Seventeen years after the horrendous massacre in Hacienda Luisita, the fascist state only intensified its attacks on the peasant masses especially under the US-Duterte regime. Duterte wielded one of the bloodiest wars against the peasantry under the veil of his counterinsurgency campaign. He aims to stifle the peasant mass struggle in a vain attempt to complete the neoliberal devastation of the local agriculture and fully open the countryside to the plunder and caprice of big foreign and local capitalists.

Bikol is one of the main targets of Duterte's anti-peasant war. The 214 victims extrajudicial killings in the region during his term, majority of whom are farmers, attest to this. As do the hundreds of communities ravaged by militarization and the brutal killing campaign of the Joint Task Force Bicolandia. For Duterte and the Bicol Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, every single one of all the Bikolano farmers are either influenced, a supporter or a member of the revolutionary movement and thus are all legitimate targets of the militaristic violence of the AFP and PNP.

Duterte also flooded the region with fascist directives from MO 32, EO 70-Whole of Nation Approach, militarization under the Retooled Community Support Program, intensified police operations, Simultaneous Anti-Criminality and Law Enforcement Operations (SACLEO) to bogus land reforms. All of these focus on the destruction of livelihoods, rampant land grabbing, dissolution of unities and suppression of the Bikolano peasantry's struggles. The most basic indication of the rampaging anti-peasant war is the region's reputation of having the most cases of political killings and massacres against members of the agricultural sector under Duterte. There have been 12 cases of massacre in the region with 44 victims in total. Most recent of these was the massacre of five civilians in Brgy. Bugtong, Mandaon, Masbate last October 24. This is aside from the hundreds of illegal arrests, fake and forced surrenders, intimidation, physical assault and other human rights violations.

Fascist violence is Duterte's only means to fully drive his anti-peasant policies in the region from liberalization of importation, widespread conversion of agricultural and ancestral lands, nonstop skyrocketing of oil prices, other basic commodities and production inputs coupled with destructive projects that will wholly deprive farmers of their means of livelihood.

Kabikulan is stricken with insufferable crises. The Bikolano peasantry has no other recourse but their unity and struggle. To let the continuing struggle of Hacienda Luisita farmers for land, rights, justice and life be an ever fervorous inspiration for all is nothing less than auspicious. It is judicious for the peasantry to wage a just war that is from them and shall primarily serve their interests - the people's democratic revolution. It is right and just for them to take up arms and choose the path of the revolution. This shall dismantle the fascist state and end injustice for all the peasant masses under this semicolonial and semifeudal system.

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