By Karl Patrick Wilfred M. Suyat
“Slaughter in Inayawan,” screamed a one-pager headline published on the May 25, 1984 issue of Mr & Ms Special Edition. Across the uppermost part of Page 19, there was a troublesome qualifier: “Trouble Spot: Negros Occidental.” It was a brief report, straightforward in recounting an event of terror that saw an entire community in the heart of Negros Occidental recoil in fear and shock.
May 14, 1984 was the date of the second Interim Batasang Pambansa elections that the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. had called, in a bid to append “democratic” trappings into his dictatorship. But in Sitio Langoni, Inayawan, Cauayan, Negros Occidental, May 14 marked their Black Monday.
Past 4:00 p.m. of that day, soldiers under the command of 2nd Lt. Aquilino Pastolera lined up 11 men and paraded them through Inayawan, their hands tied in front, each one held together by a rope. Hundreds of townsfolk witnessed it. They identified the men to be residents of Barrio Langoni, which sat “four kilometers from the barrio proper.” When nightfall came, around 7:20 p.m., villagers were startled when they heard a volley of gunshots that lasted for ten minutes. After the smoke of gunfire had cleared, nine bodies were dumped by the side of the Inayawan military detachment.
“They were identified as nine of the 11 men who were paraded through Inayawan on May 14,” the report said. “Civilians were forbidden to enter the detachment.”
But how were the military able to round them up? From the Mr & Ms report: “The 11 men were picked up by the military as they alighted from a bus in Sitio Tambo […] and were interrogated by the military men assigned to guard the precinct.” The men had just voted in the 1984 Batasan elections.
Without a single coffin, the nine bodies were loaded onto a blue dump truck to be brought to Inayawan’s parish church. Fr. Brendan O’Connell blessed and prayed over the bodies. Bacolod City Bishop Msgr. Antonio “Tony” Fortich and 12 other priests had then concelebrated a Mass for the slain men.
But only eight of the nine “decomposing” bodies were in plywood coffins displayed outside the Church during this Mass. “The ninth [body] was so mangled,” continued the report, “that it was buried the previous evening.” Fr. O’Connell was so distraught that he told reporters, “It is one of the saddest days of my life.”
A little over a year since the “Langoni Nine” killings, the Marcos dictatorship would inflict a larger show of violent force in Negros island.
“Shortly after noon last Friday, Sept. 20 [1985], elements of the [Civilian Home Defense Forces] Central Bato with Cadiz City police unleashed a hail of lead from M-14s and an M-60 machine gun upon demonstrators reportedly threatening them with bamboo sticks,” wrote J.R. Alibutud and Ma. Salvacion Espina in their front-page report published on the September 27-October 3, 1985 issue of Mr & Ms Special Edition. CHDF was one of the dictator’s most prized, but also most brutal, paramilitaries.
A crowd of 5,000 from Negros’ multisectoral folk — sugarcane farmers, fisherfolk, workers, students, members of the clergy — converged in front of municipal plaza, adjacent to the Escalante municipal hall. They denounced Marcos Sr’s tyrannical regime. They cried against militarization. They protested sugar monopolies that buried their families deep into hunger and desperation. “Welgang bayan!” became their word of the hour, for three days, until the second one ended in bloodshed.
State forces and officials had announced earlier that they would espouse a policy of maximum tolerance, but no one had foreseen that their “maximum tolerance” came with tear gas, water cannons, automatic rifles, a machine gun, and gun-toting police forces with a clear intention to kill.
Hapless demonstrators ran to the sugarcane fields for cover, but state agents caught up and continued firing at them. Robina Eranco, 14, urged a fellow youth demonstrator to run for cover while she bled. A sugarworker testified as to how another one of the protesting folk threw himself on top of him before a bullet hit him. Virgirita Calinog was saved when another Escalante martyr also threw himself on top of her body, only to be hit in the back by a paramilitary bullet.
“No one expected the slaughter to happen in Escalante,” wrote Alibutud and Espina. But it still happened.
In less than an hour, the brutal dispersal at Escalante snuffed out twenty lives. The whole world felt shockwaves of horror when newspaper headlines were splashed with photos from the carnage in Escalante — and in Sitio Langoni, a year before.
Alibutud and Espina’s special report ended on a bleak note: “The grieving goes on as the search for the dead continues. They try to console each other and they pledge to continue fighting, living as they do in a land where men with dead souls wield power.”
Those “men with dead souls” turned Negros into an active social volcano, rife with violence, uprising, and injustice.
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Negros was, and is still, a showcase for class struggle, where monopolies of sugarcane fields and land were passed on from the sugar barons of the colonial era to the feudal lords of its continuing past.
The palpable unrest in Negros island is a historical reminder of wounds that continue to fester, wounds that were caused by generations of control and dispossession.
Negros is a perpetual reminder of Joel Abong and the thousands of other Negrense children and people who starved to death when famine struck the island in 1985. Negros is a perpetual reminder of how the wealth of Roberto Benedicto and Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco were built on the enslavement of thousands of dispossessed sacada workers and sugarcane farmers into a feudal socioeconomic order. Negros is a perpetual reminder of how Negros haciendas turned into virtual hunger camps and killing fields, specifically at the apex of a despotic rule which sought to bleed its own people dry—to enrich the despot, Marcos Sr., his own family, and his cronies.
Sitio Langoni and Escalante were just two silent witnesses to this fury. But even the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986 did not see the end of this cycle of exploitation, impoverishment, and violence.
Fast forward to April 2026. Nearly 42 years after the Bloody Monday that scarred the barrio folk of Inayawan, another Bloody Monday had scarred the townsfolk of Toboso, Negros Occidental, when military forces strafed entire communities in the town in yet another search-and-destroy operation against suspected communists.
In Inayawan, the military accused the Langoni Nine of wielding knives. In Escalante, the police and military accused the protesters of “clambering aboard the firetrucks” and stabbing the armed officers. In Toboso, the same humble town where some Escalante demonstrators in 1985 came, the military is now accusing the 19 people killed last April 20 of being hardened communist fighters.
It is unalterable that, since the Marcos dictatorship, Negros has become a battleground for uprisings, armed or unarmed. But it is also an incontrovertible fact that, where economic and political subjugation persist, resistance will become inevitable. Such outrageous cycle is still besetting Negros.
The military hopes that the public will swallow their narrative on the “encounter” in Toboso hook, line, and sinker. But any honest student of history will understand that the conflict afflicting Negros did not rise from a vacuum. It stands on a longstanding theater of feudal order, brutal power, and impoverishment. These were the same root causes that led to the bloodshed in Cauayan, in Escalante, in Cadiz, and in numerous other haciendas and sacadas spread across this benighted island.
“Negros is fertile land. It was never meant to grow graves,” lamented Bishop Gerardo Alminaza after the bloodbath in Toboso. “If we listen carefully, the blood spilled on its soil cries out not for revenge, but for justice. Unless we heed that cry, we will read this same headline again, and again, and again.”
Indeed. Until the government decides to listen to the lesions of its bloodied history, the anguish of Negros island will continue. The cries of its people will still reverberate. Their radical fervor will not be vanquished. #
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