đź“·: Kilusang Mayo Uno / FB
by Diego Morra
Apart from not giving Filipino workers any decent increase in minimum pay at a time when US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conspired to attack Iran and instigate insane increases in the prices of oil and gas globally, the Marcos Jr. administration and the police under its command even staged a badly-contrived provocation against thousands of workers celebrating International Labor Day by using fire engines and attacking participants who were winding down their annual protest action.
Fuming over the police action, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) chairman Jerome Adonis accused Brig. Gen. Arnold Santiago of lying when he claimed that the workers assaulted his policemen armed with truncheons and firearms and blamed the marchers for the loss of cellular phones during the melee. “We never hurt anyone. This is a dirty police tactic to drown with disinformation our legitimate grievances against the greedy capitalists they are protecting.”
“The crisis confronting the Filipino people continues to deepen as US imperialism escalates its wars in the Middle East. Its aggression against Iran is part of a long-standing drive to control oil resources and dominate the region. The bombings and threats of war drive up global oil prices, especially along critical routes such as the Strait of Hormuz – costs that are quickly passed on to import-dependent countries like the Philippines,” KMU said. “Across both rural and urban areas, the weight of this crisis is sharply felt. Rising oil prices trigger relentless increases in the cost of food, transport, electricity, fertilizer, and other basic necessities. Farmers bear the brunt through soaring production and transport costs, while farmgate prices remain depressed. Workers, whether in factories or in the fields, are squeezed by slave-like to low wages and worsening living conditions. Meanwhile, oil cartels and big businesses continue to reap superprofits.”
KMU has demanded a substantial wage increase, including a P1,200 national living wage, arguing that it is both urgent and justified. Hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers in plantations and haciendas continue to endure chronic underpayment, neglect, and precarious working conditions, it argued. In Negros, where the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) is based, sugar workers are organizing unions and associations to assert their rights and improve their welfare. Yet their efforts are met with repression and brazen violations of their democratic rights, the labor federation revealed.
“On this May Day, we call on workers, peasants, youth, and all democratic sectors to unite and take to the streets. Let us oppose the US imperialist war and assert urgent solutions to the reeling crisis: roll back oil prices, scrap the Oil Deregulation Law, remove VAT and excise taxes on petroleum products, and advance genuine agrarian reform alongside national industrialization,” KMU stressed.
The program was about to end when fire hoses were turned on and the police attacked. Adonis said the workers were unarmed and never intended to clash with truncheon-wielding policemen, hidden SWAT elements as well as snipers. Videos showed the deliberate attempt to suppress the protest, disperse marchers and set the stage for gross violations of the basic rights of citizens to seek redress of grievances. KMU dismissed Santiago’s allegations as pure nonsense and noted that police were being behind the abduction, harassment, murders and enforced disappearances of hundreds of labor organizers nationwide.
Jude Fernandez was murdered in Rizal province and William Lariosa was abducted in Bukidnon. Aside from KMU, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) also condemned the illegal arrest and continued detention of Julie Ann Balora, an organizer of the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), and demanded her release. Balora and her companions were nabbed without warrants at 6 p.m. on April 22, 2026, in Talisay City. In August 2020, KMP leader and peace consultant Randall Echanis was also tortured and murdered in a raid in Quezon City, with a neighbor who witnessed the attack also slain.
Months earlier, the ailing Julius Giron, who had a long stint in the labor movement, was gunned down in Baguio City, along with his physician, Dr. Ma. Lourdes D. Tangco, and another companion. The story was that the ailing Giron, Tangco and their companion fought back against the heavily-armed platoons of raiders. KMU also suffered scores of fatalities during coordinated attacks in Southern Luzon, where labor organizers and union leaders were tagged as New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas and summarily executed. Since 2018, the Duterte regime implemented a two-pronged strategy copied from the US Counterinsurgency (Coin) playbook and adopted a “whole of nation” approach that had its birth during the 1950s, when the CIA employed psychological warfare and deployed assassins to eliminate guerrillas preventing the return of landlords in Central and Southern Luzon after World War II.
Apart from tagging Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB) members as “aswang,” Edward Landsdale and his Filipino cohorts masterminded the massacres of guerrilla squadrons. Today, the entire bureaucracy is being used against the underground movement through Executive Order No. 70 that created the National Task Force to Eliminate Local Communist Armed Conflict and Memorandum Circular No. 32 that declared Samar, Negros and the Bicol regions as “areas of lawlessness” that required joint police-military and paramilitary suppression campaigns. Under such conditions, the Latin phrase “arma in armatos sumere jura sinunt” becomes relevant. Translated into English, it means “the law permits us to take up arms against the armed.” #
