The three activists were part of a group sent to Cebu — the oldest city in the Philippines with over 1 million residents.

Leaving the airport, they passed by the Mactan Economic Zone — a tax‐free, low‐regulation center where more than 200 foreign companies exploit over 50,000 workers — the second largest Economic Zone in the Philippines.

At Cendet — an institution with a long and well‐known history that provides services to workers, urban poor, farmers and fisherfolks in the Visayas — some background to Cebu’s struggles for justice was given by Jaime Paglinawan Sr. He is one of 27 activists who was recently charged for supposedly violating the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act of 2012 by the Department of Justice’s Terror Task Force and the Central Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. It would be like the Pentagon charging community activists with terrorism.

The 27 defendants released a statement demanding that the government drop the phony charges and stop “its anti‐poor and anti‐people policies that conspire with the imperialists, huge local business owners and landlords to generate more wealth in their pockets”.