By Jose Maria Sison
June 14, 2019
The Filipino people and their revolutionary forces would applaud any government that carries out genuine land reform, which is well explained by the Revolutionary Guide to Land Reform of the Communist Party of the Philippines and by the NDFP Draft Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms.
But certainly the Duterte regime is not engaged in any genuine land reform by distributing mere pieces of paper to some 13,000 people that require them to pay the unaffordable price for 24,000 hectares in Central Mindanao, even if by installment.
The long-running record of the reactionary government in land reform is that more than 95 percent of supposed land reform beneficiaries ultimately cannot pay for the land assigned to them and lose it to merchant usurers, landlords, bureaucrat capitalists, big comprador companies and foreign corporations.
The New People’s Army is cherished by the people, especially the peasant masses because it defends and guarantees the genuine land reform being carried out by the revolutionary movement led by the CPP.
Revolutionary land reform includes the minimum program of reducing land rent, eliminating usury, raising farm wages, improving farm gate prices of agricultural produce, raising agricultural production and creating sideline occupations, and promoting rudimentary cooperation.
Revolutionary land reform also includes the maximum program of distributing land for free to the landless peasants, building cooperatives in stages, providing support from the people’s revolutionary government, raising production and capital construction and setting prices favorable to the agricultural and other products of the peasant masses.
It is not the NPA but the Duterte regime that is doomed in an ignoble sense because of his distribution of mere pieces of paper misrepresented as land reform. The ignoble end of Duterte is assured by his gross and systematic crimes of tyranny, treason, mass murder of people (including the peasants and the indigenous), corruption and deceptions.
In many areas today, the peasants and the indigenous people are being subjected to bombings, mass murders on mere suspicion and forced evacuation in order to allow the corrupt government officials, landlords and the mining, logging and plantation companies to grab the land.
The New People’s Army and other revolutionary forces of the people are indestructible because they serve the people and are carrying out the program for people’s democratic revolution against the three evil forces of foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism, which the Duterte regime and its armed minions are dishonorably and maliciously serving through campaigns of suppression and butchery.###
