Colonial legacies of agrarian violence, and persistent struggles to end it

Assassinations, massacres, genocides and other forms of brutal violence against people and nature are deployed to suppress dissent and silence critical voices. Violence is inherent in global capitalism, a system of endless profit-making by exploitation, oppression and ecological plunder on the basis of the intersection of class and interlocking axis of social differences: race, ethnicity, caste, genders, generation, nationality and religion. Violence meant to instill terror in order for people to accept and forget. This normalizes, naturalizes and reproduces the violent system.

Therefore, remembering is a profound act of defiance, or resistance, of not being party to the process of naturalizing exploitation, oppression and ecological plunder. Remembering the fallen comrades means not forgetting the broader struggles for which their lives were brutally and abruptly cut short by the social groups whose power was threatened.

The year 2026 is politically significant in terms of historical landmarks in the global agrarian front.

It is the 30th anniversary of the Eldorado de Carajas massacre where 19 members of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) were shot dead by the military and many more wounded on 17 April 1996 in Brazil. They were part of the 3,000 MST members who occupied a property in the context of implementing land reform. 

Ten years after, on 24 April 2006 Eric Cabanit, the Secretary General of the national peasant movement in the Philippines, UNORKA, was assassinated in Davao del Norte in a manner that was brutal and very public, that no doubt was aimed to sow terror among peasants and farmworkers in the agribusiness plantation belt. During that period, UNORKA was the most politically significant left national peasant movement that mobilized peasants to claim land within the context of the government land reform program. Eric was a farmworker in one of the biggest banana plantations in Mindanao whose owner is one of the most powerful landlords in the country, and is connected to leading transnational banana brands, especially Chiquita. 

Ten years after Eric was assassinated, on 3 March 2016, the Honduran indigenous leader and land and environmental justice activist, Berta Caceres, was assassinated. She was a co-founder and leader of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). She was the recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015. Among the many issues that she was directly involved was the anti-dam campaign for which she was assassinated.

It was also around ten years ago, when the genocidal violence against Rohingyas in Myanmar got started. The Myanmar government and its military never recognize Rohingyas as citizens of Myanmar, and the brutal expulsion led to the displacement of about a million people, most of them are now scattered outside Myanmar – in refugee camps in Bangladesh, or as vulnerable migrant farmworkers in plantations in Southeast Asia.

Thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth year commemorations of land-related violence: massacre, assassinations, genocidal campaign. But these are not isolated cases, and the history in between them is littered with many more. We have Palestine, among many other societies. These types of violence are inherent elements in global capitalism, and are enduring legacies of the violence of colonialism and imperialism.

Globally and in the history of capitalism, the idea of endless and limitless economic growth has been pursued through state-capital alliance. On many occasions, the state has the sole authority to allow for the extraction of raw materials, often from nature, free of charge or at minimal cost, organize a labour regime, and open up markets for commodities. It entails constant land frontier-making. Capitalist states deploy their coercive apparatus – military, paramilitary, police, judiciary, jails – to facilitate capitalist profit-making, expand and secure territories, engage in extractivism, grab lands, and suppress dissent by peasants, workers and Indigenous Peoples. 

When the Spanish colonial power took hold of the Philippines, it opened the entire country as a land frontier, including Mindanao island in southern Philippines. The war between the US imperialist power and the weakened Spanish colonial forces led to the Treaty of Paris of 1898, through where many of the colonies of Spain, including Cuba and Puerto Rico, were officially ceded to the United States. The Philippines was included in the Treaty, and was sold by Spain to the US for 20 million dollars – at a time when Filipino revolutionaries had already effectively weakened, almost defeated, the Spanish military forces. Part of the terms of the Treaty of Paris was to protect the property claims by Spaniards in the Philippines. The US imperialist power coopted the domestic landed and capitalist classes, and expanded the land frontier in Mindanao partly through its notion of homestead for corporations: 1,024 hectares each homestead. Banana, pineapple, sugarcane, and rubber plantations were opened up, and such property partitions would remain intact when the1988 land reform was passed into law. There was a short interlude of Japanese imperial army’s control of some of Mindanao plantations during World War II. After the war, domestic landed and capitalist classes in collaboration with transnational companies consolidated the colonial and neocolonial legacies of land monopoly shaped and reshaped by Spanish colonialism and American and Japanese imperialist occupations. Violence against peasants, farmworkers and Indigenous Peoples was central in protecting this colonial and neocolonial property system.

Overt violence against peasants has been committed not only by agents of big capital outside the state, but by the state as well. Land activists and environmental justice activists many pf whom are rural-oriented have often been the victims of overt violence. Violence is used to protect the interest of the landed and capitalist classes, as in the context of the Eldorado de Carajas massacre in 1996 in Brazil, and the assassinations of Eric Cabanit in the Philippines in 2006 and Berta Caceres in Honduras in 2016, or to violently expel particular social groups en masse in order to take over their territory, as in the case of the Rohingyas. On many occasions, the deployment of overt brutal violence is to create a terror effect on social groups in a society to cause silence, demobilization – and forgetting. 

In the Philippines, the people’s power uprising that overthrew the Marcos military dictatorship in 1986 led to a political conjuncture immediately after for popular demands for deep social reforms to become widespread and intense. This led to a huge peasant protest march on 22 January 1987 under the banner of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP, Philippine Peasant Movement) to Mendiola Bridge, just a few hundred meters away from the main gate of the presidential palace in Manila. They were demanding land reform. But Mendiola Bridge was barricaded by police and military that open fired at the 20,000-strong peasant march, killing 13 and wounding about 100 more. It became known as the Mendiola Massacre. Later, it helped generate public sentiment in favour of deep reforms in the countryside that would be incorporated in a new Constitution that was framed later in 1987, with some progressive provisions, including a social justice-oriented land reform, with a low 5 hectare-land size ceiling regardless of the productivity level of landed property. A year after, a new land reform law was passed by the Philippine Congress.

The land reform law is a progressive one in relative sense, but not without some concessions to the landed classes. One of the concessions was the 10-year deferment of land redistribution for agribusiness plantations (mainly banana, pineapple) in Mindanao beginning in 1988. By mid-1990s, farmworkers were restive and were starting to organize to claim lands by 1998. But forces of big capital, including transnational companies associated with major brands like Chiquita and Dole, were also calculating and mobilizing. They wanted to control the terms of the land reform implementation in their favour. The Philippine subsidiary of the international banana brand Dole, Stanfilco, was among those that wanted to take control of land reform by taking land away from traditional landlords, supporting its transfer to farmworkers to be organized into cooperatives. Stanfilco’s agenda was to manipulate and control the process by locking land reform beneficiaries in a 30-year contract of selling bananas to them and at extremely low prices. They were close to succeeding in their scheme by conniving with the leaders of the farmworkers’ union. But this was exposed and reversed by an insurgent and subversive group of farmworkers who demanded fairer terms of the venture, they barricaded and occupied the land. The company brought in the police and military, but the workers were defiant. Ultimately, this case led to the successful redistribution of this particular plantation that Stanfilco wanted to control, and this successful case would immediately set the agenda and parameters of struggles in the plantation belt in subsequent years. It was revolutionary in many ways. In the contemporary history of farmworkers’ struggles in the agribusiness plantation belt in Mindanao, it is popularly referred to as the ‘unang putok’ – the ‘first spark’. 

The struggle for land in the plantation belt in Mindanao resulted in highly differentiated outcomes. Some led to land redistribution where farmworkers gained control over their land. In many of these cases, the land reform beneficiaries we interviewed in 2026 proudly narrated about the positive impact of gaining land control on their lives and livelihoods: napagtapos namin sa kolehiyo ang mga anak namin, kumpara nuong panahon namin na karamihan ay high school lang ang natapos (‘we managed to send our children to college, compared to our generation when most of us managed to finish high school only’). But other big plantations whose owners are more politically well-connected, like the Floirendos and the Lorenzos, have remained intact. One of the favored mechanisms to evade land reform was the voluntary land transfer (VLT) that is inspired by and akin to the World Bank’s peddled idea of market-assisted land reform: the land is ‘given’ to farmworkers directly by the landlords on the condition that it is automatically leased-back to the ‘previous’ landowner for 30 years, renewable for another 30 years with land lease fee per hectare per year far from sufficient to provide income to land reform beneficiaries.

Eric Cabanit was a farmworker in one of the banana plantations of the Floirendos. He started to organize fellow farmworkers in his plantation, and throughout Mindanao resisting schemes by landlords to avoid actual land redistribution. Later, he became a national leader of UNORKA. He led the call for a truly redistributive justice-oriented interpretation of the land reform law. For his militant political work, he was assassinated, quite brutally, in front of his daughter and many other witnesses in the public market of Panabo at a time when many people were buying food on the way home from work, on 24 April 2006 in Davao del Norte. The gunmen were never caught, and nor were the masterminds, and in fact the case was never even investigated by the local police. Such was the impunity with which Davao’s landlords-cum-politicians and their henchmen operated.

Worldwide, it is quite often that the demand for land redistribution, recognition and restitution by peasants, farmworkers, and Indigenous Peoples are met with violent retribution from powerful landlords using their own private armies and the state’s coercive apparatus, especially the police, military judiciary and jail. Violence is often done with impunity, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is still deliberating about the Rohingya genocide case. The struggles for land in Brazil, Honduras, the Philippines and Myanmar remain central in the struggle for social justice more broadly, despite some partial successes in Brazil and the Philippines that was largely due to persistent peasant movements’ mobilizations.

While overt violence is easy to see when it happens, the more pervasive form of violence under capitalism is the structural violence – the violence against working people and nature brought about through intersectional exploitation and oppression and ecological plunder. These are not easily recognizable especially when such forms of violence have been naturalized. Joblessness amid extreme wealth accumulation by a few billionaires, landlessness and land grabbing amid increasing land monopoly by a handful capitalists, precarity in the workplace especially by migrant farmworkers amid endless profit-making by food empires, poverty and hunger amid conspicuous consumption by the wealthy few. This form of violence is brutal and dehumanizing. It is structural, silent violence, as Michael Watts labelled it.

The agrarian structures of social relations that peasant movements have struggled to dismantle in many societies have, at best, been partially reformed only through land struggles from below during the past five decades under neoliberal capitalism. We have seen this only in very countries that carried out varying degrees of redistributive land policies, such as in Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, West Bengal and the Philippines. Yet even in these countries with positive cases, we see various forms of silent violence persist in the agrarian reform sector.

Going back to Eric’s geographic and sectoral home, that is, Mindanao agribusiness plantation belt, the agrarian structure there was only partially eroded by land reform. While a significant portion of farmworkers were able to free themselves from the landlord control, many others have not succeeded, or not yet. Silent violence continues to unfold in several ways.

Silent violence under the World Bank-style voluntary land transfer combined with manipulated joint venture agreements that favor mainly the landlords and capitalists. Not 

only that given the length of period that land control has been grabbed by the landlord was essentially a life-time, the wealth generated from the land is also extracted mainly by the big capitalists. Many of the land reform beneficiaries have either died, retired or were retrenched from work – and thereby have no more direct benefit from what is supposed to be their own land. On paper they are the owners of the land, in reality they are landless and jobless. 

At the moment, there has been no known significant autonomous organizing work by farmworkers in the Floirendo plantations. This is partly an indicator of the enduring terror effect the assassination of Eric has caused in this sector in Mindanao. In other plantations, including in some of those controlled by the Lorenzos, brute force and legal schemes were used to suppress dissent, although there have been cracks caused by the persistent defiance by sections of the land reform beneficiaries against the capitalist maneuver. Whether farmworkers and land reform beneficiaries will eventually be able to regain control of their land and benefit from it, will depend in part on the ability of land reform beneficiaries to regroup and reorganize, reclaim control over their vast lands, and explore appropriate production systems in which they have greater share and control in the commodity chain.

Moreover, it was around 2016 when another form of silent violence in the banana plantations in Mindanao hit, and it was brought about by the Panama Disease (fusarium wilt), a fungal disease that many political ecologists believe are inherent in capitalist industrial monoculture. Land reform beneficiaries who gained control over their lands in the late 1990s and early 2000s and started to improve their livelihoods were suddenly hit hard by this fungal disease. Unlike the big capitalists who have enough capital to rehabilitate the infected areas of the plantations, smallholder land reform beneficiaries generally do not have the money to invest in the rehabilitation. Their livelihoods were ruined. Many have rented out their lands to those who can afford to rehabilitate them to continue producing cavendish banana or those who can invest in exploring new crops such as maize and cacao. Some have simply abandoned production and let their lands lie idle.

The source of hope amid such silent violence brought about by the fusarium wilt was the creative exploration of many land reform smallholders to explore alternative crops and production systems. One emerging alternative is the cultivation of a native variety of banana (cardava/saba), and producing them in diversified multi- and inter-cropping ways (with cacao, maize, etc,), largely discarding the massive pesticide use so common in cavendish banana production. While the scale of this shift remains limited, it could very well be that the Panama disease might have accidentally led to a possible start of an eventual erosion of the capitalist industrial monoculture and the silent violence it perpetuates against people and nature, and the opening of the exploratory path towards alternative production systems that is beneficial not only to the land reform smallholders but also to the environment. The evidence is too little, and it is too soon to conclude – but it is enough basis to feel hopeful. Some of the land reform beneficiaries who defied Dole/Stanfilco in 1996 in the unang putok/’first spark’ are now pursuing diversified multi- and inter-cropping of the native variety of cardava/saba banana with other crops, as they maintain a stance of guarded optimism – being hopeful and excited. Could they trigger a ikalawang putok/’second spark’? Maybe not. But then again, maybe they can.

Nothing is impossible when the working class is organized, defiant, subversive and persistent in their struggles for system change. The Eldorado de Carajas massacre happened just when hundreds of agrarian social movement leaders were converging in April 1996 in Tlaxcala, Mexico for the second world assembly of La Via Campesina (LVC), the most politically consequential agrarian movement in the world today. Not only that the Tlaxcala LVC assembly resolved to always remember the Eldorado de Carajas massacre as an act of political resistance by declaring 17 April as the International Day of Peasant Struggles, the Tlaxcala assembly was also a landmark in the global struggle for agrarian justice because it was during that gathering when LVC became a truly international movement. It was also at that conference when patriarchy was confronted within the movement by advancing the principle of gender parity in the leadership body of LVC. Later that year, yet another milestone in global peasant struggle was achieved: food sovereignty was politically inaugurated at the global stage during the Wood Food Summit in Rome, coinciding with the formation of IPC for Food Sovereignty, the largest alliance progressive social movements struggling for food sovereignty worldwide.

By remembering our fallen comrades who were assassinated and massacred, and all the ordinary people, including children, in genocidal violence, we constantly remind ourselves that global capitalism is a system that deploys constant violence against people and nature. Capitalism has to be eroded and dismantled if profitmaking-driven violence has to end.