A volunteer teacher for Lumad schools received the 2023 Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk in Dublin, Ireland for her work despite harassments and red-tagging.
One of the Lumad students held at a facility inside the Social Welfare and Development Office in Region 7 and her father were reunited late afternoon on March 12.
But there can be no further wondering why government feels threatened by progressive education. State forces insist that they "rescued" Lumad students—they rescued them from further learning how government assists in the corporate plunder of their ancestral lands, from realizing the potential of their collective strength as our young heroes then realized their collective strength.
Lawyers and lumad advocates slammed the Philippine National Police for keeping a Bakwit School teacher away from family and lawyers in the past days.
Why? They had no weapons nor drugs or anything illegal. They were only holding class peacefully. The police called the raid a rescue, but the videos convict the attackers as criminals. That was a scandal of terrifying violence against children.