Explaining her “no” vote to the Joint Resolution on CARP (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program) extension, Representative Risa Hontiveros of the pseudo-progressive party-list Akbayan said that Congress has “managed to obliterate an entire class” with the approval of the said resolution. Obliterate means “wipe out”, “eliminate” or “annihilate”. I wonder how a single act of Congress can wipe out, eliminate or annihilate the entire Filipino peasantry, which for almost four decades now, has been waging a civil war in the countryside to implement genuine agrarian reform.

As if her advocacy of CARP extension with reforms is the be all and end all of the peasants’ fight for land, Hontiveros has reduced the class struggle for effective control of land between peasants and landlords in the cozy confines of the House of Representatives. The Joint Resolution may have set back the peasants’ struggle for genuine agrarian reform in the parliamentary arena, not a surprise in landlords’ turf. But it certainly did not reverse the victories achieved by the peasants’ direct political actions in the countryside to own the land the till. Or will it hinder future triumphs of their agrarian revolution.

As the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) said in its recent statement, “The legislative arena is just one field of struggle by farmers and advocates of genuine agrarian reform. Indeed, the battleground is far wider than the halls of a landlord-dominated Congress. It is in the remotest barangays in the countryside where farmers and farm workers should collectively struggle against oppression and exploitation that stem from landlord domination.

I can assure Hontiveros that the Filipino peasantry will not be wiped out, eliminated nor annihilated any time soon. Heck, they were not obliterated by the political killings and state terrorism by GMA and her armed forces. And no matter what this brazenly anti-people regime does, it could never kill and obliterate an aspiration.

What is certain is that the latest developments in CARP, combined with state repression, Cha-cha, and worsening poverty and hunger, will further fuel agrarian unrest and social discontent. CARP’s extension has only further exposed the rottenness of Congress, and in the process convinced a growing number of tillers that a strong peasants’ and people’s movement is the greatest hope for genuine agrarian reform in the country.