The National Democratic Front-Eastern Visayas today marks the 44th anniversary of the Sag-od massacre, the brutal killing of an entire village of poor peasants in Northern Samar perpetrated by the state forces under the Marcos dictatorship. We commemore this bloody chapter by reaffirming our commitment to attain justice, even as strengthen our resolve to fight the the current Marcos Jr regime, which perpetuates the same environmental plunder, bureaucrat capitalist greed and fascist state terror of his father’s regime.

We remember the 45 innocent men, women, and children, who, in a depraved attempt to “restore order” in a quiet peasant community, were mercilessly killed by paramilitary troops under the Special Forces-Integrated Civilian Home Defense Forces (SF-ICHDF). The blood-thirsty fascists also served as security guards for San Jose Timber Corporation (SJTC), a logging concession operating in the area owned by then-defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile. Forces of the 14th Infantry Battalion then burned some of the houses with the victims’ bodies in them.

The people of Sag-od were killed because they actively fought the wanton plunder of the Samar forests by capitalist ventures. Until now, the survivors and their descendants remember the brutality of the massacre. They also recall how the operations of the SJTC cleared hundred year-old trees, damaged the habitat of endemic species, brought about landslides and flashfloods, and damaged crops, lives and property. Enrile’s logging operations were believed to have caused the 1989 “killer flashfloods” that inundated Las Navas and at least eight other surrounding towns. The widespread destruction prompted a moratorium on logging operations in Samar.

More than four decades later, the dictator’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr, as president of the puppet regime, is paving an even wider path for local and foreign capitalist plunder that will bring more unimaginable large-scale ecological destruction. His Green Samar Project purports itself to be a reforestation program but actually aims to convert natural forests into bamboo plantations for export. The Enhanced National Greening Program which has been underway in barrios, has confiscated agricultural land tilled by poor peasants to be converted to forest lands for explotative foreign trade. Destructive mining operations abound, such as those in Homonhon and Manicani Islands in Eastern Samar, the mining of bauxite in central-west Samar by the Romualdez-owned Marcventures, and the mining of magnetite across several towns in Leyte.

The Marcos regime is also greenwashing renewable energy projects that are part of extractive industries that serve private profit. These include a ₱108 billion wind farm in coastal Northern Samar towns by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a 100% foreign-owned company; a ₱19 billion wind farm in San Isidro, Northern Samar by Aboitiz and Vena Energy, a US-owned company; and a ₱1.2 billion tidal power plant in Capul Island by Antonio Ver and Sabella SAS of France. The people of Samar have nothing to gain from these projects; existing geothermal energy projects in Eastern Visayas have failed to make consumer electricity affordable which is among the most expensive in the country. Such renewable energy ventures will also not stop the effects of climate change that are primarily rooted in the carbon colonialism of imperialist countries such as the US.

Most importantly, similar projects in other parts of the country which proclaimed to be “environmentally-freindly” but in reality served the interests of bureaucrat capitalists, big compradors and foreign capitalists, have in fact caused deforestation, destruction of ecosystems, and displacement of peasants and fisherfolk. This compounds the effects of climate change which Filipinos are vulnerable to.

Despite the adverse effects of these pet “development” projects, Sag-od and hundreds of other barangays in the region are subjected to intense militarization by fascist state troops. In the early morning of July 31, the 8th Infantry Division conducted an aerial bombardment in the outskirts of nearby Barangay San Isidro, Las Navas. Massive bombs were dropped in forested areas frequented by peasants from San Isidro, Sag-od, Epaw, Tagab-iran, L. Empon, and San Jose, and even as far as Barangay San Nicolas in San Jose de Buan, Western Samar. Adding insult to injury, entire communities were put under a hamlet, restricting farm work among residents who live on a hand-to-mouth existence. Those who resist this military rule are Red-tagged, imprisoned, forced to surrender, or worse, summarily killed.

Sag-od still bears witness to the same rotten system that took the lives of its people and destroyed their community. The people of Sag-od and the entire Eastern Visayas region remain among the most impoverished due to decades of neoliberal economic policies and purported development by one puppet regime after another. This is stark testament to how the current system benefits only a few and not the downtrodden masses.

The history of Sag-od underscores the need to engender a complete overhaul of the current system, which cannot be achieved through a change of regimes alone. It requires the people to take the power for themselves — through the people’s democratic revolution—to attain environmental justice and even more fundamentally, social justice and genuine freedom.