Defend the Marihangin 10 and Ka Ondo

For several years now, the Indigenous peoples and surrounding communities of Bugsuk in Southern Palawan have been at the forefront of combating luxury tourism projects by the San Miguel Corporation (SMC). In the latest episode, the people of Marihangin, Bugsuk, Palawan have been resisting the latest attack on their land that has been ongoing for several weeks now. SMC has repeatedly hired armed goons from the Jewelmer Corporation and JMV Security Services to invade and pillage land in sitio Marihangin for their nefarious project. SMC is aided and abetted by the Philippine National Police (PNP), the courts, and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) in a holy alliance to steal the ancestral domains of the Molbog, Palaw’an, and Cagayanen peoples of Bugsuk. To this end, the State incarcerated and charged the Marihangin 10, leaders in the Marihangin community, on charges of “grave coercion” for defending their lands from the goons of former NCIP executive Caesar Ortega and the SMC’s own Ramon S. Ang.

This holy alliance between the oligarchs, moneymen, and the bureaucrats conspires to build a luxury resort on the corpses of the brave people of Marihangin. Abolitionists understand that the systems of police, prisons, and courts—whole systems and logics of control known as carcerality—function to preserve the order of profit and domination. As abolitionists, we do not call on the government to preserve the “rule of law,” for it is the very rule of law that arrested and charged the Marihangin 10 and the arrest of Oscar “Ondo” Pelayo, community leader fighting against the theft of their land. The “rule of law” stands for the theft of land, for the continuing of the logics of colonization upon Indigenous communities. We call for not only the dropping of charges on ka Ondo Pelayo and the Marihangin 10, but for the Filipino people to resist against the regime of policing and incarceration.

This regime of policing and incarceration was put in place by colonization. Indeed, the systems of police and prisons the American colonial government instituted in the Philippines was so effective, it was reimplemented in the United States to crush the worker’s movement there. Colonization has institutionalized structures of policing and incarceration in this country. As post-colonized inhabitants of this archipelago, we understand that decolonization will not be complete until the institutions of colonization—the state, the police, the prisons, the corporations—are abolished, and the lands returned to their tillers and Indigenous stewards.

The episodes of land-grabbing in Bugsuk has been ongoing since the Marcos dictatorship and the injustice will continue as long as the systems of injustice and carcerality remain.