Negros Island is the Philippines' sugar bowl, a landscape of vast plantations stretching to the horizon under a tropical sun. Government data show that 1,727 medium and large landlords control more than half of the island's sugarcane plantations. The workers who cut the cane -- known as sakadas -- occupy the opposite end of this equation. Since 2009, farm workers in the region had been practicing bungkalan, occupying agricultural lands and collectively growing food crops simply to feed their families. The farmers killed at Hacienda Nene had filed multiple petitions to include the estate in the government's Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. They had been NFSW members since 2012, farming on Hacienda Nene even before that. Their dream was modest: legal title to the land they already worked.

The aftermath unfolded in competing narratives. Police found twelve empty casings from a 5.56 mm rifle and seven from a .45-caliber handgun at the scene. Western Visayas police director Chief Superintendent John Bulalacao claimed some of the farmers were linked to the New People's Army and labeled the NFSW a communist front -- an accusation the federation denied. The police filed murder charges against two suspects they said were recruiting farmers to the union. But the NFSW's own fact-finding team reported that the perpetrators were members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines' Special Civilian Active Auxiliary, a paramilitary group. The Department of Agrarian Reform muddied the picture further, stating that the victims were not beneficiaries of the government's land distribution program -- contradicting local police who called them land reform beneficiaries.

The killings did not happen in a vacuum. Prior to the massacre, President Rodrigo Duterte had declared a state of national emergency through Proclamation No. 55 and issued Memorandum No. 32, ordering troops deployed to Negros Occidental along with Negros Oriental, Bicol, and Samar. The orders directed the Philippine National Police and Armed Forces to undertake all necessary measures to curb violence. According to the NFSW and the agricultural workers' union UMA, the massacre brought the number of farmers killed on Negros Island under Duterte's presidency to 45. Human Rights Watch called on the administration to carry out a credible and impartial investigation, noting that human rights abuses in the Philippines extended well beyond the drug war. The organization pointed to landlessness as the root of massive poverty among Filipino farmers, and to the pattern of security forces targeting farmers and labor activists by branding them rebel insurgents.

A surviving minor was arrested by police, prompting outcry. On October 29, Duterte publicly told state forces to arrest groups occupying idle lands and shoot those who resist violently. On December 5, 2018, farmers, human rights advocates, and church workers formed the Stop Killing Farmers: Justice for Sagay Massacre Network to campaign for accountability. Benjamin Ramos, a human rights lawyer who took on cases connected to the massacre, was himself shot and killed shortly afterward -- his murder condemned by Human Rights Watch and the National Union of People's Lawyers. The violence on Hacienda Nene was not an isolated incident but a window into the structural conflict over land that continues to define life in the Philippine sugar belt, where the question of who owns the soil remains unanswered for the people who plant, cut, and harvest it.