GABRIELA Network and Allies Across the U.S. Protest War of Terror in the Philippines

GABRIELA Network's nationwide vigil on Friday, May 20th, 2005, was a solemn reminder of the on-going US intervention in the Philippines and its destructive nature for the Philippine nation and its people. It was also a firm condemnation of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's complicity. Held in six US cities?Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle,?the vigil, organized by GABRIELA Network (GABNet), a US-Philippine women's solidarity mass organization, was the first nationally coordinated action in the US to protest the escalating political killings in the Philippines since George W. Bush and company declared the country as the second front in the global "war on terror."

With over two-hundred participants and more than twenty endorsing organizations, the vigil called attention to the intensifying political repression in the Philippines: three-hundred plus political killings and abductions from 2001 to the present; one-hundred cases of human rights violations, affecting 23,252 victims in ninety-one communities from January to March 15, 2005; thirteen journalists killed last year, three in the first quarter of 2005, making the Philippines the most murderous country in the world for the media; murder of eleven women of GABRIELA, a national alliance of more than two-hundred women's organizations in the Philippines, and of its electoral arm GABRIELA Women's Party.