The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and all revolutionary forces condemn GRP President Duterte for issuing outright orders for armed state agents to shoot peasants engaging in bungkalan or land cultivation activities, as well homeless people who seek to have idle housing projects awarded to them.

Duterte declared, “I don’t care” if anyone gets killed, revealing his bloodthirst and fascist mindset.

By threatening to kill peasants engaged in bungkalan activities, Duterte has displayed his rabid support for the greed of big landlords who refuse to allow even a square inch of land to benefit the tillers of the land. He has, in fact, justified the recent Sagay massacre, where nine peasants were killed by paramilitary forces financed by the big Negros landlords and attached to the Philippine Army.

Duterte and the AFP are washing their hands of blood when they filed murder charges against the organizers of the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) based on a fantastic conspiracy tale. He has practically exonerated the paramilitary forces and their landlord financiers who rained bullets against the peasants.

This is the nth time that Duterte has issued such kill orders to his armed minions. He has emboldened armed state agents to go on a spree of rape, abductions, torture and murder under Oplan Tokhang and Oplan Kapayapaan. At least 173 peasant activists have been killed under Duterte.

Duterte tries to justify his kill order by falsely claiming that peasants engaged in land cultivation work are “sowing anarchy.” In fact, bungkalan activities of peasants and farm workers are all legitimate forms of organized assertion of economic rights. More importantly, they stand on solid moral grounds. Gripped by poverty and hunger, the peasant masses seek only the right to cultivate idle patches of land to plan food crops for their own consumption, especially between harvest and planting season.

Similarly, homeless people are fully justified in asserting their legal and social rights to decent housing. It is flatly scandalous that thousands of housing projects remain idle while several hundred thousand families live in shanties.

By threatening the landless peasants and homeless people with murder, Duterte is covering-up his utter failure to fulfill his promise of providing them with a comfortable life and refusal to heed the urgent demand for social upliftment.

He has once again succeeded in enraging the Filipino people, especially the toiling masses and proved why he deserve to be ousted from power.