By Gerald Leigh C. Laquinon, Correspondent Around 30 students staged an indignation rally in Iligan City on Friday afternoon to decry the violent dispersal of the peasant barricade at the Kidapawan National Highway in North Cotabato earlier. The protest action spearheaded by Kabataan Party list and the chapter of the League of Filipino Students in Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology calls for justice to the death of a farmer and wounding of at least 13 others after the police forces opened fire at some 6,000 protesters. “Students are sons and daughters of farmers too, and we condemn how this ‘haciendero’ government kills its poverty-stricken people,” said Vennel Francis Chenfoo, Kabataan Party list’s third nominee. Chenfoo said that the farmers only want immediate government action on the widespread hunger in their communities due to heavy crop losses because of the drought for five months now, “but the state answered with bullets.” Kristine Cabardo, LFS regional spokesperson said that the “Tuwid na Daan rhetoric of the Aquino government actually means neglect and murder of the Filipino peasantry.” “The Aquino government should be held accountable to the ‘massacre’ of these hungry farmers,” said Cabardo, pointing that “their only weapons were placards and streamers bearing appeals to the government to give them rice to feed their families.” Thousands of farmers since Wednesday blocked stretches of the Cotabato-Davao Highway in Kidapawan City to demand relief and subsidy for farm communities affected by the dry spell while some of them are picketing at the entrance to the provincial office of the National Food Authority.