Today, January 22, marks the 39th anniversary of the Mendiola Massacre, when a peaceful peasant rally was fired upon by soldiers under the Corazon Aquino administration. Eighteen farmers were killed and almost a hundred injured just because they demanded speedier implementation of land reform.

Martial Law had been removed by then, but the Marcos legacy remained: massacres as response to peasant demands for land. The Las Navas Massacre in Samar in 1981 and the Escalante Massacre in Negros in 1985 are just some of the more well-known massacres under the Marcos dictatorship.

There would be many more. The Lupao Massacre in Nueva Ecija, 1987, under the same Aquino administration. The Hacienda Luisita Massacre in Tarlac and Palo Massacre in Leyte, both in 2004 under Arroyo. The Hacienda Nene, Sagay Massacre in Negros Occidental in 2018 and Tumanduk Massacre in Tapaz, Capiz in 2020, both under Duterte. The Himamaylan Massacre in Negros Occidental in 2023 under the Marcos administration. All carried out by state forces against peasants who demanded their right to land. All with no justice served to the victims.

These massacres only highlight the life and death character of the peasant struggle for land in our semifeudal and semi-colonial society. Because the cacique ruling class that holds government power will deceive and kill to continue its control unless forced by a people’s democratic revolution to relinquish it.

It is this same landlord class, combined with the big bourgeois-comprador agents of US imperialism, who compose the present bureaucrat-capitalists. They are landlords and big business who use their wealth to secure government positions and in turn use these positions to further increase their wealth. Their economic and political control empowers them to grab more lands from peasants and indigenous people, to facilitate the entry of foreign mining corporations to extract the nation’s resources and cultivate corruption in government by expanding their own budget allocations and rewarding contractors with fat contracts for substandard and ghost projects. The bureaucracy becomes their lucrative private business, siphoning the people’s money into their pockets. It is this joint class rule that wields deception, weaponizes its own bourgeois laws, and unleashes the worst state violence and armed repression against the people to maintain the oppressive system and keep itself in power.

Thus, the present demands of people’s open protests against scandalous corruption and the peasant demand for land reform are intertwined in the call for systemic change. It is important for the people to understand that such change can only be realized by liberating the country from the clutches of US imperialism, the principal architect of the oppressive system and master of the comprador-bourgeoisie, landlord and bureaucrat-capitalist classes, and that the people have the right to take up arms to free the nation from these clutches.

The National Democratic Front recognizes and upholds the people’s legitimate demands for land reform and government accountability against corruption. From the start, the NDFP has asserted the need for genuine land reform, national industrialization, and a democratic people’s government among the priorities in its 12-point program. At the same time, we recognize the people’s right to take up arms for their own liberation.

We commend the people for their persistent struggle for land reform and against corruption in the face of state repression and deception. But the comprehensiveness of this campaign can be achieved only by launching struggles in all fields – open and legal, underground and armed. We encourage the more enlightened advocates, workers, peasants and activists, to join the urban underground and the people’s armed struggle in the countryside. Only through the victory of the national democratic revolution will genuine democracy and freedom be attained especially for the peasant masses who comprise the majority of the Filipino people.