the gate of the Department of Agrarian Reform (as they had annually done for many years), they held various activities to call attention to their main demands: Distribute land for free to landless farmers and farm workers; and stop the killing of peasants!

Last Wednesday they marched to Mendiola near Malacañang, after meeting up with workers and other supporters at the Welcome Rotonda who marched along with them. They stopped for lunch at the University of Sto. Tomas, joined by bishops, priests and nuns, and students.

At the head of the march to Mendiola was an effigy symbolizing the fascist tendency of the Duterte government.  It depicted the President atop a giant military combat boot, its tip agape like a mouth with bullets for teeth.  Towards the end of the rally, the effigy was put to flame and reduced to ashes.

In fact, the farmer-protesters twice burned Duterte’s effigy. The day before, the farmers marched to and rallied at the gate of Camp Aguinaldo on Edsa (headquarters of the Armed Forces of the Philippines). Demanding an end to the killing of peasants, attributed to state security forces and their paramilitary groups – 91 have already been slain from July 2016 to September 2017, per Karapatan’s documentation – the rallyists torched the combined effigies of President Duterte, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and AFP chief Gen. Eduardo Año.

Yet, no word has come out from President Duterte. 

His silence was so unlike his belligerent reaction a week earlier to the two-day nationwide transport strike of jeepney drivers and operators led by Piston, when he erroneously accused Piston, along with Kilusang Mayo Uno and the human rights alliance Karapatan, of engaging in rebellion.  He capped his diatribe with a curse, belittling the drivers’ plaint that they are poor and hungry, saying: “Mahirap kayo? … Sige, magtiis kayo sa hirap at gutom. Wala akong pakialam!”

Apparently Duterte opted not to add fuel to the fire. He desisted from engaging the peasant protesters, who were joined by Rafael Mariano, former chair of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, whom he had appointed DAR secretary at the start of his term. For over a year, Mariano attended to the peasants’ complaints across the country of being denied their rights under the agrarian reform law. He looked into the complaints and, with the President’s acquiescence, acted positively on them. But when big landlords and other vested interests blocked his confirmation by the Commission on Appointments, Duterte failed to support him.

The farmers resented that. But it was only one of their grounds for protesting and demanding redress of grievances. 

For one, they are calling out Duterte for ignoring Mariano’s order for a two-year moratorium on the conversion of agricultural lands for other uses, meant to allow the DAR time to review the status of undistributed agricultural lands.  The moratorium had been approved by the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council earlier convened by Duterte himself.

For another, the farmers – who demonstrated at the Philippine Coconut Authority – demanded that Duterte fulfill his electoral campaign promise to return to the coconut farmers the P85-billion coconut levy fund collected from them during the Marcos dictatorship. The farmers want to have a say in the fund’s disposition, both for their families’ benefit and for the development of the coconut industry.

Above all, the farmers have been calling on Duterte to continue the GRP-NDFP formal peace negotiations, which he had “cancelled” for the second time in July (the first time was in February).

They want the formal discussions on agrarian reform and rural development to be immediately resumed and completed as soon as possible. Their focal interest is the consensus – reached in January and firmed up in April, by the GRP and NDFP reciprocal working committees on social and economic reforms – that “distribution of land for free [is] the basic principle of genuine agrarian reform.”     

Along with the resumption of the peace negotiations, the farmers urge President Duterte to certify for urgent legislation a Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill pending in the House of Representatives, which provides for free land distribution, among other provisions.  Should a Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms be forged in the peace talks, this legislation would come in handily for its implementation.

The big question is: how firmly committed is President Duterte to pursue and complete the GRP-NDFP peace talks? He had affirmed his electoral promise to do so when he met with the NDFP emissary Fidel Agcaoili (now head of the NDFP negotiating panel) in May 2016, after his proclamation as president-elect.

As pointed out in an earlier column piece, Duterte has left open the door to the continuation of the peace negotiations by not having ordered (as he had threatened to do) the sending of a formal notice of termination to the NDFP National Executive Council. 

Meantime, he allows his Cabinet economic team to pursue neoliberal economic policies to which the NDFP is strongly opposed. Of late the team has been wanting to liberalize the entry of foreign firms in the local construction industry and retail trade, which will put small- and medium-scale Filipino contractors and retailers in disadvantageous competition.  Duterte also appears to have abandoned his opposition to open-pit mining, notwithstanding the grave ecological, economic, health and social disaster this mining method has inflicted on the people over the decades.

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