Escalante massacre

The declaration of martial law on September 21, 1972 by President Ferdinand Marcos proved to be the dawning of darker days for the country. Although martial rule was lifted by Marcos on January 17, 1981, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was continued. Citizens merely protesting the policies of the Marcos government risked arrest without warrant and indefinite detention.

Escalante is a town in the province of Negros Occidental. It is 95 kilometers northeast of Bacolod City, the capital of the province. It was made into a city in 2001.

Negros Occidental is a province made prosperous by the sugar industry. Since the Spanish colonial period, it had exported sugar and sugar products. Large tracts of sugarcane plantations or haciendas were under the ownership of the elite, the hacienderos, who became extremely rich and powerful. Labor was often provided by live-in workers called sacadas who were frequently migrants from neighboring provinces. Poor, often severely exploited and powerless, these workers remain landless.[2]

On September 18, 1985, a crowd composed of sugar workers, farmers, fisher-folk, students, urban poor, professionals and church people staged a noise protest in the town center. The crowd was estimated to number 5000. The next day, the protesters set up human barricades in front of the public market and at the entrance of the municipal plaza. On the morning of September 20, a police car approached the picket line and the protest leaders were invited to a negotiation conference at the municipal building which was about fifty meters from the barricades. The leaders refused.

About mid-afternoon, fire trucks arrived and began to bombard the picket line with high-pressure water and tear gas. The crowd was surrounded by members of the Regional Special Action Force (RSAF) and the Civilian Home Defense Forces (CHDF). When some protestors threw back the tear gas canisters into the empty plaza, the para-military forces, who would later allege that a few "trouble-makers" tried to grab their weapons, opened fire into the masses.

Accounts of the number of casualties vary: between twenty and thirty dead,[1][3][4] and thirty wounded.[3] After the crowd had dispersed, the site was cordoned off by the para-military units and on-lookers were ordered to bring the wounded to hospitals in the town. The bodies were recovered from the rally site and in the sugarcane fields surrounding the location. Buildings and concrete walls nearby were riddled with bullet holes.

The government organized the Escalante Massacre Fact-Finding Commission chaired by Ombudsman Justice Raul M. Gonzalez (as of 2007, the Secretary of the Department of Justice). The commission recommended that the government indemnify the victims' next of kin. This was never done.[1] In 2003, three low-ranking policemen jailed for their alleged role in the massacre were released on parole.

The Escalante martyrs have been memorialized in a number of ways, most notably through a monument in the plaza very near the spot where the victims were killed, and through the names of the martyrs being inscribed on the wall of remembrance at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani.

The names of the Escalante martyrs inscribed on the wall of remembrance are as follows:

• List of massacres in the Philippines
• 1986 EDSA Revolution
• Timeline of the Marcos Dictatorship
• Sag-od massacre
• Negros Island killings
  • Sagay massacre
  • Canlaon massacre