LFS Celebrated 32nd Anniversary, Stormed US Embassy

Members of the League of Filipino Students (LFS) stormed the US Embassy with a lightning rally in protest of the “continued US intervention in the Philippines” last September 11, 2009 as part of their commemoration of the 32nd founding anniversary of the said militant group.


“The presence of US troops in the Philippines undermines the supposed sovereignty and the independence of the country, even more so if the presence is permanent,” said the LFS secretary general, Terry Ridon.


The group urged the scrapping of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), a military agreement between the Philippine and the US governments which the group called “one-sided and a fetter on Philippine sovereignty.”


“The continued implementation of the Visiting Forces of Agreement (VFA) and other unequal treaties with the US has taken away the victories of decade’s worth of Filipino struggle against US intervention such as the dismantling of US Bases in 1991,” added Ridon.


For Ridon’s opinion, the policies of the agreement serve the US interests at the expense of the Filipino welfare.


“After a decade since it was ratified, we ask what the people has gotten out of the VFA. The supposed aid that is being given by the US troops in Mindanao serve nothing but a smokescreen to their intervention in the country. It is nothing if it costs our freedom.”


The LFS have constantly expressed the protest against VFA viewing it as a clear evidence of US imperialism in our country. “The people’s battle cry in the anti-bases struggle was down with the US Imperialism and that remains appropriate, if not even more so today,” says Ridon. Preceding this lightning rally, the group had always held other rallies for the same purpose of scrapping the VFA.


The group held the rally in time of the 8th year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack claiming that since after the attack, the US-Arroyo regime exposed the country to be the 2nd front on US “war on terror.”