In April 2006, Enrico “Ka Eric” Cabanit was shot dead by masked assassins in Davao. He was the General Secretary of UNORKA (National Coordination of Autonomous Local Rural People’s Organizations), a national movement of peasants struggling for land reform. Cabanit was a former farm worker in the country’s largest Cavendish banana plantation owned by the powerful Floirendo family, a conduit of global fruit giants Dole and Del Monte. In the 1980s and 1990s, Cabanit, together with thousands of farm workers in banana plantations who had asserted their legal land rights claims over the plantations, had been expelled from the plantations. Still, by 2006, some progress, albeit limited, had been made in the farm workers’ land rights claim-making efforts, despite intense landlord resistance.

Authors: Jennifer C. Franco and Saturnino M. Borras Jr.

Published by: Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice (2007)