Solidarity with Philippine movement

Demonstrations across the United States on Sept. 21 will focus a spotlight on the widespread reign of death-squad terror in the Philippines. The protests are called by BAYAN USA and the International League of Peoples Struggle.

BAYAN USA explains in the call for the Sept. 21 actions that the campaign of extra-legal violence—Oplan Bantay Laya—is U.S. instigated, and patterned after the Pentagon’s Phoenix Program against the Vietnamese in the 1960s.

Under the Washington-backed regime of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, some 751 people have already been murdered, and more than 180 abducted and presumed dead. The class targets of the military and Klan-like death squads reveals more about the intent of the violence. It’s directed at left-wing activists, workers, peasants, Muslims, women, youth, students, teachers, legal workers, grass-roots church people and progressive media. Witnesses to killings have themselves been “disappeared.”

In 2003, then-Assistant U.S. Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced that the Philippines was the “Second Front in the war on terror.”

Since that time, the economy has continued to disintegrate and state repression and extra-legal violence against the workers and peasants has increased. All who struggle against the bosses, landlords, and the Arroyo regime and call for Pentagon troops out of the Philippines face killings, abductions, disappearances and torture.

Today this state terrorism in the Philippines, BAYAN explains, is “the bitter fruit of such U.S. imperialist policies as ‘neoliberal globalization’ and ‘global war on terror.’”

The group concluded, “We are calling on all justice-loving people and forces of the world to join the international mobilization against the Arroyo regime and its U.S. imperialist master.

“With the solidarity and support of the people of the world, the Filipino people can bring closer the day of reckoning for the entire Arroyo regime.”

All out to demonstrate solidarity with the struggling people of the Philippines!