31/05/2026
KARAPATAN: Band of fascists in Negros deflects attention from social realities
The hacienderos of Negros represented by the United Sugar Producers Federation (UNIFED) have joined the cacophony of fascists from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the Department of National Defense (DND) and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), along with bureaucrat capitalists in propagating the terror-grooming narrative as the reason why a number of student activists ended up among the casualties of military operations in Negros.
The fascists and their haciendero allies are bandying their ‘terror-grooming’ narrative to deflect the public’s attention from the social context that drew these students to Negros.
It would be strange indeed if institutions of learning turned a blind eye to the stark realities in Negros and if students did not ask questions and seek answers about these realities.
Yet, this is what this band of fascists want from the country’s educational system. They use terms like “regulating” the academe but actually mean desensitizing the youth to social ills and curbing their capacity for critical thought and discernment.
For them, young people and the public in general should remain ignorant enough to prop up the status quo.
The social realities in Negros, however, have simply been too stark to ignore in the face of state efforts to curtail students’ awareness of social issues.
Significantly, this band of fascists never mention in their tirades the massive poverty and the brutal repression that have plagued Negros for decades. Long before these fascists coined the term ‘terror-grooming,’ the buzzwords associated with Negros were hunger, malnutrition, massacres - words which represent the slave-like, inhumane conditions of the peasants in the country.
Close to a third of Negrenses live in poverty, according to IBON Foundation. Land remains concentrated, and sugar monocropping keeps farmworkers seasonal, underpaid and vulnerable. Yet collective farming efforts are met with violence.
On October 20, 2018, nine sugar farmers of Hacienda Nene, Barangay Bulanon, Sagay City who were resting in their hut after their first day of ‘bungkalan’ or collective land cultivation, were killed by armed men in what is now infamously known as the Sagay Massacre.
In 1985, when hunger and poverty stalked the majority of Negrenses reeling from the collapse of the sugar industry, they rose in protest against the Marcos dictatorship that had close ties to the despotic landlords and politicians reigning over the island. At least 20 people were killed in what is now known as the Escalante Massacre when a combined force of military, police and paramilitary forces unleashed machine gun fire against thousands of protesters marking the 13th anniversary of the martial law declaration in Escalante town, Negros Occidental.
Almost 41 years later, Escalante’s neighboring town of Toboso has become the site of the massacre of 10 NPA hors de combat and nine civilians.
Sagay, Escalante and Toboso, where all these massacres were perpetrated, are in northern Negros, where the island’s biggest haciendas can be found, where poverty and hunger are at their worst, and where people’s resistance is often at its most intense.
The whole of Negros has long been a powder keg, from the time of Marcos Sr. to that of his son. Under Marcos Jr., half of the peasant victims of extrajudicial killing come from Negros.
So the next time this band of fascists and their haciendero allies start badgering schools for allegedly grooming terrorists, they should take a hard look at the evils of the social system they are trying to preserve through repressive means and ask whether they themselves have, in fact, been grooming radicals by negative example. (26 May 2026)
