“The NPA is duty-bound to defend the Tumandok people by holding to account the perpetrators of these crimes and carrying out offensives to disable the fascists from carrying out further attacks and armed suppression against Tumandok minorities,” the CPP said.
The year 2020 had been particularly bad for journalism in the Philippines that saw more media workers killed, arrested, jailed and lose their jobs, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) reported.
“I am appealing to Manila RTC (Regional Trial Court) Branch 32 Judge Thelma Bunyi Medina for prompt action now on our motion to bring my husband, political prisoner Vicente Ladlad, to MMC for immediate treatment for repeated chest tightness since 11 AM today,” Fides Lim said.
Another peasant activist in Bohol Province was killed just as nine Tumandok civilians in Panay Island were being massacred last Wednesday in one of the bloodiest day for farmers under the four-year old Rodrigo Duterte government.
Two days before the year ends, 12th Infantry Battalion-Philippine Army (12IBPA) troopers and the Philippine National Police in Western Visayas swooped down on Tumandok communities in Calinog in Iloilo and Tapaz in Capiz and killed the victims in a Synchronized Enhanced Management of Police Operations (SEMPO).
Sison said there are enough bases for small teams “to conduct armed partisan operations in the cities to mete out revolutionary justice against Duterte’s terrorist forces based in the urban areas.”
The CPP said the NPA has built new guerrilla fronts and expanded old guerrilla fronts in several regions – including Southern Tagalog, Bicol, Negros, Eastern Visayas, Northeast Mindanao, North Central Mindanao, Southern Mindanao and Far South Mindanao — despite the large-scale and sustained military operations mounted by the AFP the past year.
“We are very much in touch with our people and we truly express their deepest sentiments when we called on them to wear white as an act of solidarity and to express our desire for and commitment to peace, sanctity of life, human dignity and human rights, and our collective call to end the killings, COVID pandemic and abuse of our common home,” San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alminaza said.
“The AFP, has so far, failed to detect and prevent the gatherings and assemblies which have already been held in some revolutionary areas… In some villages, the masses and local NPA units were able to mount their gatherings right under the nose of the AFP,” the CPP said.
Troops belonging to the 2nd Infantry Division (2ID) of the AFP and the Region IV-A Command of the PNP killed Carlito Zonio, Vilma Salabao, Wesley Obmerga, Jonathan Alberga, and Niño Alberga, workers of a mango farm in Sitio Malalim, Barangay San Juan of the said town, human rights group Karapatan-Southern Tagalog said.
