The Human Rights Situation in the
Philippines
Prepared for the Symposium on Human Rights
Violations in the Philippines
Organized by the Task Force on Pastoral and
Solidarity Visit to the Philippines
The Board of Missions
California-Nevada Annual Conference
United Methodist Church
19 June 2009
Fermin Lorico, a lay minister of the Catholic
Church and a peasant leader and organizer, had
just come from a successful rally in his native
Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental (a province
south of Manila) and was walking with a colleague
to the local office of the Promotion of Church
People's Response on June 10 when he was shot
several times by an unidentified gunman. He died
shortly after from the bullet wounds. After the
shooting, the gunman casually left the scene on a
motorcycle.
Filipino-American Melissa Roxas, an artist
apart from being a volunteer health worker
for a Philippine non-government
organization, was surveying a community in
Tarlac (a province in Central Luzon, north of
Manila) together with fellow volunteers
Juanito Carabeo and John Edward Handoc
on May 19 when they were abducted by eight
armed and hooded men and brought to a
safehouse. Roxas, in particular, was heavily
tortured. She and Carabeo were released a
few days later, but their companion, Handoc,
remains missing.
Lorico, together with Roxas and her two
companions, are just a few of the numerous
victims of human rights abuses under the eightyear-old presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances,
and torture have particularly been rampant under
the Arroyo regime.
Victims of Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced
Disappearances in the Philippines (January 21,
2001-October 31, 2008 )
977 victims of extrajudicial killings
 201 victims of enforced disappearances

Source: Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement
of People's Rights), 2008 Human Rights Report
Most of the killers are either uniformed military
men with no nametags or are in civilian clothes,
wearing bonnets or ski masks and riding
motorcycles or other vehicles without plate
numbers.
People from all sectors – including church leaders,
human rights defenders, and journalists – are
being targeted.
The killings and disappearances occur oon a
national scope, and are particularly frequent in
regions designated as “priority areas” under the
Arroyo government’s national security program
Oplan Bantay Laya, or Operation Freedom Watch.
The killings and disappearances take within the
context of the Arroyo government’s National
Internal Security Plan, or NISP. The NISP aims to
neutralize or destroy by military means both the
armed groups fighting the government and legal,
progressive organizations – with virtually no
distinction made between the two. Legal and
progressive organizations – which advocate the
interests of the poor majority, and genuine
freedom and democracy – are branded as front
organizations of the underground Communist
Party of the Philippines.
Oplan Bantay Laya lumps together armed
guerrillas of the New People’s Army – the armed
component of the Communist Party of the
Philippines – and unarmed activists working within
the legal framework in its Order of Battle, which
lists all organizations and individuals that are
targets of military attack.
The persons subject to surveillance and
neutralization under Oplan Bantay Laya range
from ranking officials of the so-called front
organizations of the Communist Party of the
Philippines – the legal and progressive groups –
to those who merely attend or support the
activities of these groups.
Some of those previously reported to have been
forcibly disappeared eventually surfaced or were
found alive – in the custody of the military.
Many of them were heavily tortured.
There have been more than a thousand
documented cases of torture under the Arroyo
regime. Most torture cases are difficult to
document because the victims fear reprisal from
the perpetrators.
Repression under the Arroyo regime has also
taken the form of political persecution against
known progressive leaders, such as Bayan Muna
(or People First) Partylist Rep. Satur Ocampo.
The likes of Ocampo have been frequently
slapped with trumped-up criminal charges.
The gross and systematic violations of civil and
political rights do not take place within a vacuum.
They take place within the context of the gross
and systematic violations of economic, social and
cultural rights.
In a very real and very direct sense, the attacks on
progressive forces and the people in general
fundamentally serve the purpose of sustaining an
unjust, exploitative and oppressive system.
Millions of Filipinos are kept in deep, widespread
and worsening poverty by a backward, agrarian
and pre-industrial economy. Filipinos obviously
have not chosen to be in this condition; it has
rather been imposed on them by neocolonialism,
led by the US government and
multinational/transnational corporations, in
collaboration with domestic economic and political
elites.
There are more poor and hungry Filipinos today
than at any other time in the country’s history. Out
of almost 90 million Filipinos, there are over 65
million (or around 80 percent) who struggle to
survive on less than $2 a day. Based on standard
dietary requirements, there are more than 45
million Filipinos suffering from hunger.
Joblessness and job scarcity have reached
historic highs under the Arroyo regime.
Correspondingly, unprecedented numbers of
Filipinos – about 3,000, based on Philippine
government data – are forced to leave the
Philippines every day to find work abroad, and at
great social and personal cost.
The country’s peasants, fisherfolk, workers, urban
poor (slum dwellers), women, children, and
indigenous peoples each suffer specific forms of
exploitation and oppression.
Without genuine land reform, tens of millions of
peasants and fisherfolk still subsist in conditions of
severe feudal and semifeudal oppression; rural
land, credit, trading and marketing monopolies
remain ascendant in the vast countryside.
Filipino workers suffer low wages, long working
hours, strict output quotas and oppressive working
conditions in order to produce the superprofits of
large foreign corporations.
The millions of urban poor face not only the lack of
livelihood and social services but also the
constant threat of demolitions of their homes, loss
of property, and physical and economic
displacement following forcible evictions. Women
and children – the most vulnerable sectors in
society especially among the exploited classes –
feel the worsening economic and social conditions
most acutely.
The survival of indigenous peoples as distinct
peoples is under threat and their rights to
ancestral domain, to practice and develop their
indigenous socio-political systems, and to selfdetermination are constantly under attack.
The Arroyo regime’s prioritization of foreign
corporate and domestic elite profits has also
resulted in the inaction on (or tolerance of) the
adverse environmental consequences of
industrial, agricultural and resource-extractive
operations. Large-scale mining by
multinational/transnational corporations is also
tantamount to the sheer plunder of the national
patrimony.
Finally, domestic ruling elites have benefited not
only from their commercial relations as junior
partners of foreign monopoly capital but also from
large-scale graft and corruption. Bureaucratic
corruption is endemic to the Arroyo regime as it
was to all the regimes before it.
In all these, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has played
a key role as a major agent of US neocolonial
interests.
The Arroyo regime, in collusion with and as an
instrument of neocolonialism and such multilateral
institutions as the IMF-World Bank, the WTO and
multinational/transnational corporations, violate
the economic, social and cultural rights of the
Filipino people.
The US government has also been involved in
counter-”insurgency” operations in the Philippines
– as policy architect, through military aid and
training, and by direct military intervention – since
the Huk rebellion (1950s, which also involved CIA
operations); in the series of suppression
campaigns during the Marcos dictatorship (1970s1986) and the presidencies of Corazon Aquino
(“total war” and CIA-sponsored low-intensity
conflict, 1986-1992); Fidel V. Ramos (VFA, 19921998); and Joseph Estrada (total war in
Mindanao, 1998-January 2001).
The crimes and atrocities stemming from the
implementation of Oplan Bantay Laya are directly
instigated by the so-called war on terror, which the
Bush regime exported to and imposed on the
Philippines.