ICHRP Statement on Anniversary of Cry of Pugad Lawin
August 27, 2025
This August 26th, one hundred and twenty-nine years after the Filipino people rose up against the Spanish following the Cry of Pugad Lawin, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) remembers and expresses our ongoing support for the Filipino people’s long struggle for genuine liberation and national sovereignty.
In the year 1896, the Filipino people faced foreign occupation and dominance under Spanish colonialism. Spanish friars enforced a feudal land system with the cross backed by swords. That August, Filipinos tore up cedulas (community tax certificates) – a symbol of subservience to the Spanish – and revolutionaries led by Andres Bonifacio launched the Sigaw ng Pugad Lawin [“The Cry of Pugad Lawin;” a historical barrio in current day Quezon City] which started a revolution against Spanish dominance.
To this day, the Filipino people reckon with the problems presented by a semi-feudal society under US neocolonial rule. Just this July, Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), the peasant movement of the Philippines, celebrated 40 years of struggle for the rights of peasants amid semi-feudal and semi-colonial conditions. Since their founding under the Marcos dictatorship in 1985, KMP has proven that peasants are not only food creators, but pathfinders and advocates of genuine social change. Their struggle – and the struggle of the whole Filipino people – continues today under the US-backed Marcos Jr regime.
While millions of Filipinos go hungry in the countryside, Marcos is opening up the economy and land only to benefit the Philippine elite and foreign tycoons. Land use conversion – farmland taken from peasants for commercial projects – is rampant. Under the guise of “green” development, Marcos Jr has welcomed foreign investment programs including renewable energy projects, but without the free prior and informed consent of communities, and without proof of how these energy projects will result in the equitable distribution of energy in the country. The New Clark City and Bulacan Airport projects present themselves as shiny tourist destinations after displacing poor communities, and peasants continue to decry Marcos’s land reform programs and the World Bank SPLIT program as fake land reform.
“When the Filipino people are suffering from the soaring cost of food and low wages, the government should prioritize genuine land reform and agricultural projects that feed Filipinos,” said Peter Murphy, ICHRP Chairperson. “Instead, the Marcos regime is selling out Philippine lands to foreign interests and bombing the very communities who cultivate the food the people need.”
While Filipino peasant farmers resist the seizure of their lands, they also face the worst of militarization and violations of international humanitarian law. This month, in the midst of an Asia-Pacific Conference on “International Humanitarian Law” hosted by the Philippines, the Armed Forces of the Philippines conducted a campaign of terror against civilians backed with US support. In the last few months state forces have conducted numerous indiscriminate bombings across Mindoro and Central Luzon, killed a farmer Juan Sumilhig in Mindoro, and most recently pounded villages in Laguna with gunfire, artillery, and air support.
In the spirit of the Sigaw ng Pugad Lawin, and 40 years after the founding of KMP, ICHRP renews our call for increased solidarity support for Filipino peasants and those in rural areas facing the worst of development aggression and fascist attacks of the Marcos regime. We uplift the call of the peasant movement and the whole Filipino people for genuine land reform, and call upon peace loving people around the world to support the Filipino people’s ongoing cry of genuine national sovereignty. As ICHRP, we say “Land Not Bombs! Support the Filipino Peasant Struggle Against Plunder and Militarization.”
