Negros is drenched in blood. Once again, the Duterte monster spewed a thousand bullets against the defenseless.

His death squads in the island mounted another round of killings of ordinary people over the past month. No less than 16 were killed, including a former mayor, an elected council, a school principal and other officers in the civil bureaucracy. The killing of ordinary civilians is also relentless. Most of them were baselessly accused of supporting the revolutionary movement.

Doubtlessly, the monster Duterte is behind these killings. He was so incensed over the annihilation of his four armed men last July 18 in an ambush by the New People’s Army (NPA) last July 18 in Ayungon, Negros Oriental. Because of this, he incited his minions to unleash even worse fascist terror and directed his ire against unarmed civilians.

Since the Sagay massacre in October 2018, Negros has suffered four rounds of concentrated violent attacks by the Duterte regime. Patterned after simultaneous attacks and killings by police and military in communities under the so-called Oplan Sauron, armed agents of the AFP and PNP carried out the killings one after another. The evil aim is to terrorize the people of Negros and cripple their resistance to the fascist regime.

Landlessness in the island of Negros is one of the worst in the entire country. Here, the fraudulence of the “land reform” program of the reactionary state is starkly clear. Negros continues to be ruled by big hacienderos who continue to enrich themselves with thousands of hectares of sugar land. At the same time, big mining companies covet the island’s rich mineral resources.

The masses of peasants and farmworkers in Negros sugarcane fields suffer severe oppression and exploitation. They go hungry everyday. Their clamor for social justice and land reform as solution to their poverty resounds. The armed revolution in Negros continues to gain strength because of the deep and wide support of the toiling masses who aspire to put an end to the century-old oppressive system.

Big landlords fund soldiers and police, as well as paramilitary “death squads” in Negros. In the interests of the hacienderos, the US-Duterte regime employs its armed agents to silence the peasant masses and suppress their struggles. Over the past months, peasant resistance in Negros has been met with massacres, killings, arrests and incarcerations.

Through Duterte’s October 2018 Memorandum Order No. 32, he claimed additional powers to impose military and police rule in the name of “suppressing lawless violence.” Negros was among those placed under de facto martial law. After successive killings in July, he deployed an additional 300 troops of the Special Action Force in the island. This will tighten the armed grip and suppression against the people of the island.

The terror that reigns over Negros is the same that blankets the countryside across the country. The situation is worse in the Mindanao provinces where more than two years of martial law has reigned. In addition to Negros, Bicol and Samar are also under de facto martial law.

In the countryside and hinterlands across the country, the military rules and there are no laws higher than its command. Under the National Task Force (NTF) and its “counterinsurgency” doctrine, the entire bureaucracy of the Duterte government is under direct and indirect military control. All civil agencies are weaponized for the war of suppression.

Across the country, killings and military abuses of power are relentless. State violence is employed to silence the clamor for genuine land reform and suppress resistance against entry of foreign mining companies, plantations and infrastructure projects under the regime’s “Build, Build, Build” program. Fascism is the other face of the Dutertes’ bureaucrat capitalist plunder.

Though brutal and relentless, one must not think that the Duterte monster is invincible. Its cruelty is a sign not of strength, but of weakness and inability to get the ruled to voluntarily and peaceably concede to its evil reign.

The foundations of its rule is tattered in crisis. Behind its barbarity and factitious fearlessness, Duterte is deeply frightened at how the Filipino people will collectively rise up to bring him down from power and make him account for all his crimes and corruption.

The people of Negros and the entire Filipino people will continue to rise up. They clamor for an end to Duterte’s brutal reign. They continue to advance along the path of resistance. They must firmly unite and further strengthen their organizations as their weapons to assert their rights and aspiration for justice. They must raise everyone’s consciousness and strengthen their determination and courage to fight.

The Party and all revolutionary forces are being strengthened. They are at the core and vanguard of the struggle of the entire people. The Party leads the NPA to pound Duterte and shatter his fascist fangs. The Party calls on the entire people to struggle and end all his infamy and advance the revolutionary struggle to establish a new order in the country.