San Francisco: 100 Rally against Extra-Judicial Killings in the Philippines

The protest featured GMA’s Bay Area debut as the Aswang, a character from Filipino folklore who invades people’s bodies and sucks out their blood and life spirit. The hideous Aswang was guided through the crowd by her puppet master, George W. Bush, symbolizing the millions of dollars in U.S. military aid that is funding the death squads of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. At one dramatic point, an assassin in military fatigues shot first a peasant, then a worker and then a student, who slumped to the ground in front of the entrance to the Consulate. Appropriately, the protestors had covered the windows of the Consulate with pictures of activists murdered by the Philippine Army.

Another demand raised by the protestors was for the repeal of the recently passed Human Security Act, a repressive law modeled after the USA Patriot Act that gives the Arroyo regime a dangerous new weapon to silence militant groups and opposition critics under the guise of fighting “terrorism.” The demonstration also highlighted the state of Filipinos in the U.S., including the case of 27 Filipina nurses in New York City forced to work in miserable conditions by the Sentosa Employment Agency.

Speakers and flyers handed out to bystanders lambasted the SONA. In this speech, GMA proclaimed a multi-billion peso construction program of roads and other infrastructure that will supposedly turn the Philippines into a First World country over the next 20 years. At the “People’s SONA” in the Philippines, activists scoffed at this plan as an opportunity for massive corruption by Arroyo’s friends and cronies, and pointed out that without radical economic and social changes, building a new network of roads will only bridge one backward economic region to another.

The protestors were made up of contingents from Anakbayan-East Bay, League of Filipino Students at SF State University, babae women's group, Bayan USA, ALAY youth group, Filipino Community Center and NAFCON (National Alliance for Filipino Concerns). Rev. Larry Emery from Sacramento spoke about his experience as a member of an international observers delegation that documented massive voter fraud during the May elections in the Philippines.

Doug Norberg from the International League of Peoples’ Struggle said that the struggle of the Filipino people against the imperialist system is the struggle of people all over the world, and described the recent involvement of ILPS-affiliated organizations in people’s struggles in Brasil, Iran, India, among migrant workers in Europe, and at the demonstrations against the G-8 Summit in Germany. He ended by inviting the protestors to send representatives to the ILPS Third International Assembly to be held in Malaysia in May 2008.

The rally concluded with a closely packed “hoi hoi” chant and dance, inspired by the militant toi toi dance from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

For more information, please contact Bayan USA at info [at] bayanusa.org