Senate minority bloc wants investigation into Sagay massacre

Six senators on Wednesday filed a resolution seeking an immediate investigation into the killing of nine sugarcane farmers in Sagay City, Negros Occidental on October 20.

Senators Leila De Lima, Paolo Benigno Aquino IV, Risa Hontiveros, Francis Pangilinan, Antonio Trillanes IV, and Minority Leader Franklin Drilon said that they seek the investigation not just to bring the real perpetrators to justice but also to address the pitiful plight of ordinary farmers.

In Senate Resolution No. 929, the senators said that the killing of the nine sugarcane farmers, including two minors and four women, should prompt the government to take a hard look at the decades-old failure of the government’s agrarian reform program.

“The indiscriminate and thoughtless killing of the members of the impoverished and marginalized sectors of the society by those who circumvent the law, such as powerful landowners and local warlords, must be put to an end,” they said.

The victims, some of whom were reportedly members of the National Federation of Sugarcane Workers (NFSW), were resting in a makeshift shelter when they were shot dead by some 40 unidentified armed men in Hacienda Nene in Barangay Bulanon.

The resolution brought up the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police's attributing the killings to the New People’s Army as part of "Red October," a supposed plot to oust President Rodrigo Duterte from office.

It also said that some reports indicate that private armies and paramilitary groups backed by the military and police were behind the series of assaults on and killings of peasant leaders in the Negros Islands.

The senators said Duterte has blamed the NPA for the massacre of nine even as he warned communist-linked farmers against occupying idle lands with a threat that they would be shot at should they resist arrest.

The resolution also said that an initial fact-finding mission conducted by human rights and leftist groups claims that Hacienda Nene lessor Allan Simbingco and other identified landowners related to a big political clan were behind the massacre.

“This [killing] is not an isolated case as it only reflects the prevailing situation in many farm lands around the country, necessitating immediate attention of government to address the plight of our Filipino farmers,” the senators said in the resolution.

They added that the farmers' deaths should lead to a stronger program to implement social justice measures and protect poor Filipinos, and should not be used "as a political device to impute criminal acts against critics of this administration without any factual basis."

The resolution also said that apart from the official investigation and prosecution, the national government should also look at the implementation of Republic Act No. 6657 or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law.

The minority bloc senators said that the effective implementation of the agrarian reform law would be a means to undertake the just distribution of all agricultural lands, which should be given priority as mandated by the Constitution to promote and protect the rights to own and till lands.

“Aside from the pockets of investigations led by various agencies seeking accountability for the lives lost in this eventuality, the government should not only prosecute those responsible to the killings but should probe and swiftly respond to the primal causes of the continued landlessness of many Filipino farmers that shackle them and their families to the chains of poverty and social injustice,” they said. — BM, GMA News