The Human Rights Situation in the Philippines

1. Prepared for the Symposium on Human Rights Violations in the Philippines Organized by the Task Force on Pastoral and Solidarity Visit to the Philippines The Board of Missions California-Nevada Annual Conference United Methodist Church 19 June 2009 The Human Rights Situation in the Philippines

2. Fermin Lorico, a lay minister of the Catholic Church and a peasant leader and organizer, had just come from a successful rally in his native Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental (a province south of Manila) and was walking with a colleague to the local office of the Promotion of Church People's Response on June 10 when he was shot several times by an unidentified gunman. He died shortly after from the bullet wounds. After the shooting, the gunman casually left the scene on a motorcycle.

3. Filipino-American Melissa Roxas, an artist apart from being a volunteer health worker for a Philippine non-government organization, was surveying a community in Tarlac (a province in Central Luzon, north of Manila) together with fellow volunteers Juanito Carabeo and John Edward Handoc on May 19 when they were abducted by eight armed and hooded men and brought to a safehouse. Roxas, in particular, was heavily tortured. She and Carabeo were released a few days later, but their companion, Handoc, remains missing.

4. Lorico, together with Roxas and her two companions, are just a few of the numerous victims of human rights abuses under the eight-year-old presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

5. Extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture have particularly been rampant under the Arroyo regime.

6. Victims of Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances in the Philippines (January 21, 2001-October 31, 2008 ) 977 victims of extrajudicial killings 201 victims of enforced disappearances Source: Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights), 2008 Human Rights Report

7. Most of the killers are either uniformed military men with no nametags or are in civilian clothes, wearing bonnets or ski masks and riding motorcycles or other vehicles without plate numbers.

8. People from all sectors – including church leaders, human rights defenders, and journalists – are being targeted.

9. The killings and disappearances occur oon a national scope, and are particularly frequent in regions designated as “priority areas” under the Arroyo government’s national security program Oplan Bantay Laya, or Operation Freedom Watch.

10. The killings and disappearances take within the context of the Arroyo government’s National Internal Security Plan, or NISP. The NISP aims to neutralize or destroy by military means both the armed groups fighting the government and legal, progressive organizations – with virtually no distinction made between the two. Legal and progressive organizations – which advocate the interests of the poor majority, and genuine freedom and democracy – are branded as front organizations of the underground Communist Party of the Philippines.

11. Oplan Bantay Laya lumps together armed guerrillas of the New People’s Army – the armed component of the Communist Party of the Philippines – and unarmed activists working within the legal framework in its Order of Battle, which lists all organizations and individuals that are targets of military attack.

12. The persons subject to surveillance and neutralization under Oplan Bantay Laya range from ranking officials of the so-called front organizations of the Communist Party of the Philippines – the legal and progressive groups – to those who merely attend or support the activities of these groups.

13. Some of those previously reported to have been forcibly disappeared eventually surfaced or were found alive – in the custody of the military. Many of them were heavily tortured.

14. There have been more than a thousand documented cases of torture under the Arroyo regime. Most torture cases are difficult to document because the victims fear reprisal from the perpetrators.

15. Repression under the Arroyo regime has also taken the form of political persecution against known progressive leaders, such as Bayan Muna (or People First) Partylist Rep. Satur Ocampo. The likes of Ocampo have been frequently slapped with trumped-up criminal charges.

16. The gross and systematic violations of civil and political rights do not take place within a vacuum. They take place within the context of the gross and systematic violations of economic, social and cultural rights. In a very real and very direct sense, the attacks on progressive forces and the people in general fundamentally serve the purpose of sustaining an unjust, exploitative and oppressive system.

17. Millions of Filipinos are kept in deep, widespread and worsening poverty by a backward, agrarian and pre-industrial economy. Filipinos obviously have not chosen to be in this condition; it has rather been imposed on them by neocolonialism, led by the US government and multinational/transnational corporations, in collaboration with domestic economic and political elites.

18. There are more poor and hungry Filipinos today than at any other time in the country’s history. Out of almost 90 million Filipinos, there are over 65 million (or around 80 percent) who struggle to survive on less than $2 a day. Based on standard dietary requirements, there are more than 45 million Filipinos suffering from hunger.

19. Joblessness and job scarcity have reached historic highs under the Arroyo regime. Correspondingly, unprecedented numbers of Filipinos – about 3,000, based on Philippine government data – are forced to leave the Philippines every day to find work abroad, and at great social and personal cost.

20. The country’s peasants, fisherfolk, workers, urban poor (slum dwellers), women, children, and indigenous peoples each suffer specific forms of exploitation and oppression.

21. Without genuine land reform, tens of millions of peasants and fisherfolk still subsist in conditions of severe feudal and semifeudal oppression; rural land, credit, trading and marketing monopoliesremain ascendant in the vast countryside.

22. Filipino workers suffer low wages, long working hours, strict output quotas and oppressive working conditions in order to produce the superprofits of large foreign corporations.

23. The millions of urban poor face not only the lack of livelihood and social services but also the constant threat of demolitions of their homes, loss of property, and physical and economic displacement following forcible evictions. Women and children – the most vulnerable sectors in society especially among the exploited classes – feel the worsening economic and social conditions most acutely.

24. The survival of indigenous peoples as distinct peoples is under threat and their rights to ancestral domain, to practice and develop their indigenous socio-political systems, and to self-determination are constantly under attack.

25. The Arroyo regime’s prioritization of foreign corporate and domestic elite profits has also resulted in the inaction on (or tolerance of) the adverse environmental consequences of industrial, agricultural and resource-extractive operations. Large-scale mining by multinational/transnational corporations is also tantamount to the sheer plunder of the national patrimony.

26. Finally, domestic ruling elites have benefited not only from their commercial relations as junior partners of foreign monopoly capital but also from large-scale graft and corruption. Bureaucratic corruption is endemic to the Arroyo regime as it was to all the regimes before it.

27. In all these, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has played a key role as a major agent of US neocolonial interests.

28. The Arroyo regime, in collusion with and as an instrument of neocolonialism and such multilateral institutions as the IMF-World Bank, the WTO and multinational/transnational corporations, violate the economic, social and cultural rights of the Filipino people.

29. The US government has also been involved in counter-”insurgency” operations in the Philippines – as policy architect, through military aid and training, and by direct military intervention – since the Huk rebellion (1950s, which also involved CIA operations); in the series of suppression campaigns during the Marcos dictatorship (1970s-1986) and the presidencies of Corazon Aquino (“total war” and CIA-sponsored low-intensity conflict, 1986-1992); Fidel V. Ramos (VFA, 1992-1998); and Joseph Estrada (total war in Mindanao, 1998-January 2001).

30. The crimes and atrocities stemming from the implementation of Oplan Bantay Laya are directly instigated by the so-called war on terror, which the Bush regime exported to and imposed on the Philippines.