Peace Brigades International-Canada coordinator Brent Patterson moderated a panel on militarism and “organizing for just peace” at the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) conference in Ottawa on May 26, 2026.
The panel featured two Indigenous land defenders whose territories are situated within British Columbia, Billie Pierre and Kolin Sutherland-Wilson; Philippines peasant leader Danilo Ka Daning Ramos; Salvadoran activist Maricarmen Guevara; and Mohamad, a representative of the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Kolin Sutherland-Wilson and Billie Pierre
Both Gitxsan land defender Kolin Sutherland-Wilson and Nlaka’pamux land defender Billie Pierre have been criminalized for their resistance to megaprojects, namely the Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory and the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion on Secwepemc territory in British Columbia. Both pipelines were built without the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples.
In May 2022, CBC News reported that the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) had sent a third rebuke to the Government of Canada calling on it to stop construction on both pipelines.
That letter stated that the governments of Canada and British Columbia “have escalated their use of force, surveillance, and criminalization of land defenders to intimidate, remove and forcibly evict Secwepemc and Wet’suwet’en Nations from their traditional lands…” The letter further names the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) and private security forces as the perpetrators.
Danilo Ka Daning Ramos
The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP-Canada) has previously highlighted: “Ka Daning, a farmer himself, is a staunch human rights defender and environmentalist. KMP has effective leadership over a total of 1.3 million rural people with 65 provincial chapters and 15 regional chapters nationwide.”
AlterMidya has reported: “Ka Daning is a survivor of the 1987 Mendiola Massacre. He was among the tens of thousands of poor farmers from Luzon who marched to the then Ministry of Agrarian Reform and later to Mendiola. They were demanding free land distribution to the then Cory Aquino administration when the Philippine Constabulary (now PNP), opened fire at the protesting farmers, killing 13 and injuring scores of others.”
In February 2024, PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP) expressed “deep concern about the reported incidents of surveillance and red tagging that Danilo Ramos, chairperson of the Peasant Movement of the Philippines (KMP), has recently faced.”
They further noted: “Many cases of human rights violations, including political killings, involve activists red-tagged by the government. We are outraged that Ramos is facing real threats to his life for standing up for the rights of landless Filipino peasants.”
Mohamad, Maricarmen Guevara
More about the presentations from Mohamad and Maricarmen soon.
The ILPS
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle describes itself as “an anti-imperialist and democratic formation. It promotes, supports and develops the anti-imperialist and democratic struggles of the peoples of the world against imperialism and all reaction. It has a broad mass character and not subordinate to any political party, government or religion and affords equality to all participating organizations.”
