TO THE PEOPLE of Negros, your grief and struggle are ours as well. To the families of the slain, your cry for justice resounds across Panay and throughout the nation.
The bloodbath in Toboso, Negros Occidental, on April 19, 2026, where 19 lives were mercilessly taken, is not an accident of war, nor a regrettable “encounter” as state security forces would want the public to believe. It is a massacre. It is another gruesome chapter in the long record of state terror unleashed against poor peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, youth, community organizers, and all those who dare struggle for land, livelihood, and democratic rights.
Panay Alliance Karapatan condemns in the strongest possible terms the Toboso Massacre and demands immediate justice for all victims. We stand with the bereaved families and communities whose grief is compounded by the lies, vilification, mockery, and impunity that so often follow every state-sponsored killing.
This latest atrocity bears the familiar markings: brutality in counterinsurgency operations, heavy presence of armed troops in rural communities, sweeping claims that all those killed were armed combatants, suspicious recovery of weapons, denial of independent scrutiny, and the swift branding of the dead as enemies of the State. Time and again, the script is the same — kill first, fabricate later.
The people of Panay and Negros know this pattern too well.
We remember the Tumandok Massacre of December 30, 2020, when nine indigenous Tumandok leaders and residents opposing the destructive Jalaur mega dam were slaughtered in coordinated raids.
We remember the Antique 7 Massacre, where seven lives were snuffed out under contested claims of armed encounter.
We remember the August 2024 massacre in Panay, another bloody operation cynically justified through the stale language of “neutralization,” where among those killed was Concha Araneta — already sickly, frail, and by all indications in no physical condition to engage in armed combat. Her death laid bare the hollowness of official claims and raised grave questions about the killing of persons who were vulnerable, incapacitated, or unable to fight.
We also remember the October 2025 Lambunao killings of Mateo Suarez, 71, and Roberto Cabales, 68. They were slain by soldiers in Barangay Coto, Lambunao, Iloilo, during an operation the military claimed was an “encounter” while serving a warrant, yet witnesses and local reports asserted that no firefight took place. The deaths of elderly victims exposed once more how official narratives are too often invoked to mask grave abuses and evade accountability.
These are not disconnected tragedies. They arise from one doctrine, one machinery of repression: a militarist counterinsurgency program that turns the countryside into killing fields.
Negros and Panay have long been laboratories of militarization because they are also lands of militant peasant struggle, labor organizing, indigenous resistance, and people’s assertion of rights. Where people organize, the State responds not with sustained reforms but with force. It brands activists and rebels as terrorists, dissenters as criminals, and communities as enemy zones.
In this light, the Toboso Massacre must be probed through the lens of the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), which was forged between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front to protect the people amid armed conflict.
CARHRIHL explicitly prohibits massacres, summary executions, torture, arbitrary arrests, collective punishment, and forced evacuation. Every massacre committed under the pretext of counterinsurgency is an affront to CARHRIHL and to the people’s demand for a just and lasting peace.
Under International Humanitarian Law (IHL), there are inviolable rules even in situations of armed conflict. Civilians must be distinguished from combatants. Persons who are wounded, captured, or no longer participating in hostilities must be protected. The use of disproportionate force, execution of captives, desecration of bodies, attacks on civilian communities, and denial of humanitarian treatment are grave breaches that may constitute war crimes.
The Toboso Massacre raises urgent and serious questions under these principles:
Were those killed given the chance to surrender? Were some of them already hors de combat when slain? Were civilians among the dead deliberately targeted or indiscriminately attacked? Was evidence planted or manipulated to justify the operation? Why are independent investigators and human rights groups routinely denied immediate access after such killings?
These questions cannot be buried beneath military press releases. No volume of state propaganda can wash away blood. Every lie issued to sanitize bloodshed deepens public outrage. Every attempt to terrorize communities only sharpens resistance.
We declare with utmost clarity: the people will not be silenced by massacres. Panay Alliance Karapatan calls for justice for the victims of the Toboso Massacre through the identification, prosecution, and punishment of all perpetrators, including commanding officers and officials responsible for the killings; an immediate, independent, and transparent investigation with full access for human rights bodies, civil society, and forensic experts; protection for victims’ families, witnesses, and human rights defenders from harassment and reprisals; an end to militarization and red-tagging in rural communities in Negros, Panay and other regions; and full adherence to International Humanitarian Law and CARHRIHL in protecting civilians and hors de combat.
We also enjoin fellow Panayanons in the pursuit of a just and lasting peace by addressing its unresolved roots: landlessness, chronic poverty, joblessness, elite rule, plunder of natural resources, attacks on indigenous communities, and the violent suppression of democratic demands.
Justice for the 19 slain in Toboso.
Justice for the Tumandok martyrs.
Justice for the Antique 7.
Justice for all victims of extra-judicial killings in Panay and Negros.
Stop state terror.
End militarization.
Uphold CARHRIHL.
Advance the people’s struggle for genuine peace rooted in justice! – PANAY ALLIANCE KARAPATAN <panaykarapatan@gmail.com>
