Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop

This piece was anonymously authored by a former cop from California and originally published on June 6th, 2020 in response to recent police violence.


Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop

By Anonymous / Medium

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy.

Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me. But enough is enough.

The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS

As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it. I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us.

One of the other reasons I’ve struggled to write this essay is that I don’t want to center the conversation on myself and my big salty boo-hoo feelings about my bad choices. It’s a toxic white impulse to see atrocities and think “How can I make this about me?” So, I hope you’ll take me at my word that this account isn’t meant to highlight me, but rather the hundred thousand of me in every city in the country. It’s about the structure that made me (that I chose to pollute myself with) and it’s my meager contribution to the cause of radical justice.

YES, ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

I was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor, non-white population (with a large proportion of first-generation immigrants). One night during briefing, our watch commander told us that the city council had requested a new zero tolerance policy. Against murderers, drug dealers, or child predators? No, against homeless people collecting cans from recycling bins. See, the city had some kickback deal with the waste management company where waste management got paid by the government for our expected tonnage of recycling. When homeless people “stole” that recycling from the waste management company, they were putting that cheaper contract in peril. So, we were to arrest as many recyclers as we could find.

Even for me, this was a stupid policy and I promptly blew Sarge off. But a few hours later, Sarge called me over to assist him. He was detaining a 70 year old immigrant who spoke no English, who he’d seen picking a coke can out of a trash bin. He ordered me to arrest her for stealing trash. I said, “Sarge, c’mon, she’s an old lady.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. Hook her up, that’s an order.” And… I did. She cried the entire way to the station and all through the booking process. I couldn’t even comfort her because I didn’t speak Spanish. I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn’t willing to lose my job for her.

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t.

I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations. We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community.

As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years.

I know what you’re going to ask: did I ever plant drugs? Did I ever plant a gun on someone? Did I ever make a false arrest or file a false report? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cheating was no fun, I liked to get my stats the “legitimate” way. But I knew officers who kept a little baggie of whatever or maybe a pocket knife that was a little too big in their war bags (yeah, we called our duffle-bags “war bags”…). Did I ever tell anybody about it? No I did not. Did I ever confess my suspicions when cocaine suddenly showed up in a gang member’s jacket? No I did not.

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squad-mates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it.

And that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or “the bad apples” illegally harassing “shit-bags”, we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code.

None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops. This is why “All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

BASTARD 101

I could write an entire book of the awful things I’ve done, seen done, and heard others bragging about doing. But, to me, the bigger question is “How did it get this way?”. While I was a police officer in a city 30 miles from where I lived, many of my fellow officers were from the community and treated their neighbors just as badly as I did. While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.
Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary boot-camp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

I want to highlight this: nearly everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS mortality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force: “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”
Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra.

Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer. Once police training has – through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle – promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you.

Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables. One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs”. Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and the citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

This “they hate you for protecting them and only I love you, only I can protect you” tactic is familiar to students of abuse. It’s what abusers do to coerce their victims into isolation, pulling them away from friends and family and ensnaring them in the abuser’s toxic web. Law enforcement does this too, pitting the officer against civilians. “They don’t understand what you do, they don’t respect your sacrifice, they just want to get away with crimes. You’re only safe with us.” I think the Wolves vs. Sheepdogs dynamic is one of the most important elements as to why officers behave the way they do. Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality.

Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed.

After all, most people don’t steal, so anyone who does isn’t “most people,” right? To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.” And yet, it was never even a question as to whether the power structure above them was honoring any sort of contract back. Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have.

One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he “slept like a baby” that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but “unofficial training” teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.

HOW TO BE A BASTARD

I have participated in some of these activities personally, others are ones I either witnessed personally or heard officers brag about openly. Very, very occasionally, I knew an officer who was disciplined or fired for one of these things. Police officers will lie about the law, about what’s illegal, or about what they can legally do to you in order to manipulate you into doing what they want. Police officers will lie about feeling afraid for their life to justify use of force after the fact.
Police officers will lie and tell you they’ll file a police report just to get you off their back. Police officers will lie that your cooperation will “look good for you” in court, or that they will “put in a good word for you with the DA.” The police will never help you look good in court.

Police officers will lie about what they see and hear to access private property to conduct unlawful searches. Police officers will lie and say your friend already ratted you out, so you might as well rat them back out. This is almost never true. Police officers will lie and say you’re not in trouble in order to get you to exit a location or otherwise make an arrest more convenient for them. Police officers will lie and say that they won’t arrest you if you’ll just “be honest with them” so they know what really happened. Police officers will lie about their ability to seize the property of friends and family members to coerce a confession. Police officers will write obviously bullshit tickets so that they get time-and-a-half overtime fighting them in court.

Police officers will search places and containers you didn’t consent to and later claim they were open or “smelled like marijuana”.
Police officers will threaten you with a more serious crime they can’t prove in order to convince you to confess to the lesser crime they really want you for. Police officers will employ zero tolerance on races and ethnicities they dislike and show favor and lenience to members of their own group.

Police officers will use intentionally extra-painful maneuvers and holds during an arrest to provoke “resistance” so they can further assault the suspect. Some police officers will plant drugs and weapons on you, sometimes to teach you a lesson, sometimes if they kill you somewhere away from public view. Some police officers will assault you to intimidate you and threaten to arrest you if you tell anyone.   A non-trivial number of police officers will steal from your house or vehicle during a search. A non-trivial number of police officers commit intimate partner violence and use their status to get away with it. A non-trivial number of police officers use their position to entice, coerce, or force sexual favors from vulnerable people.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith. Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops. I just remembered something, do not talk to cops.
Checking my notes real quick, something jumped out at me:

Do

not

fucking

talk

to

cops.

Ever.

Say, “I don’t answer questions,” and ask if you’re free to leave; if so, leave. If not, tell them you want your lawyer and that, per the Supreme Court, they must terminate questioning. If they don’t, file a complaint and collect some badges for your mantle.

DO THE BASTARDS EVER HELP?

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people. During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night?

The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them. It’s also important to note that well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most “active” crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender?

Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started. Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE A BASTARD?

So what do we do about it? Even though I’m an expert on bastardism, I am not a public policy expert nor an expert in organizing a post-police society. So, before I give some suggestions, let me tell you what probably won’t solve the problem of bastard cops:

  • Increased “bias” training. A quarterly or even monthly training session is not capable of covering over years of trauma-based camaraderie in police forces. I can tell you from experience, we don’t take it seriously, the proctors let us cheat on whatever “tests” there are, and we all made fun of it later over coffee.
  • Tougher laws. I hope you understand by now, cops do not follow the law and will not hold each other accountable to the law. Tougher laws are all the more reason to circle the wagons and protect your brothers and sisters.
  • More community policing programs. Yes, there is a marginal effect when a few cops get to know members of the community, but look at the protests of 2020: many of the cops pepper-spraying journalists were probably the nice school cop a month ago.

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.
Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

  • No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.
  • No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens [sic] like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.
  • Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.
  • Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.
  • Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.
  • One final idea: consider abolishing the police.

I know what you’re thinking, “What? We need the police! They protect us!” As someone who did it for nearly a decade, I need you to understand that by and large, police protection is marginal, incidental.

It’s an illusion created by decades of copaganda designed to fool you into thinking these brave men and women are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

I alluded to this above: the vast majority of calls for service I handled were theft reports, burglary reports, domestic arguments that hadn’t escalated into violence, loud parties, (houseless) people loitering, traffic collisions, very minor drug possession, and arguments between neighbors. Mostly the mundane ups and downs of life in the community, with little inherent danger. And, like I mentioned, the vast majority of crimes I responded to (even violent ones) had already happened; my unaccountable license to kill was irrelevant.

What I mainly provided was an “objective” third party with the authority to document property damage, ask people to chill out or disperse, or counsel people not to beat each other up. A trained counselor or conflict resolution specialist would be ten times more effective than someone with a gun strapped to his hip wondering if anyone would try to kill him when he showed up. There are many models for community safety that can be explored if we get away from the idea that the only way to be safe is to have a man with a M4 rifle prowling your neighborhood ready at a moment’s notice to write down your name and birthday after you’ve been robbed and beaten.

You might be asking, “What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?”

And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I’ve seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother’s arms thanks to a gang member’s bullet. I know the wages of violence. This is where we have to have the courage to ask: why do people rob? Why do they join gangs? Why do they get addicted to drugs or sell them? It’s not because they are inherently evil. I submit to you that these are the results of living in a capitalist system that grinds people down and denies them housing, medical care, human dignity, and a say in their government.

These are the results of white supremacy pushing people to the margins, excluding them, disrespecting them, and treating their bodies as disposable.

Equally important to remember: disabled and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police officers not trained to recognize and react to disabilities or mental health crises. Some of the people we picture as “violent offenders” are often people struggling with untreated mental illness, often due to economic hardships. Very frequently, the officers sent to “protect the community” escalate this crisis and ultimately wound or kill the person. Your community was not made safer by police violence; a sick member of your community was killed because it was cheaper than treating them. Are you extremely confident you’ll never get sick one day too?

Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save? Would there still be a few bad actors in the world? Sure, probably. What’s my solution for them, you’re no doubt asking. I’ll tell you what: generational poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, and for-profit medical care are all problems that can be solved in our lifetimes by rejecting the dehumanizing meat grinder of capitalism and white supremacy. Once that’s done, we can work on the edge cases together, with clearer hearts not clouded by a corrupt system.

Police abolition is closely related to the idea of prison abolition and the entire concept of banishing the carceral state, meaning, creating a society focused on reconciliation and restorative justice instead of punishment, pain, and suffering — a system that sees people in crisis as humans, not monsters.

People who want to abolish the police typically also want to abolish prisons, and the same questions get asked: “What about the bad guys? Where do we put them?” I bring this up because abolitionists don’t want to simply replace cops with armed social workers or prisons with casual detention centers full of puffy leather couches and PlayStations. We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people’s needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization.

Here’s legendary activist and thinker Angela Y. Davis putting it better than I ever could:

An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.”

(Are Prisons Obsolete, pg. 107)

I’m not telling you I have the blueprint for a beautiful new world. What I’m telling you is that the system we have right now is broken beyond repair and that it’s time to consider new ways of doing community together. Those new ways need to be negotiated by members of those communities, particularly Black, indigenous, disabled, houseless, and citizens of color historically shoved into the margins of society. Instead of letting Fox News fill your head with nightmares about Hispanic gangs, ask the Hispanic community what they need to thrive. Instead of letting racist politicians scaremonger about pro-Black demonstrators, ask the Black community what they need to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. If you truly desire safety, ask not what your most vulnerable can do for the community, ask what the community can do for the most vulnerable.

A WORLD WITH FEWER BASTARDS IS POSSIBLE

If you take only one thing away from this essay, I hope it’s this: do not talk to cops.

But if you only take two things away, I hope the second one is that it’s possible to imagine a different world where unarmed black people, indigenous people, poor people, disabled people, and people of color are not routinely gunned down by unaccountable police officers. It doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, this requires a leap of faith into community models that might feel unfamiliar, but I ask you: When you see a man dying in the street begging for breath, don’t you want to leap away from that world? When you see a mother or a daughter shot to death sleeping in their beds, don’t you want to leap away from that world? When you see a twelve year old boy executed in a public park for the crime of playing with a toy, Jesus fucking Christ, can you really just stand there and think “This is normal”?

And to any cops who made it this far down, is this really the world you want to live in? Aren’t you tired of the trauma? Aren’t you tired of the soul sickness inherent to the badge? Aren’t you tired of looking the other way when your partners break the law? Are you really willing to kill the next George Floyd, the next Breonna Taylor, the next Tamir Rice? How confident are you that your next use of force will be something you’re proud of? I’m writing this for you too: it’s wrong what our training did to us, it’s wrong that they hardened our hearts to our communities, and it’s wrong to pretend this is normal.

Look, I wouldn’t have been able to hear any of this for much of my life. You reading this now may not be able to hear this yet either. But do me this one favor: just think about it. Just turn it over in your mind for a couple minutes. “Yes, And” me for a minute. Look around you and think about the kind of world you want to live in. Is it one where an all-powerful stranger with a gun keeps you and your neighbors in line with the fear of death, or can you picture a world where, as a community, we embrace our most vulnerable, meet their needs, heal their wounds, honor their dignity, and make them family instead of desperate outsiders?

If you take only three things away from this essay, I hope the third is this: you and your community don’t need bastards to thrive.


The author of this piece is a former California Police Officer.

The Rise of Coronavirus Surveillance

The Rise of Coronavirus Surveillance

Coronavirus is leading to expansions in surveillance around the world. This article discusses implications and what we can do to protect ourselves.


By Max Wilbert & Salonika

Fear is a powerful force. Fear is not just an emotion: it is a state of heightened physiological arousal. Fear lowers our immunity. Fear makes careful decision-making difficult.

Fear also makes us susceptible to suggestion, and this is exploitable.

In Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, the author (someone we have deep disagreements with, especially on the issue of “green” energy) writes that “in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure—whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or, as the Bush administration would later show, a terrorist attack.”

Or a virus.

The Coronavirus Crisis and The Corporate State

There are now roughly 3 million confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide, and likely millions more as yet untested. Of those confirmed infected, 200,000 have died. Deaths are disproportionate among Black, Latino, indigenous, and poor people who are more likely to have health issues as a result of capitalism, colonization, and white supremacy.

It is a grave situation, although it is as yet unclear exactly how deadly this virus is. This publication has previously covered the importance of considering underlying health issues, such as exposure to high levels of air pollution, which complicate “cause of death” considerations and implicate industrial pollution and industrial fast food. But predictably, governments are waging a “war on coronavirus,” not a war on pollution or on McDonalds.

Coronavirus, after all, doesn’t make any “campaign contributions” (that’s what we call bribes in the United States).

The Rise of Surveillance and the Chinese Model

Coronavirus originated in China, and so has China set the model for how the world responds to this situation.

Public surveillance is China is not a new phenomenon. The Chinese government employs a variety of tools to control it’s 1.4 billion people, including the world’s largest and most powerful internet censorship and control system (“The Great Firewall of China”), an AI-powered facial recognition platform linked to a network of hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras, laws requiring official IDs for mundane activities, extensive financial and communications monitoring, and a mandatory “Social Credit” system that assigns a score to each citizen based on their regular activities.

One city alone, Chongqing, was reported to have 2.58 million government surveillance cameras in operation last year—thirty times more cameras than Washington D.C.

This data is used to, among other things, assess the “political loyalty” of residents.

From China to the World

Coronavirus provides justification for expansion of these activities. In Wuhan and across the country, China is using CCTV cameras and drones to enforce quarantine. As the lockdown in Wuhan was lifted, the government mandated that residents install an app called “Health Code” on their phones to track possible exposures to coronavirus.

Governments around the world are taking advantage of the crisis to expand surveillance and police powers. In Hungary, for example, the government has passed an unlimited emergency declaration allowing the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, to rule by decree. Elsewhere, the expansions in state power have been less stark but no less concerning when it comes to civil liberties.

For example, twenty-three countries and counting have now adopted “contact tracing apps”—a nightmare for privacy and surveillance. Even the so-called “anonymized” contact tracing apps can be easily reconstructed, leaving detailed records of social relationships. In Hong Kong, authorities have mandated wristbands which alert police if a person has left their place of quarantine. In South Korea, data from credit card transactions, smartphone location tracking, and CCTV video surveillance is being used to generate a real-time map of possible vectors.

What is the Price of Safety?

The push for a stronger surveillance is often justified by as a means for saving lives. With people fearing for the lives of themselves and their loved ones, it is easier to find support for greater surveillance. The Tony Blair Institute, a neoliberal think tank in the UK, calls it a choice between three “undesirable outcomes:” an overwhelmed health system, economic shutdown, or increased surveillance.

But these are false dichotomies. Many health professionals advocate for protecting privacy and addressing the coronavirus using other approaches. With governments pushing for greater surveillance rather than establishing accessible healthcare systems and free testing and treatment, the public should be apprehensive. And opening the economy before the proper time is a fools gamble.

Community organizer Vince Emanuele reminds us, “For capitalists, economic recessions and depressions are the best of times. After all, they can buy up assets at bargain basement prices and further consolidate their power. Capitalists raked in record profits after the 2008 Financial Collapse, which turned out to be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of this country, expanding and deepening existing wealth inequalities. The only reason capitalists want to reopen the economy is to avoid giving Americans the sort of social democratic programs that would be necessary to keep the country closed and everyone safe. They’re not worried about saving capitalism — they’re worried about giving you money, healthcare, and canceling your student loan payments. If Americans get a taste of the good life, good luck getting them to go back to their shitty jobs that provide less than a living wage, no benefits, and no future. Capitalists are not worried about saving capitalism. They’re worried about poor and working class people experiencing what it would be like to live in a decent society.”

9/11 and the Power of Fear

Once governments and police agencies have developed a new surveillance technology, there is no evidence they will give it up. The same goes for laws. To judge by history, there is no such thing as “temporary” expansions in surveillance. The surveillance system adopted during times of crisis are more likely to define the new normal long after the crisis has been averted.

“Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life,” writes Yuval Noah Harari. “That is the nature of emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger. Entire countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments.”

The Patriot Act, for example, was originally designed to be temporary, and is still in effect 20 years later. Every time it comes up for renewal, it passes by a wide margin. Israel still has surveillance laws—originally planned to be temporary—dating from the 1940’s.

The September 11th, 2001 attacks on the United States created a culture of fear that led directly into submission to state authority. This in turn led to the “War on Terror,” and as a result, the world has been subjected to expansions in surveillance, detention, and torture, and to the outbreak of wars in the Middle East which have destabilized the planet and killed well over a million people.

One expert called the current situation “9/11 on steroids.”

As some would see it, lack of privacy is a price they are willing to pay for increased security. They should be reminded that “privacy” isn’t an abstract value, it is a fundamental principle of political liberty. Without privacy, dissent can become literally unthinkable.

There are countless reasons we cannot trust states to keep our personal information safe, and only use it in case of emergency. Historically, even “liberal democracies” have not been able to meet these standards. As Snowden leaks illustrated, to provide states access to our personal information and expect them to respect our privacy is analogous to giving our car keys to a known car thief and expecting him to only use it in case of an emergency.

How to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus Surveillance

So what is to be done?

We advocate for revolutionary change to the economic and political system of the world. This requires the development of political consciousness, leadership, and organizations—work that we are engaged in right now. We welcome you to join us.

While we build revolutionary power, we must protect ourselves from existing state surveillance programs. Say no to #CoronavirusSurveillance. We can keep our communities safe without ceding all privacy to the state and corporate partnerships. We must demand privacy. This level of surveillance is absolutely unacceptable, and we must push back as hard as possible. Here are some basic actions you can take:

  1. Pressure your government to preserve privacy. Call, write letters, and meet with representatives. Support organizations fighting for civil liberties.
  2. Campaign against installation of surveillance cameras and other intrusive technologies.
  3. Refuse to install privacy-degrading applications, including official tracing apps as well as corporate applications like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, etc.
  4. Use a “faraday bag” to store your cell phone when not in use to prevent contact tracing.
  5. Turn off GPS and Bluetooth whenever you are not using them.
  6. Protect your digital information by using privacy-respecting services like Signal, Session, Protonmail, and Tutanota for email and communication. Use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Use Firefox instead of Google Chrome, and use add-ons like uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
  7. Consider using a VPN or Tor to protect your internet connection.

Salonika is an organizer at DGR South Asia based in Nepal. She believes that the needs of the natural world should trump the needs of the industrial civilization.

Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance. Max is the author of two books: the forthcoming Bright Green Lies, and We Choose to Speak, a collection of essays released in 2018.

Police Brutally Dismantle Indigenous Anti-Mining Roadblock In Philippines (Eyewitness Video)

Police Brutally Dismantle Indigenous Anti-Mining Roadblock In Philippines (Eyewitness Video)

The indigenous community of Didipio on the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines has been resisting foreign gold mining for decades. The gold mine, owned by Oceana Gold Philippines, Inc. (OGPI), has destroyed massive areas of jungle, poisoned the land and water, and displaced  hundreds of villagers.

Two resistance figures were shot and killed by anonymous gunmen in 2012, but resistance has continued.

In June 2019, a key mining permit expired. The local community has been fighting this whole time and sensed an opportunity, so they erected a roadblock to stop OGPI from accessing the mine. Last month, the company tried repeatedly to access the site but were rebuffed by non-violent protests.

On April 6th, 2020, Philippine police forces violently dismantled the roadblock, as this video shows. One leader, anti-mining advocate Roland Pulido, chairman of Didipio Earth Savers’ Movement Association (Desama), was arrested and others were beaten.

Background of the Struggle

via Environmental Justice Atlas

The Oceana Gold and Copper mine, located in Barangay Didipio, Nueva Vizcaya, was the first mining project awarded a Financial Technical Assistance Agreement (FTAA) by the Philippine government, allowing the company to operate large-scale mining explorations, 100% owned by foreign investor OceanaGold Corporation.

The mine is located in an area in which the majority of people are indigenous. It has become a much contested site due to large complaints over human rights violations as well as environmental destruction.  The company has been alleged to have obtained a Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) of affected communities by creating a ‘council of elders’ comprised by people that either did not belong to the affected communities, or received rewards in exchange for their consent.

Awarded with the FTAA in the 1990s, the company started project [in the year] 2000. Formal petitions against the FTAA were lodged in 2006 but dismissed. On October 2, 2009, it was reported that the company forcefully evicted local villagers without prior consent, bulldozed and burned 187 houses, assisted by private security forces, using teargas and violence against villagers and neighbors who resisted leaving.

In relation to the tension surrounding the mine, Kalikasan reported that in December 2012, two opponents of large-scale mining; both members of the Didipio Earthsavers’ Multipurpose Association (DESAMA), were killed by unidentified assailants in Didipio, Nueva Vizcaya. Cheryl Ananayo, was shot dead along with her cousin-in-law Randy Nabayay as they were riding to Didipio at 6:00PM on December 7, 2012.

DESAMA is a people’s organization opposed to the ongoing implementation of the 17,626-hectare Didipio gold-copper project owned by Australian large-scale miner OceanaGold Corporation. Nabayay was a small-scale miner who had differences with OceanaGold over his property. Ananayo was with her 4 year-old child and carrying her 3 month-old baby, both unharmed.

The Commission for Human Rights (CHR) of the Philippines urged the government to withdraw the FTAA due to large evidences of rights abuses. However, the government apparently sided with the company, which claimed to do “ethical, responsible, and sustainable mining.”

Construction was completed in 2012 and commercial production started on April 1, 2013. Since production started, increasing contamination of rivers by heavy metals has been recorded, significantly exceeding the standard safety limits, thus, strongly affecting the environment and the livelihood of local communities. People living next to the river, as well as downstream, are concerned about declining fish stock and irrigation of nearby agricultural fields. Increasing noise and air pollution adds to the situation, while the company was further accused of avoiding tax payments.

Nowadays, petitions and protests against the Didipio mine, targeting the company and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) issuing the permits, go on. On the national level, the OceanaGold mine is one of many mines, causing severe tensions between corporate interests in search of new commodity frontiers and indigenous communities, aiming to preserve their identities, opposing these trends which they call “development aggression.”


The Philippines is a dangerous place for indigenous land defenders and environmentalists. Thirty were murdered in 2018 alone (number aren’t yet available for 2019).

The following is  a statement made on the Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM) Facebook Page. ATM is an alliance of mining-affected communities and their support groups of NGOs/POs and other civil society organizations who are opposing the aggressive promotion of large-scale mining in the Philippines.


Press Release: Condemnation of violent dispersal of peoples’ barricade in Nueva Vizcaya

April 6, 2020, Quezon City – Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM) strongly condemns the violent dispersal by the police against indigenous community leaders in Brgy. Didipio, Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya, late afternoon today.More than 100 personnel of the Philippine National Police from the regional and Quirino provincial units escorted a diesel tanker and forcibly entered the premises of the Didipio mine of Oceana Gold Philippines, Inc. (OGPI).

Violence erupted when local residents resisted the entry and stood their ground to prevent the entry of the diesel tanker. A barricade has been set-up by local groups in July 2019, when the mining contract of OGPI expired. Financial and Technical Assistance Agreement No. 1 (FTAA #1) expired last June 20, 2019, and has since been left pending at the Office of the President.

Reportedly, the mining company and its escort brandished a letter dated January 2020 from the Office of Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea endorsing the entry of fuel trucks inside the mining area.
This forced entry of the diesel tanker is illegal and against the people of Nueva Vizcaya. The mining contract has expired so there is no activity allowed inside the mine. The local governments have not given any permit for the mining company to operate. The area is part of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) order of Pres. Duterte, therefore no work activity is permitted.

This is a clear violation of the work-stoppage, the physical distancing and the quarantine procedures imposed by the ECQ in the whole Luzon island.More importantly, the barricade set-up by local organizations DESAMA, BILEG, AMKKAS and SAPAKKMI is a clear indication of the rejection of the people to the continued illegal operations of OGPI in Brgy. Didipio.

We call on the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to immediately conduct an investigation to this tragic and unnecessary confrontation. We demand that DENR urgently issue a cease-and-desist order to OGPI on their illegal operations in Didipio. We insist that the DILG conduct an investigation on the conduct and performance of PNP elements in Region 2, Quirino Province and the Municipality of Kasibu, but specifically violations of the quarantine rules by the OGPI itself.

The use of violence by the police today is a reflection of the blind and draconian measures that this government is willing to use to pursue the greedy interests of the mining industry. The local leaders sustained injuries when the police used unnecessary force in dismantling the barricade. Our alliance strongly denounces this ferocious and aggressive behavior of the PNP against a non-violent and legitimate protest action of Didipio residents.

We note with anger similar instances in the past few weeks of illegal mining activities in the town MacArthur (Leyte), the island of Homonhon in Guiuan, Eastern Samar and clandestine drilling operations in Tampakan, South Cotabato.

We support the continued resistance of the people of Kasibu against the mining operations of OGPI in Didipio. The recent quarantine procedures have harshly impacted the people there when they lost income and livelihoods. Their access to food and health supplies were severely constrained. This violent dispersal has only added more misery to their fragile lives.

For details:

  • Jaybee Garganera, ATM National Coordinator – (+63) 9175498218 / nc@alyansatigilmina.net
  • Emer Perocho, ATM Campaign Officer – (+63) 9567591524 / atmsosluzon@alyansatigilmina.net

#StopMiningInDidipio

In The Event of My Demise

In The Event of My Demise

By Max Wilbert

Anthropologist Stanley Diamond once wrote that “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” Empires and the elites that control them have, as Diamond notes, been repressing their opposition for thousands of years. At this point, they have turned suppression and violence into an art form. From blacklisting to blackmail, from false lawsuits to frame-ups, from jail to torture and murder, their methods are sometimes subtle, sometimes direct, but almost always effective.

In his book on U.S. government repression of communist, black power, feminist, and indigenous movements during the 1960’s and 70’s, Nelson Blackstock writes that “The total picture [revealed by declassified COINTELPRO documents] is of cool, calculating technicians, not crazed paranoids, going about the business of secretly combating people who are challenging the rule of the rich.” He concludes: “That’s the FBI’s job.”

History is littered with the corpses of those who spoke truth to power, organized, and fought back, and who proved themselves too dangerous to be allowed to live. But as Steinbeck reminded us, there is a “little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.” The struggle for justice is bigger than can be covered up by one corpse, or a thousand, or a million.

When Che Guevara was on the firing line in Bolivia, his last words were: “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.” Fred Hampton, murdered by the police as he lay drugged in his bed at age 21, once said “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” And the Burkinabé revolutionary Thomas Sankara, on the eve of his betrayal and murder, said “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can’t kill an idea.”

We are surrounded by ghosts. The ghosts of ancient forests, long ago cut down. The ghosts of verdant meadows plowed for fields and cities. The ghosts of bison, slain for their skins turned to leather belts and sent east to drive gears in factories. The ghosts of indigenous people. The ghosts of extinct species. And the ghosts of those who have fought back.

Those in power—the overlords of our neo-colonial world order—use violence because it is dreadfully effective. Their drone strikes are effective. Their special operations raids are effective. Their hundreds of billions of dollars spent on weapons of war are well spent. That is why they do it.

Thomas Friedman, that prototypical liberal justifier of imperialism once wrote in a rare moment of clarity, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglass [an arms manufacturer that has now merged with Boeing]. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.” He is right. Violence maintains modern industrial society.

Revolutionaries generally do not live long lives. Perhaps this is melodramatic to say. But then again, I have received death threats, and expect to receive more. The threats do not scare me. At least not yet. They will not silence me—but a bullet would. And that is well known to those behind the “hidden fist” of the market.

The real danger to revolutionaries is not simply repressive violence itself, but maybe even more so the fear that it creates.

In 1990, members of the Mohawk Nation began a protest camp among a pine forest at Kanesatake, west of Montreal, to oppose a “development” project that would have destroyed the forest. They began carrying weapons after racist vigilantes targeted them, and a standoff  began when police were sent to evict them. After a firefight in which one policeman was killed, the Canadian military was called in, beginning a 78-day armed confrontation between 3700 professional soldiers and a small contingent of Mohawk warriors and families.

One Mohawk warrior explained the effect that their total commitment to land, nation, and mission had on the Canadian soldiers they faced. “They aren’t scared of us because we’re willing to take up arms,” he said, speaking to a journalist. “They’re scared of us because we’re willing to die.”

Courage is not the lack of fear, but the ability to continue despite fear. When we master our fears in this way, we have taken a vital first step towards defeating the repression. For every act of repression, our acts of defiance must be more fierce, more lasting, more total.

Violence is all around us. It is written on the tags of our clothing reading “Bangladesh” and “Vietnam.” It is engraved by child slaves and captured by “suicide nets” on the circuit boards of our cell phones and televisions. It is bone-deep in the stolen indigenous land we walk upon. It gushes forth into our gas tanks alongside ghosts of Ogoni and Falluja stillbirths.

Someday, that violence will catch up with all of us. The end may come fast or slow. A 9mm police bullet. The machete of an illegal logger. The slow death in a hospital bed. We are immersed in the violence every day, our lungs the shellfish of the atmospheric ocean, filtering out every carcinogen and toxin they can grasp and sequestering them deep in our soft bodies.

The question that faces each of us is “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Like Mary Oliver, I’ve spent my fair share of hours reclining in meadows, watching grasshoppers crawl up long stems of grass—and I plan to continue this pastime until I die. Living life, experiencing ecstasy and grief and the full range of human feelings, is our birthright as living beings. But an ethical life today requires more.

When I die, I do not intend to have lived for nothing. As Lierre Keith has written, life is a combat discipline. Every day on this planet could be my last, and in the event of my demise, there will be more work to be done. I hope those who survive will bury my body in a beautiful place, mourn, laugh and tell stories of me, and remember that I lived for a belief and died for a principle. Then, I hope they will straighten up, take a deep breath, and get back to work.


Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. His essays have been published in Earth Island Journal, Counterpunch, and elsewhere. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018.

Featured image by Max Wilbert

What Does The UK Election Mean?

What Does The UK Election Mean?

by Ben Warner

The result of last week’s election was both unsurprising and, oddly helpful. It demonstrated what many of us already know; that most of the electorate are ill-informed, and incapable of making even a basic, reasonable decision. We know that the media is corporately controlled and designed to protect corporate interests. We know that this culture’s downward spiral is accelerating and that it will not voluntarily transform itself into the promised “better society”.

It was perhaps the starkest choice the British electorate has ever had to face. On the one hand a racist, sexist, upper class, proven liar at the head of a political party that offered very little (in reality) for the people. On the other, an imperfect but, seemingly,  honest man with a history of integrity, who has fought for disadvantaged people for decades. A man at the head of a party whose policies might at least have helped those less well off in the UK, people who really needed immediate relief from austerity. I normally spoil my ballot paper because I want radical not incremental change . This year I voted.

I knew that my vote would not be enough. Corbyn’s policies, at least less destructive than the Sociopath’s, did not go nearly far enough in terms of halting the destruction of the earth. I knew that even if Corbyn won we would still have to resist. I voted because it was a choice between a vile self-centred man who craves power and a decent human being whose aim is  to help the disadvantaged.

I was disappointed but not surprised when the country elected the Sociopath. This is a profoundly dishonest and sociopathic culture. Psychologist, J. Schumaker (2016) claims “Human culture has mutated into a sociopathic marketing machine dominated by economic priorities and psychological manipulation.”, so of course it would elect a dishonest sociopath to lead it. In actual fact, the more you learn, the more you realise the situation is far worse than that. Life on earth is facing extermination. Everyday 200 species disappear forever, climate change accelerates, this culture continues to poison our air, water and land. If life is to survive we need to create a vibrant diverse culture of resistance.

According to Umail Haque, Anglo-America is “entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return.”  The “only two rich societies in the world with falling life expectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain.” In fact the whole world is in a death spiral, or rather, industrial civilisation is killing life on earth. Every single ecosystem is in decline. You might think this is an exaggeration, in which case I invite you to investigate. It is a hard truth to face but we ALL NEED TO face it and ACT. We need to resist or we die.

In the The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) Elizabeth Kolbert and the scientists she interviews, identify three main causes of global extinction; climate change/ocean acidification, habitat loss and foreign species introduction. Pre-industrialised humanity did not cause climate change and ocean acidification. Habitat loss was not caused by indigenous people, it was caused by agriculture and the spread of civilisation. Foreign species introduction only became a global problem with the rise of globalisation. Industrial civilisation is not causing the 6th mass extinction, rather it is committing the first mass extermination of life on earth. It is not an extinction event. It is genocide.

Both Umail Haque and psychologist John F Schumaker have noticed that Who we are has never been more incompatible with who we need to be. What we have become is the greatest threat to ourselves and the planet.” This culture celebrates stupidity, rewards the selfish and reveres the rich. How else can explain that a Grimsby fish market worker would describe the Tory leader as “a normal working class guy”? Empathy as a social characteristic is, according to this study, in decline. We are all, to some extent, as Jack D. Forbes has shown, infected by the Wetiko virus, an indigenous reference to pathological selfishness.

Johnathan Cook claims that this election has helped to burn the illusion that we live in a functioning democracy. We do not. As Chris Hedges points out, the corporate coup d’etat took place decades ago. The media is owned by the elite and they would not permit a man who posed a threat to their ability to thrive, to be elected. Cook also points to part of the solution, stating we must take to the streets. We know this alone will not be enough.

We need to stop the idiocy, we need to increase people’s ability to think things through, we need to take this whole mess down. We need a resistance movement that knows what the root cause of the problem is; industrial civilisation. A movement schooled in the strategies and tactics that have led to unlikely victories in the past. We need support networks. Sabotage. Educated, underground, militant, direct action groups, who are willing to take any necessary action to stop the machinery of this cannibalistic system from poisoning the air, the soil and the sea. We need peaceful protests. We need boycotts. We need strikes and we need people to support the strikers. We need all truly effective actions. We needed it decades ago. We need it now before it is too late.

This election result should not dispirit us. It must galvanise us. I WILL SEE YOU. I will see you in the streets, in the trees, and at the gates of the elite. I will see you at night dismantling the machines of destruction. I will see you in the jungles in front of bulldozers or chasing colonizers from your land. See you at the rivers letting them run free. See you anywhere life is under threat. I see as all working together to turn the tide of this merciless destructive culture. And I see us all regenerating this wild beautiful bleeding world. I see us.


Ben Warner is a longtime organizer with Deep Green Resistance UK. He is a white, urban-raised, middle-class male, who recognises that cities, white supremacy, male supremacy, human supremacy, and capitalism need to be dismantled.

Featured image: original artwork provided by the author.

Activists fighting for their lands swept up in Philippines crackdown

Activists fighting for their lands swept up in Philippines crackdown

  • A security crackdown in the Philippines targeting an armed communist insurgency has swept up environmental and land defenders in a raid on Oct. 31.
  • International humanitarian and church groups have also been included in the military’s list of “legal front groups” of the outlawed New People’s Army and tied to terror financing.
  • Security forces rounded up a total of 63 activists: 57 on the island of Negros and six in Manila. They include leaders of peasant groups, farmers, and anti-reclamation activists.
  • At least six of the arrested critical groups are environmental and land defenders advocating for land campaigns on Negros and against the ongoing Manila Bay reclamation.

MANILA — Environment and land rights leaders were among the activists rounded up in a new wave of arrests in the Philippines as part of the government’s extensive counter-insurgency campaign to flush out sympathizers of the outlawed New People’s Army (NPA) while international humanitarian groups, alongside local church groups, were accused of being “legal communist fronts” and aiding terrorism.

A total of 57 activists were arrested on Oct. 31 in Negros, an island 850 kilometers (530 miles) from Manila, while another six were arrested in Manila on Nov. 5. Among the arrested are farmers and peasant group leaders fighting for their land rights in Negros Island and activists opposing the ongoing Manila Bay reclamation project. They were arrested in security crackdowns on major left-leaning organizations, with search warrants issued by a court in Metro Manila on Oct. 30.

Environmental groups have denounced the arrests, which they say involved “planting evidence” in the form of explosives and guns in the homes of activists. Kalikasan PNE, an environmental NGO, says the tactic is similar to President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, known locally as Tokhang, which has left nearly 6,000 people dead since 2016.

“We condemn this recent surge of Tokhang-style raids and arrests against land and environmental defenders and other activists by the police and military forces,” Clemente Bautista, international network coordinator of Kalikasan PNE, said in a statement. He added that the strategy “fits a national and global trend of criminalization of land rights and environmental activism not only in the Philippines but globally,” echoing the findings of the recent “Enemies of the State?” report by the environmental watchdog Global Witness.

“[M]any governments are manipulating their legal systems and intimidating defenders with aggressive criminal and civil cases, often to further the interests of big business,” the report says. “This often goes hand-in-hand with incendiary rhetoric that brands defenders as ‘terrorists’ or criminals in other guises, making attacks on them more likely and seemingly legitimate.”

International humanitarian organizations and church groups have also been branded by the Philippine military as “legal fronts” for the NPA, according to a list shown to lawmakers in a briefing on Nov. 6. The military identified 18 organizations — including Oxfam Philippines; the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP), a fellowship of Protestant and non-Catholic churches; and the Farmers Development Center (Fardec), a nonprofit — as “front organizations of local communist terrorist groups (CTG).”

In another list, Oxfam International and Oxfam UK were labeled as “foreign funding agencies wittingly or unwittingly providing funds to CTG front organizations.”

“Oxfam categorically denies these accusations,” the organization said in a statement, adding that the new development is a “troubling situation” that places “communities and partners we work with at risk.”

“In a country where poverty remains, and poor communities are continually struck by disasters, we strongly believe that organizations like ours should be encouraged, rather than hindered, from undertaking our programs,” Oxfam Philippines said.

The Department of National Defense and the military have since clarified that the list is “unverified” and that the organizations listed are “not red-tagged” — that is, not affiliated with the banned Communist Party and its armed wing, the NPA. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said the list was based on “documents captured from all operations in the country,” news outlet Rappler reported.

In April, the country’s police warned students about getting involved in potential communist groups outside schools, and the rhetoric heightened in August when the government accused some NGOs and state schools of being hotbeds of subversion. This is the first time, however, that international development organizations and church groups have landed on such a list.

Groups were on high alert as early as September after reports of possible raids circulated among them. Kalikasan PNE filed complaints with the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), and the group and its partners, Global Witness and the World Resources Institute (WRI), have also engaged in a series of public forums and dialogues with representatives of the U.S. State Department and U.S. Congress on Oct. 26 over the incidents.

Sixty-four local lawmakers, three belonging to the affected party-list groups, have also demanded an end to the government’s crackdown on activists, party-list groups Bayan Muna, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), and Gabriela Women’s Party. Both Bayan Muna and Gabriela are left-leaning organizations that currently hold congressional seats in the Philippines’ party-list system, in which underrepresented or single-issue parties receive a quota of congressional seats.

In Negros: Land rights leaders, party-list members arrested

The wave of arrests, however, is not new in Negros, where President Duterte dispatched seven military units and an additional 300 police personnel in August to quell a state of “lawlessness” that saw a spate of killings with 15 people gunned down in July alone.

Fifty-seven people were arrested as suspected members of the communist insurgency, while the military raided the offices of groups including the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW). Among those arrested were Danny Tabura of the KMU’s Negros chapter and John Milton Lozande, an NFSW representative who conducts land cultivation campaigns in Negros. These campaigns, locally called bungkalan, are a source of tension as they involve farmers taking over contested farmlands that are covered by the agrarian reform law but have yet to be titled and distributed. Lozande was eventually released alongside 48 other activists, leaving eight others who are still detained.

Nine sugarcane farmers and environmental defenders, including four women and two children, were killed in one such dispute in Sagay, a city in Negros, on Oct. 20, 2018. They were among the 30 environmental and land defenders killed in the Philippines that year, according to Global Witness, which named the country the most dangerous in the world for defenders. Since the Sagay massacre, the island has seen two waves of counter-insurgency campaigns, which the government called Sauron I and Sauron II, that resulted in the arrests of peasant group leaders and the killings of local officials, farmers and social workers.

Small farmers and indigenous peoples account for 81 percent of murdered land and environmental defenders under the Duterte administration, said Leon Dulce of Kalikasan PNE. “This shows that the unabated killings of farmers is the single biggest blow to the country’s environmental protection efforts,” he added. “Protecting the lives and rights of farmers will allow them to continue their innate role of protecting watersheds and agricultural lands.”

In Manila: Anti-reclamation activists rounded up

Of the six activists arrested in Manila, four were opponents of the ongoing Manila Bay reclamation project, which will cover 2,627 hectares (6,491 acres) of coastal and foreshore areas in the capital’s biggest body of water. Among them was Cora Agovida, a spokeswoman for Gabriela, the women’s party, and a campaigner against land reclamation in the capital’s bay. The three other anti-land reclamation activists arrested were Ram Carlo Bautista, Alma Moran and Reina Mae Nasino, all members of the Manila chapter of the Bayan Muna party.

All four are part of Manila Baywatch, a watchdog coalition of environmental and human rights groups monitoring the Manila Bay inter-agency rehabilitation program that Duterte created on Feb. 19. The rehabilitation cost of the bay is estimated at 47 billion pesos ($924 million) and includes massive relocation projects for illegal settlers. The grassroots campaign seeks to “ensure that the rehab program addresses the threats of ecological destruction, flooding, and community displacement posed by reclamation projects.”

“The Duterte administration is cracking down on Manila-based activists who exposed its sham Manila Bay rehab program for paving the way for reclamation development,” Dulce said. “The Manila Police District must be investigated and held accountable for their attacks are clearly meant to pave the way for reclamation and other infrastructure projects at all costs, including costing people’s rights and lives.”

Manila Bay, home to the Port of Manila, one of Asia’s oldest harbors and the heart of the Philippines’ shipping, industrial and commercial activities, is the site of 19 reclamation projects that are under development. Six of these projects are in the “detailed engineering stage,” or close to being implemented, according to data from the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA).

These reclamation projects include the 148-hectare Manila Solar City project and the contested Manila-Cavite Coastal Road and Reclamation Project (MCCRRP), which will encroach on Las Piñas-Parañaque Critical Habitat and Ecotourism Area (LPPCHEA), a Ramsar site that’s a key stopping point for migratory birds.


Banner image of the arrested activists in Manila who oppose the Manila Bay reclamation program. Image courtesy of Defend Negros Movement