Compatriots-NDFP marks the 30th year since the execution of Flor Contemplacion, one of our fellow migrant workers put to death in Singapore after an unjust trial abroad. We remain indignant at the Philippine reactionary government for failing to save Flor’s life, denying her the support she needed until it was too late.
The hanging of Flor in 1995 sparked nationwide outrage. Filipino migrants and their families back home led mass protests calling for her justice. But to this day, the Philippine government continues to deny justice for many migrant workers since Flor’s death like Mary Jane Veloso who remains imprisoned in the Philippines. Only through the overthrow of this puppet reactionary state can we realize justice for all exploited and oppressed Filipino migrants.
By abandoning Flor Contemplacion to the gallows, the Philippine state exposed their labor export program as a false solution to the impoverished conditions our people are subjected to. Poor living conditions back home and the Philippine government’s peddling of employment overseas coerced Flor to work in Singapore as a domestic worker, only to never return alive. They sold Flor abroad and continue to sell millions of us into peril overseas. We endure labor violations, discrimination, and even slave-like conditions from foreign employers and their reactionary host governments. Like Flor, we enjoy no protections, especially not from the Philippine state. Human traffickers are left to prey on vulnerable OFWs with impunity, as with the case of Mary Jane Veloso.
Despite the many cases of exploitation, abuse, and abandonment overseas, Filipinos are still leaving the country in their thousands every day. The persistent crises of worker unemployment and peasant landlessness continue to force us to go abroad in the hopes of a stable livelihood that we cannot find at home. The big bourgeois comprador and landlord classes who rule the country have no interest in ending these chronic crises. Their power comes from monopolies on land and the continuous flow of commodity imports and raw material exports. They are obsessed with following the neoliberal dictates of the US to maintain this order. It is to the benefit of them and their US imperialist masters that our country’s economy remain backward, agrarian, and non-industrial.
To stave off a complete collapse of the local economy, the Philippine government has become the number one recruiter and trafficker of Filipino migrants, facilitated by the Department of Migrant Workers who ensures the systematic and mass sale of Filipinos. Through bilateral labor agreements and neoliberal deployment programs, they peddle us to foreign countries, catering to their demands for cheap labor. The state is dependent on our foreign exchange remittances to ease the country’s trade deficit between large commodity imports and a weak export capacity.
Justice for Flor Contemplacion and all Filipino migrants will not come from the comprador – landlord ruling state. It will certainly not come from the US-Marcos Jr. regime, which saw record highs of Filipinos leaving the country and is denying clemency to Mary Jane Veloso. Justice for victims of human trafficking, unjust detention and death row abroad, and migrant labor exploitation can only come from the collective and revolutionary action of Filipinos overseas and the people.
The Compatriots-NDFP, being the revolutionary mass organization of overseas Filipinos will undertake ever widening and deepening mass work in order to bring together masses of overseas compatriots towards embracing the people’s democratic revolution in the Philippines as their weapon to upend the semifeudal and semicolonial order and realize the justice that comes from national and social liberation. Our revolutionary movement will empower our fellow migrants in taking justice for their exploitation, oppression, and state neglect into their own hands.
The three decades of growing injustices against Filipino migrant workers compel us to unite with oppressed sectors back home in overthrowing the local ruling system. The continuing crises at home and overseas push us to strengthen our political and material support for the revolutionary war in the countryside. Let us cherish the New People’s Army in their mission to defend the people and overthrow the reactionary order.
Together, let us fight for a genuine national democratic and socialist society together with the revolutionary organizations of peasants, workers, women, youth and the Filipino overseas as well as the proletariat that leads them. Together, we will continue to build organs of political power that oversee land reform, justice, education, healthcare, and other social services that our families back home would not otherwise enjoy.
Long live the Compatriots-NDFP!
Long live the Revolutionary Organizations of Filipinos Overseas!