Negros 19: I Know Marienne Cuison — And I Believe Her Over the AFP
Negros 19: I Know Marienne Cuison — And I Believe Her Over the AFP
A personal reckoning with the April 19 massacre in Toboso — and why two generations of Philippine state violence have made it impossible for this Fil-Am editor to take the military at their word.
The last time I saw Marienne Cuison, we were standing outside Skyview Memorial in Vallejo, California. January 2022. We were there for Tito Maning — Manuel Perseveranda, my uncle — and the Angeles family had gathered the way they always do: loud, warm, all talking at once, the women's voices carrying over each other the way only a big Filipino family manages even in grief. That was also the first time — and the last time — I ever saw Lyle Prijoles. He and Yenyen had just gotten engaged. The family was teasing them. One of Marienne's titas turned to me and asked what my photography rate was. Even at a memorial, life keeps moving. That is the Angeles way.
I did not know, standing in that parking lot, that the next time Lyle's name would reach me would be through a text from my cousin Melvin — Tito Maning's eldest, one of the people I text most regularly — telling me that Lyle had been killed in Negros Occidental. April 19, 2026. Shot dead by soldiers of the Philippine Army's 79th Infantry Battalion in the sugar cane barangay of Toboso. Along with 18 others. The AFP called it a legitimate armed encounter. They handed out medals.
Did You Know?
San Francisco State University — where Lyle Prijoles earned his degree — is where the 1968 Third World Liberation Front strike established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the United States. That same struggle to tell your own history, in your own voice, is the current that ran through everything Lyle did in the sugar fields of Negros Occidental 58 years later.
Tagalog Word of the Day
Pakikipagkapwa (pa-ki-ki-pag-KAP-wa)
The deep, shared sense of self with the other — not sympathy from a distance, but solidarity through presence. Lyle Prijoles did not love the Filipino people from the safety of California. He practiced pakikipagkapwa by living, eating, and ultimately dying alongside the farmers of Negros Occidental. The NTF-ELCAC calls this terror-grooming. We call it kapwa.
My Light Turned On Before Martial Law
I was born in the Philippines in September 1966. Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law on September 21, 1972. I was five years old — old enough for impressions, too young for analysis. But my light had already turned on. By second grade, growing up on Carmine Street in SSS Village, Marikina, I was reading about Rizal, Bonifacio, and the Katipunan. The moral universe of the Philippine Revolution was already mine before I had the adult language for it.
My father told me things — about what Marcos was doing, about the machinery of fear and patronage being built across the islands. Not as political lecture, but the way Filipino fathers of that generation spoke to their children: through story, through warning, through the quiet insistence that you understand the country you come from. He kept telling those stories after we migrated to Chicago in 1976, and then in Vallejo. The stories did not stop at the border.
That formation is why, when I married my wife Tess, my only directive to her was: teach our kids Tagalog. Language is the first thing a diaspora loses, and it is the thing that keeps you tethered to everything that came before. Veronica, JianCarlo, and Francesca were born in the United States. But they are Filipino. That was non-negotiable. It is why I founded PinoyBuilt in 2011 — a platform for the diaspora to find itself, its history, its people. And it is why I am writing this article now.
It is also why I cannot — will not — take the AFP at their word on the Negros 19.
What I Learned From Tita Myrna
There is another family connection that shapes my reading of this story, and it runs through my late wife Tess.
Tess's uncle, Tony Baluyut, was married to Myrna de Vega-Baluyut. Tita Myrna is the sister of Guillermo Vinluan de Vega — known as Gimo — who served as Ferdinand Marcos's chairman of the Board of Censors for Motion Pictures from the late 1960s until his assassination inside Malacañang Palace on October 27, 1975. With the rank of cabinet secretary, Gimo was Marcos's chief censor — helping build the apparatus of social control that made Martial Law livable for those who served it, deciding what Filipinos could see, hear, and think.
Since 1999, Tita Myrna and I have seen each other at family gatherings over the years. She would tell her stories. One I never forgot: she held a senior position at the Bureau of Customs. And Tito Tony, she would say with quiet satisfaction, did not have to work because of it.
I am not saying Tita Myrna is a bad person. Families are complicated, and most people navigate the systems they are born into. But I have sat at tables where the benefits of Marcos-era connections were spoken of without shame. I know what Philippine state patronage looks like from the inside — not from a history book, but from a holiday gathering. When the AFP today insists that 19 people killed in a so-called 12-hour firefight — including two American citizens, a student activist, and a community journalist — were all armed combatants, I reach for the framework my own family history gave me: Philippine state institutions have lied before. They have decorated the people who carried out those lies. The ones who suffer are almost always the ones who had the least.
— Marienne Cuison Prijoles
Who Was Lyle Prijoles
Lyle Prijoles was 40 years old. He grew up embedded in the California Fil-Am community — his family owned a Filipino restaurant, he moved through collegiate student organizations, local arts, and cultural work with the ease of someone who had been doing it his whole life. He was an alumnus of San Francisco State University and a County Council member of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP), one of the most respected Fil-Am human rights organizations in the country. He spent two decades building the diaspora connection between the Bay Area, San Diego, and the homeland he clearly loved.
In March 2026, he traveled to Negros Occidental with fellow advocate Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, 26, to do what generations of Fil-Am activists have done before them: practice pakikipagkapwa — the refusal to love your people from a safe distance. BAYAN USA's Aidan Bonifacio put it plainly: Prijoles was "immersing with communities in Negros at the time to learn first-hand their daily hardships as farmers, and their struggle for land and justice... Lyle knew that the stories of the Filipino community reached much further than California, and even beyond the United States."
On April 19, the Philippine Army killed him for it. Or — in the AFP's telling — encountered him in a 12-hour firefight in which only one government soldier was injured and 24 firearms were recovered from 19 dead bodies. Make of that arithmetic what you will.
The Land and the Gun
Negros Occidental is not a mystery. It is one of the most structurally volatile regions in Philippine economic geography — a sugar economy dominated by haciendas, where landlessness is not an accident but a design. The New People's Army has operated there for decades because the conditions that produce insurgency — poverty, dispossession, impunity — have never been resolved. They have only been militarized.
Following former President Rodrigo Duterte's Memorandum Order No. 32 in 2018 — which deployed extra military forces to Negros under the banner of suppressing "lawless violence" — human rights organizations documented a sharp escalation in killings targeting farmers, activists, and organizers. The red-tagging playbook: brand civilian activists as communist terrorists, eliminate them, close the case. The NTF-ELCAC confirmed the identities of Prijoles and Sorem while simultaneously issuing a warning to Fil-Ams against "terror-grooming" by left-wing activist groups.
They are calling pakikipagkapwa terror-grooming. They are calling a man who ate with farmers and listened to their stories a combatant. And they handed out medals. Meanwhile, drone footage posted online — and later deleted — allegedly showed an NPA member alive and incapacitated before being killed. Demands for an independent fact-finding mission have been blocked by the military. The Philippine Commission on Human Rights is investigating, and lawmakers including Congresswoman Leila de Lima have called for immediate accountability.
Across the Pacific, Filipino American advocates — including close friends of Prijoles who were actively lobbying to halt U.S. military and monetary aid to the Philippines — are asking the question Washington has refused to answer: are American tax dollars funding the AFP's operations against U.S. citizens? The silence from the U.S. government has been deafening.
Yenyen's Words Are the Record
Marienne Cuison Prijoles is not asking for sympathy. She is asking for accountability. Speaking from the Philippines in the days after April 19, she said: "I do not believe the AFP or police — how can I believe the very entities that murdered my husband? How can the AFP claim victory when 19 people were killed and no explanation was given to the families? There are clear violations of human rights and international humanitarian law."
And this — the line that will stay with me: her husband "died doing what he did best, being with the people and learning from them."
I have known Yenyen as the daughter of Cynthia, as a cousin's cousin, as the young woman at her debut, at Cynthia's 60th birthday party, at family gatherings where the room was always too loud and never loud enough. I knew she was an activist. I was impressed by it — genuinely inspired by her commitment and Lyle's, by the love of the Philippines that ran through everything they were building together. I had meant to contact her about writing for PinoyBuilt. Her voice, her work, her grounded, first-person connection to Philippine human rights — that is exactly what this platform needs.
I am making that contact now under circumstances I would give anything to undo.
A Message for Yenyen
Marienne — before April 19 changed everything, I had been meaning to reach out to you about writing for PinoyBuilt. Your voice, your work, and your love of the Philippines are exactly what this platform was built to amplify. The invitation stands. Whenever you are ready, we are here — and we would be honored to give your words a home in the Filipino-American community that knows you, loves you, and stands with you now.
— Jonjo (J.F.R. Perseveranda), Founder and Publisher, PinoyBuilt
To the Prijoles and Angeles-Cuison Families
To Marienne. To the Prijoles family. To Cynthia and the entire Angeles-Cuison family — you are family to me, across the miles and the years. My deepest condolences on the loss of Lyle. What he practiced in the fields of Negros was not terror. It was love of his people — the most Filipino thing a person can do. And what Yenyen is demanding in his name is not politics. It is justice. It is right. PinoyBuilt stands with you, fully and without reservation.
Sources
- Channel News Asia — Philippines: US citizens killed in Negros unrest (2026)
- KTVU Fox 2 — Hayward human rights activist among 19 shot, killed in Philippines
- Asia News Network — US-based activists seek probe into clash that killed 2 Filipino Americans
- Inquirer.net USA — Fil-Am advocates mourn lives lost in Negros clash, call for justice
- Communications Workers of America — Statement on the killing of 19 people by Philippines Armed Forces
- Action Network — Justice for the Negros 19: Stop the Killings in the Philippines (petition)
- Inkstick Media — Why Is the US Silent About a Deadly Massacre in the Philippines?
- Bulatlat — Remembering the massacre victims (May 13, 2026)
Help Us Become the #1 Filipino-American Media Platform in the U.S.
PinoyBuilt is built by the community, for the community. If this article meant something to you — if it made you proud, informed, or connected — we need your help to reach every kababayan out there.
💬 Drop a comment below — share what Lyle's story means to you, and what justice looks like for the Negros 19.
📲 Text this article to a friend, a tita, a teammate — anyone who needs to see this.
📣 Share it on your socials — every share brings us closer.
4.6 million Filipinos in the U.S. One platform telling our stories. Salamat, kababayan.
Founder & Editor
J.F.R. Perseveranda
J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
Comments
Post a Comment
Hi! Thank you for dropping by. Please leave us a comment. Sige na!