Malaya Movement USA Condemns the harassment of peasant farmers in Barangay Orong, Kabankalan City in Negros Occidental!
Why the urgent demand to release Chantal from AFP custody is critical.
In a report by Human Rights Advocates Negros, elements of the 94th Infantry Brigade of the AFP camped in Barangay Orong, Kabankalan City in Negros Occidental. Between January 11th and 14th masked soldiers stalked farmer Marciel Figuera’s house as well as other residents. Another farmer, Danny Yonson, was forced into a black van and was interrogated and pressured into becoming an intelligence asset for the military. He declined and expresses concern for his family’s safety.
The 94th Infantry Battalion demonstrates their cowardly behavior by threatening and harassing farmers. These incidents follow shortly after elements of the 15th IB murdered peasant leader Warlita “Dedeng” Jimenez in the neighboring Barangay Camansi in December of 2025. The AFP has long been committing military abuses in Kabankalan City, harassing peasant leaders fighting for their right to land and human rights advocates.
Members of Malaya Movement Northeast integrated into Kabankalan City to learn about the human rights abuses, land grabbing, in Negros Occidental. Many rural communities in Negros Occidental continue to face aerial bombings and strafings by the military, harassment and threats by despotic landlords, and displacement due to landgrabbing and land use conversion.
The Department of Agrarian Reform’s sham programs continue to worsen the longstanding problem of landlessness in the Philippines. DAR’s SPLIT program (Support to Parcelization of Land for Individual Tilling Program) is designed to break up collective land titles into individual ones, which threatens the compulsory parcelization of land, worsening land disputes, accelerates the sale of land to developers, all in the context to worsening heightened militarization and counterinsurgency in response to heightened peasant resistance. The NTF-ELCAC and its counterinsurgency programs continue to harass and terrorize Filipino farmers fighting for genuine land reform.
We must also continue to echo the call to release Chantal Anichoche, who continues to be in detention by the AFP! Just as we returned to the Philippines to learn about the conditions of peasants in Negros Occidental, Chantal returned to learn about the conditions of indigenous communities in Occidental Mindoro, which was subjected to aerial bombings and aerial strafings on January 1st. She is illegally detained in Camp Campininpin in Tanay, Rizal where the military continues to deny her access to a lawyer to ensure her human rights are protected.
So as long as these human rights abuses continue, overseas Filipinos will continue to monitor the abuses committed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and will continue to fight fascism in our homelands.
