It was Friday, May 23, when Pojas was laid down to his final rest. For the first time since the 1980, people gathered at Davao’s Freedom Park, and paraded the casket of the slain peasant leader along the streets of Davao, reminiscent of the funeral march during the time of Martial Law.
Farmers coming all the way from Compostela Valley, Davao del Norte and Davao Oriental marched with Pojas’s family and friends from Freedom Park to the Davao Memorial Park, passing through the streets of F. Torres, Araullo, Quirino, Claveria and Ponciano.
“He was five years old when I brought them to Davao because I did not want them to be away from me,” said his father Felix Pojas, now 75 years old. Pojas’s mother died when he and his sibling were young.
Poverty prevented him from going to college after he finished high school. When his father remarried, Pojas helped support the family. His siblings remember him as the brother who sacrificed his life to become the breadwinner of the family.
He used to work for the Lapanday banana plantation but after seven years, he was fired when he joined the workers’ demand for increase in wages. Then, he worked as a canal surveyor in a banana packing house in Cabaguio, where he was also terminated after joining calls demanding insurance benefits from the company.
In 1991, he started joining a farmers’s group known as the United Farmers of Fatima (UFF).
Back to his farm, he was awakened to the conditions of peasants and started joining farmer’s groups. He was active in the struggle for genuine land reform to break off the chain of land monopoly from the hands of few big landlords and big capital. He joined the Mandug Farmers’ Association (Mafa) in 2001, an affiliate of FADC and two years after, became a council member of FADC.
Pojas’s father is a farmer beneficiary of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in Fatima, Mandug. Despite the government’s touted claim to distribute land to the farmers, the land that was supposed to be for him under CARP was still difficult to obtain because the family had a hard time paying for the amortization fee.
Joel Virador, Bayan Muna national vice chairperson, said that the tragedy that happened to Pojas could usually drive people to desperation. “That’s why, some people opt to support armed struggle, because their demand for genuine agrarian reform and food for their families are oftentimes met with bullets,” Virador said during the Freedom Park rally.
Filled with grief over his passing, fellow activists said they were not cowed by what happened and pledged to continue his fight. “It is very clear for us who killed Celso Pojas,” Kelly Delgado said.
“We raise our fist to hail him the peasants’s hero,” said Gonzaga.
Danilo Ramos, the KMP national secretary- general who read a poem on the last night of Pojas’ wake, said that for every grain of rice that Pojas fought for, was life not only for farmers but also for the Filipino people.
“He lived such a deep and meaningful life,” Ramos said. (Grace S. Uddin/ davaotoday.com)
Extrajudicial Killings, Land Reform
