CLARK FREEPORT – As the country’s leaders warmly welcomed yesterday US Pres. Barrack Obama, the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) warned that the US President’s “twin agenda of military basing and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) would lead to the massive displacement of farmers and wide-scale land-grabbing.”
KMP Chair Rafael Mariano said “we expect US troops to once again directly participate in the local military’s counter- insurgency and combat operations that will result to increasing militarization, human rights abuses, and massive displacement of farmers in the countryside.”
“The return of the US military bases, troops, fighter jets, and war ships through the USPH Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (US-PH EDCA) is an affirmation of the neo-colonial relations between the puppet Aquino government and its imperialist master,” he said.
Meanwhile at a hotel in this freeport, the presence of the US military has filled in a pool with Filipino women working in entertainment establishments along Fields Avenue, the former “rest and recreation” district for US military men assigned to the former US air force base here.
“My family were supposed to be billeted in the hotel, but we instead got a villa because the hotel rooms were already assigned to US soldiers. And then when we went to the hotel pool because my kids wanted to swim, I backed out because the pool area teemed with Filipino women partnered with US soldiers,” said a mother whose family spent the weekend here.
Mariano said that “the return of US military bases and troops clearly shows Aquino’s rabid puppetry and has surpassed succeeding regimes since the Filipino people’s collective rejection of the US bases in 1991.” Mariano also said that Obama’s push for the country to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement “removed any pretension by Aquino on Charter change.”
“Obama’s push for the TPPA exposes Aquino as the brains behind Charter change moves in Congress,” Mariano said, noting that “amending the 1987 Constitution and the removal of restrictions on foreign ownership of land and enterprises are among the dictates of the TPPA.”
He warned that “the economy that was already devastated by the so-called ‘free market’ globalization will continue to worsen. Cha-cha and the TPPA will hasten the full-scale liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and denationalization of the economy.”
“With foreign agri-businesses and mining corporations having full ownership of lands courtesy of Cha-cha, the widespread land-grabbing and environmental plunder will surely intensify,” Mariano added.
