Stop agrarian violence and killing of farmers!

Implement agrarian reform in contentious landholdings!

Madam President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo:

From 2001 when you assumed power to 2006, 38 farmer-leaders were slain in cold blood. Two more were killed since -- TFM’s Pepito Santillan in Negros Occidental on January 25 and UNORKA's Joseph Matunding in Iloilo on January 30. KMBP's Heliolito Abrenica could have been the third had he not survived the bolo-hacking by a goon identified with a big landowner in San Francisco, Quezon. He, however, lost his left hand.

More limbs and lives are likely to be sacrificed unless you act quickly and resolutely. Records of PARRDS indicate that there are 2,342 leaders and organizers whose lives are threatened by goons and security guards of big
landowners and plantations as well as others in their service, including policemen, barangay tanods, and members of so-called revolutionary forces.

The farmers have experienced five years of murders, frustrated murders, arson, physical assaults, grave threats, forced evacuations, harassment cases, destruction of properties, and strafing of houses, especially in agrarian
reform hotspots like Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental, Iloilo, Davao del Norte, Compostela Valley, Sarangani, Mindoro Occidental, Batangas, Quezon, and Masbate.

No less than the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has attributed the killings and violence to your government's apparent disregard for meaningful implementation of agrarian reform. Apparently in response, you were quoted on February 6 by a national newspaper as saying:

“There is a new paradigm that is being proposed to open new lands for agriculture so that we can give farmers a chance to have their own land and, yet, avoid all this bloodshed that is happening (in the implementation of land reform).