Denounce killing of peasant in Escalante, Negros

Translation/s: Pilipino

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) joins Negrenses and the rest of the Filipino people in condemning the Duterte regime for the killing of Jose Jerry Catalogo, an officer of the National Federation of Sugar Workers last Tuesday.

Suspected state agents gunned down Catalogo at around 5:00 a.m. on June 23. He was feeding his carabao outside his residence in Barangay Paitan, Escalante City, Negros Occidental when killed. Prior to the incident, Catalogo has reportedly been subjected to surveillance.

Catalogo was an officer of the NFSW. His killing forms part of the systematic attacks of the Duterte regime against the NFSW which has been repeatedly tagged by the regime’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as a “front organization” of the CPP.

On June 9, state forces arbitrarily arrested Gaspar Davao, also an organizer for the NFSW, in Cadiz City in the same province. In 2018, the regime also perpetrated the Sagay massacre of nine peasant members of NFSW who were asserting their right to cultivate an idle piece of land for food.

The killing of Catalogo seeks to terrorize the peasant masses amid growing political and socioeconomic unrest across the country. These were perpetrated at a time that the Duterte fascist regime is railroading the enactment of the Anti-Terror Bill which aims to clamp down on activism, silence demands to oust Duterte, and eliminate opposition against his plans to establish an outright fascist dictatorship.

Denounce killing of peasant in Escalante, Negros