History
Bayan was founded by political activist Leandro Alejandro and former senator Lorenzo Tanada. Started in May 1985 during the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. It brought together more than a thousand grassroots and progressive organizations, representing over a million people, largely "national democratic" groups aligned with the Communist Party of the Philippines.
It was a participant in the People Power Revolution against the Marcos dictatorship, contributing to one of the first of the non-violent, popular revolutions of the 1980s as well as involved in the creation of now-defunct Partido ng Bayan that participated during the 1987 elections. However, since 1998, Bayan Muna, the political party of the organization, has been the leading party-list member in the House of Representatives of the Philippines.
On August 7, 2002, the secretary-general of BAYAN, Teodoro A. Casiño, claimed that under the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo presidency, soldiers murdered at least 13 BAYAN and BAYAN Muna members.
Claims such as these are consistent with reports from Amnesty International. For example, on April 22, 2003, Amnesty International claimed that as part of the government's anti-insurgency campaign against the New Peoples' Army (NPA), there were systematic human rights violations such as disappearances, torture, extrajudicial executions and arbitrary arrests carried out by national security forces and paramilitary groups known as militias. According to the reports, both civilians and members of legally recognised organizations considered to be related to the NPA are at risk, especially in provinces such as Oriental Mindoro.
After the 2007 elections, and the death of Anakpawis representative Crispin Beltran, BAYAN now has five combined representatives in the 14th Congress of the Philippines, Satur Ocampo and Teodoro Casiño of Bayan Muna, Rafael V. Mariano of Anakpawis, and Liza Maza and Luzviminda Ilagan of GABRIELA.
In the 2010 elections Bayan has 7 congressmen in the lower house. Including Raymond Palatino, Neri Colmenares, Luzviminda Iligan.
Read more about this topic: Bagong Alyansang Makabayan
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)