MANILA - Political activist Cathy Alcantara was gunned down by unidentified
assailants last December 5, outside the resort where she had helped to
organize a conference on farmers’ rights.
Two months later, the lifeless body of her activist friend, 19-year-old
Audie Lucero, was found in a remote rice field. Lucero was last seen
surrounded by police officers and soldiers in a hospital lobby, inexplicably
crying.
Annaliza Abanador-Gandia, another left-leaning activist, had frequently
marched with the two victims, often at the forefront of demonstrations
calling for various sorts of political change, including the ouster of
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, an end to US military exercises in the
Philippines, and overhaul of the World Trade Organization’s free-trade
policies.
On May 18, it was Abanador-Gandia’s turn to die. It’s unclear exactly what
happened, because she was alone inside her shop that night. Her body was
found slumped on a table, eight bullets through her face, chest and stomach.
The gunpowder found on her face indicated that she had been shot at
point-blank range.
All three victims were active organizers of the Movement for National
Democracy (KPD), a left-leaning umbrella grouping of trade unions, farmers’
and fishermen’s organizations, and women’s and youth groups, that has seen
two more of its members shot and killed in provincial areas this year.
They are the latest victims in a creeping and escalating killing spree of
left-leaning political activists in the Philippines. Over the past two
months, at least 18 activists have been murdered by unidentified assailants
in various areas of the country - an average of two killings per week. At no
other time in the KPD’s nearly 10-year history have so many of their members
been assassinated.
The KPD is just one of many left-leaning groups now under shadowy assault.
UNORKA (Ugnayan ng mga Nagsasariling Lokal na Organisasyon sa Kanayunan, or
National Coordination of Autonomous Local Rural People’s Organizations), a
farmers’ group that is part of the “Fight of the Masses” coalition, is now
pushing for a “transitional revolutionary government” to replace Arroyo. So
far, no fewer than 13 of UNORKA’s leaders have been killed. The group’s
national secretary general was shot dead on April 24.
Task Force Mapalad (TFM), another peasants’ group that has been pushing for
land reform in Visayas and Mindanao, has seen at least eight of its
farmer-leaders killed since 2001, the last one felled in May 2005. Lani
Factor, the group’s campaign coordinator, refers to the escalating violence
against activists as the Philippines’ “killing season”.
The majority of the victims belong to the Bayan Muna group, which has
representation in parliament and which since 2001 counts as many as 95 of
its local leaders inexplicably killed. Robert de Castro, the group’s
secretary general, was quoted saying in the local press that local leaders
“are being killed like chickens ... They are dropping dead like flies.” [1]
Keeping track of the onslaught has not been easy. Human-rights organizations
as a rule only count those cases that are reported to them, and each
maintains separate lists. According to a running tally by the Philippine
Daily Inquirer newspaper, the latest killings bring the total number of
activists slain since Arroyo seized power in 2001 to 224. The human-rights
group Karapatan estimates that figure much higher, at 601. Nearly all of the
cases remain unresolved. An additional 140 activists are considered
“disappeared” and remain missing. [2] And the number is growing by the week.
TROUBLE IN THE PROVINCES
Fallen activist Abanador-Gandia’s province falls under the command of
Major-General Jovito Palparan, the most controversial military official in
the Philippines. Widely dubbed “the executioner” by his critics, Palparan
stands accused of perpetrating a rash of killings and disappearances of
leftist activists during his previous postings in Samar and Mindoro
provinces.
He has consistently denied the charges, saying on record, "I can smile and
laugh about it." At the same time, he has also gone on record to say that
the extrajudicial killings are “helping” the armed forces of the Philippines
get rid of those who instigate people to fight against the government. [3]
To him, the deaths of activists are just “small sacrifices” in the
military’s anti-insurgency campaign. [4]
“We’ve got to hate the movement,” Palparan said in a recent interview with
Newsbreak magazine. “We’ve got to have that fighting stand.” [5]
Palparan’s provocative statements have caused a lightning rod of criticism.
But increasingly, his is not a lone voice in the wilderness. His military
superiors have a quiet way of expressing their agreement with Palaparan’s
tactics: through promotion. Palparan is elevating through the military’s
ranks and was recently bestowed the Distinguished Service Star medal for his
“eminently meritorious and valuable service”.
Government executive secretary Eduardo Ermita, himself a former military
official, has hailed Palparan as a “good officer”, saying his detractors
automatically blame him for violent incidents without corroborating
evidence.
Yet Palparan’s fighting mood reflects a growing edginess in the military.
"The enemy that we confronted more than three decades ago is the same enemy
that we are confronting today, only more scheming and obviously much more
dangerous," wrote Lieutenant-General Romeo Dominguez in his recent book
Trinity of War: The Grand Design of the CPP/NPA/NDF (Communist Party of the
Philippines/New People’s Army/National Democratic Front).
Published by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the book has become
one of the military’s “know your enemy” guidebooks, as indicated in a recent
military Powerpoint presentation produced by the AFP top brass and
circulated among soldiers. The volume discusses how the leftist movement has
evolved since the late 1940s, how the Communist Party of the Philippines
(CPP) took over its mantle beginning in the 1960s, and how it has morphed
and splintered along ideological and tactical lines since the 1980s.
Complete with tables and flow charts, the book includes a comprehensive list
of what it calls the "communist terrorists’ legal sectoral front
organizations" - down to the provincial level - including the names and top
leaders of those groups that have broken away from the CPP’s mainstream or
that have only emerged in recent years.
Despite all the attention given to the Abu Sayyaf rebel movement in past
years, "the single greatest threat to the Philippine state continues to come
from the CPP/NPA", concludes Zachary Abuza, an expert with the
congressionally funded US Institute of Peace, who has studied the various
leftist and Moro secessionist groups fighting against the government in the
Philippines. [6]
This threat has not been lost on the military and right-wing politicians,
who have grown increasingly alarmed by the left’s resurgence. The strength
of the NPA was estimated at about 25,000 fighters during the martial-law
period in the 1970s, dwindled to about 8,000 in the 1990s, and is reportedly
on the upswing again. In recent months, the NPA has launched a series of
military offensives across the country. Apart from the NPA, a number of
smaller left-wing armed groups operate in remote provincial areas.
The Philippines’ right has also been spooked by the left’s recent success in
democratic elections. When the formal institutions of democracy were
restored after the 1986 “people power” uprising, the left was split between
those who still saw the armed struggle as primary and those who wanted to
contest power through electoral processes. The CPP initially boycotted the
general elections that paved the way for Corazon Aquino’s presidency.
While carrying on with what it calls the “protracted people’s war”, the CPP
eventually decided to participate after the introduction of the party-list
system, a measure that reserved a portion of seats in Congress to
under-represented and marginalized sectors of society. Other leftist groups
have abandoned armed struggle altogether, choosing to focus on elections and
public campaigns to bring about political change.
In the last elections, left-leaning candidates won 11 of the 24 party-list
seats filled. Though this proportion represents little more than 5% of the
total national vote, the left’s visibility in public debates has been
disproportionately high compared with their actual number of parliamentary
seats. On the streets, where in the Philippines political battles are
frequently waged, only the broad left has been able consistently to mobilize
people, albeit on a limited scale.
Military official Palparan has promised to "completely clear his area of
responsibility of rebels before he retires in September this year". [7] It
is a vow endorsed by the country’s top civilian defense official, Avelino
Cruz, who has also said that the “communist insurgency” can be defeated in
“six to 10 years”. [8]
Cruz is confident that this goal could be attained through the ambitious
Philippine Defense Reform Program, a comprehensive plan to modernize and
upgrade the capacity of the armed forces to conduct "internal security
operations".
Intensifying its long-running involvement in the Philippines’
counter-insurgency campaign, the United States jointly designed the
Philippine Defense Reform Program with the Philippine military and is
funding half of its $370 million budget. Washington has designated the
CPP/NPA and the Alex Boncayao Brigade, a group that broke away from the NPA,
as “foreign terrorist organizations”.
But while the military has always considered the armed leftist groups to be
a major military threat, and offensives and counter-offensives were launched
way before Arroyo took office, there has recently been one significant shift
in the mindset of key military officials: an increasing refusal to
distinguish between armed and unarmed leftists, between those who are in the
underground guerrilla movement and those who are in the open legal struggle.
The boundary, at least in the eyes of certain military and civilian
officials, simply does not exist.
This attitude is best summed up by Palparan’s stock reply whenever he’s
reminded that the activists who are killed are unarmed and participate in
legal mass organizations: "They’re legal but they’re doing illegal
activities." [9] The decision to decriminalize the communists in 1994 was a
bad idea, says Palparan, adding that he would be “happy” to have it
restored. The Trinity of War stresses - in bold typeface - that, while the
CPP still considers parliamentary struggles secondary to the armed struggle,
both struggles are “complementary, interrelated, and interactive”.
This outlook is shared by the civilian leadership. "We encourage communism
as well as socialism as a party just like those in Europe," said
presidential chief of staff Michael Defensor. "What we do not want is when
they preach armed revolution.“According to National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales,”What we are
fighting today is no longer the classic guerrilla warfare. They have
infiltrated and entered our democratic process." He has railed against how
the left’s elected parliamentarians are taking advantage of their office to
advance the revolution. He has constantly complained about how Bayan Muna
members “moonlight” as NPA fighters and how they are, to paraphrase
Palparan, straddling both sides of what the government defines to be legal
and illegal activities.
’WE HATE COMMUNISTS’
It’s obviously a charge that those who have been killed will not have the
opportunity to contest. Most of the victims belonged to legal leftist or
left-leaning organizations enumerated in the AFP’s list of alleged “front”
organizations. As a recent Amnesty International report puts it, "Increased
killing in particular provinces were reportedly linked to the public
labeling of leftist groups as NPA front organizations by local AFP
commanders."
Prior to activist Abanador-Gandia’s killing, for instance, police and
military officials in Bataan had ominously told KPD members, "We already
know who you are. We know who’s really behind you. We know all of you."
Other activists belong to organizations that are locked in bitter land
disputes with powerful landlords who, aided by the state’s tacit consent or
lack of political will, have historically used thugs to eliminate peasants
pushing for land reform. With their lands now subject to expropriation,
these landlords, said TFM campaign coordinator Factor, have been acting like
“mad, rabid dogs unleashed”.
Most of the killings are concentrated in areas of increased militarization
and intensified counter-insurgency operations. In Palparan’s Central Luzon,
more than 50 leftists have been killed, or nearly a quarter of the total 224
killings compiled by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. In that region, the
military has embedded itself in 10-man detachments in various villages,
conducting door-to-door interrogations and nightly patrols.
They have even taken to organizing anti-communist workshops and mobilizing
protest rallies in support of the military. Participants of these rallies
say they were told to make placards saying, “We hate communists.” Negros,
where a number of the killings are concentrated, is another province where
the military has launched what the region’s military chief,
Lieutenant-General Samuel Bagasin has described as “decisive operations”.
The victims are apparently not chosen at random. Almost all of those that
have been executed are known leaders or organizers who actively worked on
the ground and recruited new members into their organizations. The
operations are in most cases surgical and well targeted. And while
provincial and municipal-level organizers were being picked off, national
leaders are also being persecuted.
Facing rebellion charges, at least one congressman from Anakpawis remains in
detention, while five others camped out in Congress for two months to elude
arrest. Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales has told them to "go back to the
mountains where they belong", [10] an allusion to where the CPP has
historically pitched its base camps.
Activist Factor suspects that the calculated elimination of the upper
echelons of his organization is an attempt to terrorize members and scare
off potential recruits in the hope of slowly debilitating the movement. One
local columnist has called it a “kill one, scare 100” tactic. [11] That the
activists are not being killed en masse, but rather at a slow-motion rate of
one every other day, seems calculated to maximize the chilling effect while
also minimizing public outrage.
In a number of cases, witnesses have pointed directly to uniformed soldiers,
policemen, or known paramilitary or vigilante groups as the assailants. In
many other cases, the victims were shot dead by a pair of motorcycle-riding
masked men.
Observers point out that this manner of killing is reminiscent of the period
in the late 1980s when, at the height of the “total war” waged by the Aquino
government against the left, masked motorcycle-riding men also shot and
killed activists across the country. According to the human-rights group
Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, up to 585 were killed during that
orgy of extrajudicial violence.
PROUD HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD
The government publicly views the widespread killing of activists as just a
sad coincidence. There is no set pattern and the killings are unrelated,
officials contend. Accusations against state security officials are
routinely shrugged off.
A police spokesman has claimed that if there’s any pattern at all, it’s just
part of the normal crime-rate cycle. "Sometimes it falls, sometimes it goes
up," Philippine National Police spokesman Samuel Pagdilao was quoted as
saying about the spate of activist killings. [12]
State officials have repeatedly insisted that there’s no state-sanctioned
crackdown on activists. "We have nothing to hide about, and we are proud of
our human-rights record," press secretary Ignacio Bunye recently said.
Earlier, Arroyo called accusations of human-rights violations “an insult” to
the military.
Other high-ranking officials have claimed that if anyone is to blame, it’s
the activists themselves. According to this view, the revolution is once
again devouring its own children - just as it did in the 1980s when, in an
operation that has since been acknowledged by the CPP leadership, at least
2,000 party members were ordered killed as suspected government
infiltrators.
But those on the left no longer aligned with the CPP and who have been
openly critical of its anti-infiltration campaign have come out to dismiss
this charge as both opportunistic and ludicrous. Robert Francis Garcia,
secretary general of the Peace Advocates for Truth, Healing and Justice, an
organization of survivors, relatives and friends of victims of the CPP’s
past internal purge, believes that the government is "capitalizing on the
issue to hammer down the CPP/NPA".
Garcia points out that the manner by which the CPP’s purge was carried out
then bears little resemblance to how activists are being killed nowadays.
Then, Garcia recalls, suspected infiltrators were arrested, detained and
interrogated by party agents - they were not executed summarily in public as
is happening now.
Even an officially constituted police task force has recently identified
soldiers and paramilitary forces as suspects in at least some of the
killings. [13] The normally timid Commission on Human Rights (CHR), an
independent constitutional body, has stated that the "pattern of complaints
that come to us show members of the armed forces and the PNP [Philippine
National Police] as suspects". Assuming that the government is not behind
the many unresolved killings, the commission points out that it still has a
duty to solve and prevent them.
Unfortunately, for many of the cases, there are no smoking guns, and the
masterminds are not in the habit of giving receipts to their hired
assassins. But even a cursory survey of the killings over recent months
makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is an ongoing
systematic and deliberate mission to terrorize - if not exterminate - the
left being carried out by those who have both the motive and means to do so.
Even if one assumes that a portion of the killings could be explained away
as the result of personal grudges or of turf wars among different armed
leftist factions, the vast majority of the cases paint an alarming pattern.
A POOR RECORD
Arroyo’s administration is turning out to be the most repressive regime in
the Philippines since Ferdinand Marcos’ corrupt authoritarian rule.
According to the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, about 3,400 people
were killed and more than 700 disappeared during Marcos’ 14-year
dictatorship.
According to Senator Manny Villar, citing figures provided by the CHR,
Arroyo’s five-year term has already eclipsed all three previous presidents’
combined 11-year tenure in terms of the number of people executed, tortured,
or illegally detained.
This is not to say that all was well before Arroyo came to power. Previous
administrations also tallied their fair share of rights violations. But as
Max de Mesa, the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates chair and
longtime human-rights activist, points out, the total number of cases of
rights violations under Arroyo should not be compared as separate from those
of her predecessors.
Arroyo’s government, he says, is still obliged to resolve those past
violations - something her government has so far wholly failed to do. As
such, the totals under the previous regimes should be added to that under
Arroyo, he contends.
At the beginning of Arroyo’s term, most of the victims were Muslim
civilians, who were often rounded up and detained in droves, caught up in
the government’s US-backed “war on terror”. In one particularly shocking
episode, caught live on national television in March last year, the
country’s highest-ranking security officials, with apparent approval from
the president, supervised the storming of a prison after suspected Abu
Sayyaf leaders being held there mounted an uprising.
Despite being unarmed and secured against a wall, 26 detainees were shot
dead. Human-rights groups called the incident a “massacre” and the CHR has
since endorsed their recommendation to file murder charges against the
officials.
In heavily militarized Sulu in the southern Philippines, where the military
has been pursuing the Abu Sayyaf group, there have been numerous allegations
of serious human-rights violations by the armed forces, including the
February 2005 massacre of a family, which finally provoked the Moro National
Liberation Front to recommence attacking government forces.
Disappearances, beheadings, and summary executions have once again become
the norm in the area. But the government’s documented abuses have not been
given the same attention as the atrocities committed by the Abu Sayyaf.
Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the government’s failure to protect
and guarantee civil liberties has been the unbridled killing of journalists.
Freedom of the press has never come at a higher price for at least 42
journalists who have been killed since Arroyo took power - or about half of
the estimated 79 killed since 1986. This record prompted the US-based
Committee to Protect Journalists to rank the Philippines in 2005 as the
“most murderous” country for journalists in the world next to Iraq. Some
have contested that label, saying the country is in a league of its own;
Iraq, after all, is a war zone.
While local bosses and criminal elements, and not state agents, are likely
to be behind many of the journalists’ killings, the government’s tepid
response shows its inability - or unwillingness - to protect the press.
Instead of working to bring the killers to justice, Secretary of Justice
Raul Gonzales has recently suggested that media practitioners should arm
themselves in self-defense. He also implied that the killings may have
nothing to do with press freedom. "There are media men killed in drinking
sprees or because of a woman," Gonzalez recently said.
While human-rights violations have steadily mounted, the situation has taken
a sharp turn for the worse after Arroyo, facing widespread calls for her
ouster from across the political spectrum, began to use more brazenly
coercive measures to retain her grip on power. For instance, she has banned
public demonstrations and authorized the use of force to disperse them. She
has gagged public officials from testifying in congressional hearings.
Finally, on February 24, she declared a “state of national emergency”. This
was interpreted by police and military officials as carte blanche to conduct
arrests without warrants and to raid and intimidate media entities. While
the “state of emergency” was quickly lifted - and was recently declared
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court - human-rights violations have not
stopped; rather, they have spiked.
Last week, five leaders of the Union of the Masses for Democracy and Justice
(UMDJ), a group identified with imprisoned former president Joseph Estrada,
were abducted in broad daylight - not in the countryside but in the capital
Manila - and were missing for about two days. Pressed whether the military
had arrested the UMDJ leaders, executive secretary Eduardo Ermita denied the
allegations and emphatically repeated the government’s standard line, "They
are automatically pointing at the administration as the culprit, which is
unfair."
But only two hours later, a military spokesperson confirmed that the five
were indeed arrested and detained by intelligence agents. It was the same
military spokesperson who, just the day before, also disavowed any knowledge
of the five’s whereabouts. Accused of being NPA infiltrators plotting to
assassinate the president and a number of cabinet members, the detainees
were later released because of “insufficient evidence”.
Such cases illustrate that the state is conducting commando-style operations
against activists and casts doubts on its claims that it has not been
involved in unresolved killings and disappearances.
THINKING ABOUT A REVOLUTION
In many ways, the recent wave of killings is a tragic reprise of previous
episodes in Philippine history. In 1946, leftist legislators were also
expelled from Congress and driven to the mountains. Death squads stalked the
Philippines’ countryside in the early 1950s and late 1980s. Newspaper
offices were routinely padlocked by the government during periods of martial
law. State-sponsored disappearances gave birth to a generation of orphans
and widows.
The escalating repression taking place now in the Philippines is no
coincidence. Twenty years since the end of the dictatorship and three
“people’s power” uprisings later, Philippine society is hugely polarized.
If the recent killing spree signifies anything, it’s that the growing
coercion and the abandonment of democratic rights portend the fraying of the
post-1986 political order, when the dictator Marcos was unceremoniously
thrown from power and democracy restored. What will replace those democratic
hopes, more than at any time in recent years, is a point of bitter political
contention.
The political crisis triggered by charges of electoral fraud and corruption
against Arroyo have brought these divisions clearly out in the open. In one
camp are those who want to salvage and carry on with what academics like to
call “oligarchic democracy” or “low-intensity democracy”, where ballots are
universally assured but food, jobs and housing are not.
On the other side of the debate are those who are struggling to move beyond
limited democracy and are working to change the system from both above and
underground. Over the past few months, these two sides have failed to oust
Arroyo and now face an impasse.
But as the intensifying militarization and repression signify, another camp
has moved to break the stalemate. Those who seek to roll back democracy and
push the country toward a more authoritarian, albeit nominally democratic,
system are again in the ascendant and clearly on the offensive.
For the ruling elites and conservatives from 1986, the formal institutions
of democracy - free and fair elections, a free press, the protection and
promotion of civil liberties - were then seen as the most effective way to
maintain their hold on power and wealth.
But as the Philippines’ massive marginalized population has increasingly
employed these institutions to challenge the status quo, sections of the
ruling class and military appear to have come to the conclusion that
democracy is a double-edged sword. Low-intensity democracy is once again
giving way to low-intensity warfare in the Philippines, while being
“underground” has taken on its old meaning.
“Nothing has changed,” said Lorena Paras, a former guerrilla fighter with
the NPA who surrendered to the government in 1997 and now tries to live a
quiet life at the foot of the Bataan Mountains. And yet for her, in reality
so much has changed: last September, she personally witnessed uniformed
military men drag away her husband, also a former NPA rebel.
His name has been added to the new list of the disappeared, and she, most
likely, to the list of new widows. Lorena says that her thoughts have
increasingly returned to the revolution she only recently left behind.#
Notes
1. Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 15, 2006
2. Associated Press, May 30, 2006
3. Philippine Daily Inquirer, October 28, 2005
4. Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 2, 2005
5. Newsbreak, April 29, 2006
6. Zachary Abuza, “Balik-Terrorism: The Return of the Abu Sayyaf”, Strategic
Studies monograph, September 2005
7. Newsbreak website, May 31, 2006
8. Reuters, May 18, 2005
9. Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 21, 2004
10. Philippine Star, May 9, 2006
11. Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 26, 2006
12. Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 25, 2006
13. Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 16, 2006