Every year, those who remember Sitio Rano gather to honor the thirty-nine people who never came home on June 25, 1989. Candles are lit, prayers are offered, and the names of the dead are spoken once more. For the Bagobo-Tagabawa indigenous community, the massacre is not simply an event frozen in history books. It remains a living piece of family memory, carried by survivors and passed down to children and grandchildren who know the tragedy only through stories.
Yet after nearly four decades, remembering what happened has not necessarily meant understanding how it happened.
On that Sunday morning, members of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) in Sitio Rano, Brgy. Binaton, Digos, Davao del Sur gathered for worship as they had done many times before. The congregation was composed largely of Bagobo-Tagabawa families who had embraced the Christian faith in the years preceding the attack. According to survivor testimonies, church investigations, and contemporary reports, around seventy armed members of the New People’s Army (NPA) entered the community and opened fire. Those who fled toward nearby houses to protect their children were reportedly pursued. When the violence ended hours later, thirty-nine people lay dead. Twenty-two of them were children—including toddlers and a two-month-old infant. The rest were mothers, fathers, elders, and church leaders whose only purpose that morning had been to worship.
The facts of the massacre have been documented for decades. Survivors have spoken, journalists have written, and church leaders conducted their own inquiries while news agencies reported the incident across the country and the international community. Yet one question continues to receive far less attention than the massacre itself: How did a community that had once welcomed the CPP-NPA-NDF eventually become the target of one of the deadliest attacks on Indigenous Peoples? Asking this does not erase responsibility for the killings. Instead, it demands that we understand the chain of events that made such violence possible in the first place.
This investigation begins there because massacres rarely begin on the day they happen. They usually begin much earlier, through a series of decisions, misunderstandings, escalating tensions, and shifting relationships that slowly reshape a community long before the first shot is fired. By the time violence becomes visible, the deeper story has often been unfolding for years. If we focus only on the attack itself, we risk overlooking the conditions that allowed trust to erode until neighbors began seeing one another as enemies.
Several survivor accounts point to a reality that may surprise those who know Rano only through newspaper headlines: the relationship between the Bagobo-Tagabawa community and the NPA was not always hostile. Survivors recalled that when members of the movement first entered the area, they were received as visitors rather than invaders. They spoke about poverty, injustice, and the arduous lives of farmers and Indigenous Peoples. They described themselves as “sundalo sa kabus” or soldiers of the poor. For communities that had lived for generations with limited government services, weak infrastructure, and unresolved ancestral land claims, those words did not sound foreign. They addressed problems that many families were already experiencing daily.
Understanding this part of the story matters because insurgencies rarely grow through force alone. They grow by building relationships. They listen to grievances that institutions have ignored, present explanations for why communities remain poor or isolated, and offer a promise that someone is finally willing to stand beside those who have long felt forgotten. Whether those promises are fulfilled is another matter, but their appeal cannot be understood without first examining the conditions in which they were made.
According to testimonies gathered over the years, however, that relationship gradually soured. Survivors recalled that requests for food, rice, and other supplies became more frequent and demanding. What had once been voluntary was increasingly treated as an obligation. Some spoke of revolutionary taxes that burdened already impoverished families. Others remembered that refusing requests or questioning decisions invited suspicion upon the entire community.
Religious friction also began to emerge. Some survivors later explained that they struggled to reconcile their Christian faith with ideological teachings of communism that viewed religion through a hostile lens. These changes did not happen overnight, nor did every family experience them in exactly the same way. But together, they suggest that the relationship between the community and the armed movement had become profoundly strained long before June 1989.
One statement from a survivor captures that transformation with painful simplicity. Reflecting on the years before the massacre, the survivor asked, “If they were soldiers of the poor, why did they kill the poor?”
It is not merely an emotional question. It is an investigative one. It asks how a movement claiming to represent marginalized communities came to view one of those very communities as an enemy. It asks what happens when ideological loyalty supplants mutual trust, and when disagreement is no longer treated as a difference of opinion but as an act of betrayal.
Historical accounts suggest that tensions reached a breaking point after members of the community refused revolutionary taxation and later sought protection through Ituman, a local self-defense group supported by government forces. From the perspective of the community, these decisions reflected a desperate desire to protect their families. From the perspective of the revolutionary movement, they were likely interpreted as active cooperation with the state. Whether these events alone explain the massacre remains a matter that deserves careful, ongoing examination. What is beyond dispute is that the attack did not occur in isolation. It followed a period during which trust had steadily disintegrated between the movement and a community that had begun making its own decisions about its future.
The Rano Massacre therefore deserves to be remembered not only because of its brutality, but because it reveals a larger pattern that has received far too little attention. For decades, many Indigenous communities in Mindanao found themselves living in crossfires where armed movements, government forces, and local defense groups all competed for dominance. Their ancestral domains became battlegrounds where military strategy, political ideology, and community life collided. Too often, the experiences of these communities were reduced to brief references in military reports or political debates, while the everyday realities of the people who lived there remained largely untold.
That is why The Mountains Remember begins with Rano. This series is not an attempt to reopen old political arguments or to repackage familiar stories through different slogans. Its purpose is to examine how decades of communist insurgency affected Indigenous Peoples, their traditional leaders, their ancestral domains, and the social fabric that held their communities together.
Rano is only one community among many, but it forces us to confront a question that extends far beyond a single massacre: what happens to an Indigenous community when a revolution enters its domain, wins its trust, and then loses it?
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