On Sunday, January 11th, Al-Ahrar Toronto joined BAYAN Toronto at their community vigil to demand for the immediate release of Filipino-American human rights youth activist Chantal Anicoche and honoured the victims of the recent bombings in Mindoro. The following is our statement of solidarity that one of our members read at the vigil.
Militant greetings comrades, and thank you for having me here today. I am a member of Al-Ahrar Palestinian Prisoner Support. We are an international organization working to support prisoners of the Palestinian liberation struggle— this also means extending our solidarity to all prisoners of the global struggle against imperialism, from Palestine to Turtle Island to the Philippines.
25-year-old Chantal Anicoche is a political prisoner. Chantal was in Mindoro helping the people struggle against corporate exploitation and resisting the destructive renewable energy and mining operations being pushed on the island. Because of her militant advocacy and organizing work alongside the peasant masses, she was kidnapped by the military. Political prisoners like Chantal are captured because of their revolutionary potential and the action they take on the ground with the masses. They are captured because they pose a threat to imperialism and their organizing is a powerful force to defeat it.
In the movement for Palestinian liberation, it is common to recite that prisoners are our guide to liberation, the compass of our struggle, and our vanguard in this movement— these words are not simply slogans, but an analysis about how prisoners ground the Palestinian Resistance’s work, and by extension ours as internationalists and in the diaspora as well. To be a prisoner is to have a political position in the struggle for liberation.
As of June 2025, there are over 700 political prisoners in the Philippines. Over 100 are women, over 100 are elderly, and at least 96 are very ill. Chantal has now joined these numbers. Filipino political prisoners come from various walks of life: they are farmers, workers, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, women, youth, activists, human rights defenders, political leaders, and members of mass organizations.
Similarly, there are over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Zionist prisons, who also come from all walks of life: students, workers, women, union members, revolutionarries who executed anti-colonial operations, children, elders, Resistance leadership, and even unorganized Palestinians who individually express their support for the national liberation struggle— many of whom then become organized into a Resistance faction once inside prison.
In prisons in the Philippines, political prisoners suffer from inhumane conditions. The prisons are severely overcrowded, and people are jam-packed together in jails without ventilation or even proper room to lay down, eating scarce and inedible food rations, using insufficient and unclean water, with access to poor healthcare, if any at all, and constantly being subjected to abuse from prison guards, officers, and the legal system that changes policies and procedures at a whim.
This is the reason that the Palestinian Resistance centres prisoners, and that we must, too, in our own organizing: prisoners face a very specific type of colonial violence through isolation and torture that occurs outside of the public eye. From the dying Palestine Action hunger strikers in Britain to Palestinian Resistance leadership like Ahmad Sa’adat to the Holy Land 5 in the United States to Chantal and the hundreds of other political prisoners in the Philippines— behind closed doors, prisoners see the fascist ideology of their oppressors mask-off. They gain clear sight of imperialist beliefs and goals.
The kinds of imprisonment used by the Zionist entity and the comprador Philippine government serve the same function: to materially weaken resistance. By supporting political prisoners, by demanding freedom for them, and by liberating these prisoners, we strengthen our resistance toward victory.
Our struggle continues to support our prisoners, to free our prisoners, and to build power from Palestine to the Philippines.
Free them all! Free Chantal! Defend Mindoro!
From Palestine to the Philippines, Stop the U.S. and Canadian War Machine!
