Girard Mariano Lopezby Girard Mariano Lopez
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Photo Credit: Girard Mariano Lopez
“Have you heard the news? RJ is dead.”
IMMEDIATELY, MY MUNDANE afternoon riding the Taipei MRT had come to a screeching halt with that one message. I sent out DMs to people from all over my hometown, hoping the news was false. However, it would turn out that I had been the one unintentionally spreading the dreaded news update, which was confirmed publicly days later—the Philippine military had indeed killed my dear journalist colleague and friend, RJ Ledesma, in cold blood.
Just days beforehand, news already broke out online on April 19th that an encounter had happened in Toboso, a town dozens of kilometers away from my own hometown of Bacolod in Negros Island, between the Philippine military and the New People’s Army. The New People’s Army is a communist guerrilla group that first waged a protracted “people’s war” against the Philippine government more than 50 years ago during the martial law reign of Marcos Sr., pledging to overturn what they call the unjust semi-feudal, semi-colonial, and bureaucrat capitalist system that has plagued the nation since its supposed independence in post World War II.
Photo credit: RJ Ledesma/Facebook
Nineteen people were killed in a massacre by the Philippine military after an alleged “encounter” began at four in the morning and did not end until three in the afternoon. The fighting reportedly ended at a fish pond where the bodies of RJ and a few other civilians were found—all of whom had bandoliers and guns planted on them right after (in an awkward position, by the way) to justify that they had all been combatants and therefore rightfully gunned down.
The Communist Party of the Philippines itself disclosed that only ten of the nineteen were legitimate fighters, but the rest had been civilians. An outpour of rage and condemnation spread like wildfire nationwide and around the world as more than a hundred civil society groups of all sectors called for accountability and an independent investigation.
Most people like myself had thought that it was the ‘usual’ encounter between the two armed factions. While ‘usual’ may seem a crude way to describe an armed conflict, the island where I come from, Negros, has been a hotspot for such encounters long before I was born. Yet, what we call ‘usual’ is in fact unusual for most ‘civil’ places: civilian casualties, dehumanizing propaganda, another statistic to tally, and a vicious cycle of violence foreign to most in the ‘first-world’. However, for us who call the island home, it is only a matter of time before the luck that you roll runs out, and someone—a relative, friend, acquaintance–becomes a victim of that violence. It is perhaps this anxiety that prevented me from investigating further just who was killed in that encounter in Toboso days prior.
Photo credit: Kalinaw News/Facebook
Despite its prestigious-sounding title of “Sugar Bowl of the Philippines’ due to it being home to 60% of the country’s sugar industry, the vast majority of the people that call it home are in fact living below the poverty line, perennially stuck between meager wages or having their lands grabbed by megaplantations or developers. Thus, it is no wonder that some choose to join the armed rebellion as a last resort to get what little justice or retribution they can from a system designed to keep them perpetually at the whims of the ruling elite. In Negros, there is no distinction between the “landlord” or the “politician”—both are cut from the same cloth, most often sharing the same surname, and play a silly roulette of whose turn in the family it is to rule their little fiefdoms.
This enduring injustice is precisely what RJ Nichole Ledesma sought out to cover and expose, despite the prestige of his last name that could have opened much more comfortable doors for him elsewhere. A renowned campus journalist during his university days, RJ had his whole life ahead of him, not only as a news reporter but also as a poet and literary artist, whose works inspired many around him. Both RJ and I come from Paghimutad, an alternative media outlet in the island covering the issues of human rights violations, land grabbing, environmental destruction, and many more “people’s issues” pertinent to the grassroots movement, often reporting what mainstream media could not or refuse to cover, either due to pressure from stakeholders or the military. In fact, at the time, he was investigating an issue of land-grabbing, where a solar power company is allegedly kicking people off their lands to “make way for renewable energy.” When I moved to Manila during the pandemic, he took over as the managing editor of the outlet, and subsequently, all alternative media reporting in Negros Island, all on the back of one seemingly soft-mannered but passionate and determined journalist and community activist.
It is also this grit, determination, and passion that prompted the others who were killed— Education and Research councilor of the University of the Philippines Diliman University Student Council Alyssa Alano, peasant advocates Maureen Keil Santuyo and Errol Wendel, as well as Filipino-American human rights advocates Lyle Prijoles and Kai Sorem—to visit Negros Island and see for themselves the injustice and intense militarization that people in the island live under, a militarization that intensified not too long ago under the Duterte administration through a memorandum order that deemed the island infested with “lawless violence” that needed to be suppressed. Yet, the “lawless violence”, the blood that falls on the rich soil of Negros is often not spilled by the very group the government aims to label as “terrorists”, but by the very people that swore to “serve and protect” their fellow countrymen, whose salary Filipinos pay through their taxes.
For any US citizens reading this article, this is also a massacre that has been paid by your tax dollars. The very arms produced and sold to the Philippines by the United States are the same arms used against helpless masses, and the same arms that only serve to benefit private companies and big landlords who control the vast wealth of the country. The war games that both countries play on the people’s sovereign soil only serve to uphold the unequal and bloody status quo, all while the rival superpower, China, is left to continue invading other parts of our territory with little to no consequence. It may be true that Taiwan is left to be reliant on the US superpower for protection, but for every ounce of protection it gets from it, hundreds of thousands more are killed by the very same war machinery.
Fact-finding mission in Negros Island in October 2025. Photo credit: Lynlyn Casenio/Facebook
No one in that MRT I rode with, nor my workplace, would have understood the intense grief that drowned me and looms over my head up until this very day. Here, in Taiwan, I feel the immense survivor’s guilt of living in a society where such violence is so unheard and alien that a literal alien sighting would perhaps be more fathomable to most Taiwanese than had I narrated this series of events. Yet, it is important, because it is in fact unavoidable that in the unlikely scenario that China invades Taiwan, the Philippines will inevitably be involved as part of the US “First-Island” Chain strategy, a strategy that plays at the demise of the Philippines’ poorest, landless, and most vulnerable.
In mourning for the Negros 19, I call upon Taiwanese society to reflect on how it benefits amid the violence that plagues not only the Philippines, but Southeast Asia–be it in Negros Island, West Papua, the indigenous shores of the Bajau Laut, or the military coup of Myanmar. The very push factors of inequality, unemployment, meager wages, and state violence that force people to migrate are the ones that power the migrant labor, and in turn, the economy of Taiwan. Yet, at the same time, right-wing narratives claiming to be “champions of Taiwanese sovereignty” are exploiting xenophobic tendencies of the populace and denouncing such migrant laborers when they demand better and fairer treatment. Crucially, they seemingly do not exactly call for their eradication, but rather indirectly advocate for their treatment to be merely second-class people—the very same people that undergo extreme strife at home are yet told by the country whose economy they power that once again, they do not matter.
The brutal violence of Negros 19 and the xenophobic violence that migrant workers here face may not be of the same cloth, but do come from the same notion that some people inherently deserve less in rights and in life compared to others. In the spirit of calling for justice for Negros 19, it is imperative that the masses of the Philippines, Taiwan, and nations all over the world come together to foster true “people-to-people” solidarity, where one’s sovereignty, rights, or life do not come at the expense of another.