By GERMELINA LACORTE
RETIRED Army general Jovito Palparan will be reinventing himself as a party-list representative in Congress, but his legacy of anti-communist crackdowns lives on in places like Compostela Valley, Sultan Kudarat and South Cotabato provinces in Mindanao where peasant and human rights leaders are being killed as the government intensifies counterinsurgency operations.
A total of 93 activists have been killed in southern Mindanao since President Arroyo came to power in 2001, the human rights group Karapatan said. At least five were shot dead in Compostela Valley in the last half of 2008 alone, all of them involved in fact-finding missions investigating military abuses against peasants in areas affected by military operations.
More recently, anti-mining activist Eliezer “Boy” Billanes was gunned down inside the public market in Koronadal City. Human rights advocates suspect his killing last March 9 had to do with a “security force” called Task Force Kitaco created recently under the Army’s 10th Infantry Division purportedly to protect the mining firm Xstrata operating in Kiblawan in Davao del Sur, Tampakan in South Cotabato and Columbio in Sultan Kudarat.
The Socsksargen chapter of Karapatan said it has a copy of the draft memorandum of agreement between the local government of the three towns, the mining company and the 10th Infantry Division, under which the Army would provide the training of the security force to be composed of soliders and Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Units and the Xstrata would finance it.
Maj. Gen. Reynaldo Mapagu, commanding officer of the 10th Infantry Division, said Xstrata had asked the Army to secure the area against the communist New People’s Army. “The effectiveness of the task force against the NPAs is now being felt by the enemy, kaya panay propaganda at paninira nila sa tropa (hence, the propaganda and verbal attacks against the troops),” he said.
The 10th Infantry Division operates in the Davao provinces, Compostela Valley, South Cotabato, Sarangani, eastern parts of North Cotabato and Sultan Kudarat, considered strongholds of the NPA. People in these areas, however, worry over how the division conducts its operations because of what they say is the presence of “Palparan Boys” in this military unit, said Kelly Delgado, Karapatan Southern Mindanao secretary general.
“Their framework in counterinsurgency has been influenced by Palparan,” Delgado said, referring to the “Palparan Boys.” “This is very alarming. His (Palparan’s) influence remains in the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines).”
Delgado said Col. Oscar Lactao, chief of Task Force Davao, for example, earned the moniker “Palparan of Leyte” when the troops he was directing as commanding officer of the 19th Infantry Battalion were implicated in the massacre of nine peasants, including four minors, in Kananga town in Leyte in April 2003. Two months after the massacre, President Arroyo sent Lactao to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas on a scholarship.
Karapatan now likens many areas in Southern Mindanao where the 10th Infantry Division operates to Samar, Leyte, Mindoro and Pampanga, provinces which experienced a spate of summary executions and disappearances of leftist leaders under Palparan’s watch as Army officer. It relates the killings to a document called Oplan Bantay Laya, a military campaign to end the communist insurgency by 2010.
Palparan, who was one of 29 sworn in last week following a Supreme Court decision that increased the number of party-list members in Congress, represents the party-list group called Bantay.
Human rights groups point to a growing trend of activists summarily executed in areas where the government’s fight against communist rebels is at its fiercest. This is particularly true in Compostela Valley, an area Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro recently described to the Davao media as “difficult” as far as the government’s war against insurgents is concerned and which at present has the largest concentration of troops in the country.
But Mapagu, who previously served as commanding officer of the Scout Rangers, the Army’s special anti-guerilla unit, denied it ever was a policy of the state to engage in the killings of activists, even those whose organizations are directly linked with the underground.
“We always tell our soldiers to observe discipline: ‘Let’s not give people ammunition to hit us, we have to strictly observe discipline, and the army is a well-disciplined organization,’” said Mapagu, who assumed his post in February. He dismissed the reported beatings and torture of farmers as “pure hearsay.”
Lactao said “legal organizations” are part of the rebel group’s “united front” and hence directly linked with the communist organization, but denied it is the military’s policy to target activists for summary killing.
“We should identify who are directly linked with the underground organization and then file appropriate charges against them,” he said.
Compostela Valley killings
On May 15 last year, the feast day of San Isidro, patron saint of farmers, Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas spokesperson Celso Pojas was gunned down by motorcycle-riding men while buying cigarettes at a sari-sari store near his office in Barangay Maa in Davao City.
Activist groups called the killing the “first salvo” of political killings related to Compostela Valley. Pojas was about to leave for a mission to Compostela Valley at the time.
Two months after Pojas was killed, Maximo Baranda, a leader of the Kilusang Mayo Uno, was killed in the riverside quarry in San Jose, Compostela town in Compostela Valley.
Then, barely a month later, Roel Dotarot, the coordinator of the party-list group Bayan Muna in Monkayo, was gunned down by men on motorcycle in Barangay Banlag in that gold-rich town.
Dotarot’s killing preceded the assassination of three more Bayan Muna coorodinators in Compostela Valley just four months: Danilo Cualbar, cluster coordinator in Compostela town; Rolando Antolihao, barangay coordinator of Kapalong town, killed four days after; and Isabelo Celing, barangay coordinator in Poblacion, Monkayo. Celing was killed in December.
All six victims of summary executions had one thing in common: They were helping peasants evacuate from areas affected by the militarization in Compostela Valley. Among those they were supposed to have helped were a couple and their newborn son who fled Sitio Bermuda in Compostela town on foot on the night of May 12 after the husband was allegedly beaten and tortured by soldiers 10 days earlier.
Most of the victims were also in the fact-finding teams to Baganga, Davao Oriental. Baganga was the site of increased armed encounters between the military and communist rebels, where eventual aerial bombardment by soldiers on villages forced civilians to flee.
They had also joined another relief and fact-finding mission in Crossing Taytayan in New Bataan, a town in Compostela Valley that the military has used as a “staging point” for its offensives against the NPA.
Interviews with survivors and victims’ relatives reveal a pattern of death threats, a period of surveillance, sometimes involving motorcycles or tinted vehicles with “fake” plate numbers parked near their houses or place of work, before attackers close in on their victims.
Leaders of activist groups often become wary when officials start issuing public statements branding them as communists and linking them with the armed movement waged by the NPA. They usually take these statements as death warrants.
But on May 15, Pojas threw caution to the wind. It was close to 6 a.m. and he was at the KMP office preparing for his immediate trip to Compostela where KMP members were fleeing their houses because of increased presence of soldiers in the area. Statements from the military the previous weeks had branded his group as a “legal front” of communists out to discredit the Army.
Pojas stirred his coffee, noticed he had run out of cigarettes, and asked his companions if they had any. When told they had none, he decided to go out to buy some.
Minutes after Pojas left his house, another KMP staff who was supposed to accompany him to Compostela heard gunshots and the peasant leader’s last cry for help. Pojas died of gunshot wounds in his ribs and left elbow.
Falling into a pattern
For years, Edil Gonzaga, spokesperson for Southern Mindanao of the transport group Transmission, has been living the life of the hunted. He has been followed around and said he can spot his pursuers easily.
Gonzaga said that during the May 12 transport strike that paralyzed Davao City, “suspicious” men were following Pojas. “I knew because I saw some of them pretending to join (the transport strike), but I can tell that they don’t belong. They kept an eye on him (Pojas),” he said.
Gonzaga said he had the feeling that Pojas was targeted to get killed that day. Friends made sure the peasant leader was never left alone.
Days before the transport strike, at the picket at the National Food Authority in Davao City, a box-type car with tinted windows was seen tailing Pojas. The same vehicle had followed him on several occasions, but bore different plate numbers.
Pojas’ brother said the peasant leader also received a text message that he would be killed on the feast day of the peasants. This turned out to be true.
Gonzales said Pojas became an easy target because he had fallen into a pattern. “He (Pojas) had this habit of taking cigarettes with his coffee. Then he always ran out (of cigarettes) and had to run to the store in the morning,” he said.
Worse, Pojas would go to the KMP office at the same hour almost every day, even sleeping there at times, just like what he did that fatal day.
The KMP had kept that office for seven years. In the last three years, staffmembers have spotted men on motorcycles with different plate numbers stalking around.
They also noticed a group of high students hanging out at a nearby videoke store taking pictures of people arriving at and leaving the KMP office with their camera phones. “I knew it because I once arrived at the gate, I happened to turn around and caught them in the act,” said an officemate of Pojas who declined to reveal his name because of threats to his life.
Storeowners in the neighborhood had also told friends that the KMP staff was “under surveillance.” Said Maypril Pangilinan, a staff of the indigenous peoples group Sagip who was close to Pojas: “Why would they say ‘it’s under surveillance’ if they don’t know it’s the military?”
Why farmers are killed
On April 28, 2008, Davao media reports quoted Maj. Medel Aguilar, the chief of the military’s Civil Relations Service, as saying that activist groups involved in the evacuation of peasants in Compostela and New Bataan towns were the “legal fronts” of the NPA. In a report published in Mindanao Times, Aguilar said bringing the farmers to the city to speak about alleged military atrocities was a strategy to “discredit” the 10th Infantry Division and “pressure the military” to stop the operation.
But the KMP had taken the lead in the evacuation because the military operations directly affected its members. “Those were their affiliate groups,” said a staff of Exodus for Peace, which was involved in relief operations. “It was KMP’s call.”
As the KMP spokesperson, Pojas had been voicing out the increasing difficulties of farmers as a result of soaring food prices and the declining value of the peso. He spoke about the need to break up the monopoly of land ownership and warned against the conversion of more rice lands into jathropa plantations, done at the expense of farmers.
On Jan. 22, 2008, remembering the 19 farmers killed 21 years ago in Mendiola for demanding agrarian reform, Pojas pointed out that farmers made up more than half of the victims of extrajudicial killings in the country.
Barely four months after he said this, Pojas joined the growing roster of summary killings.
(The author is a Davao journalist pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University’s Asian Center for Journalism. She submitted a version of this report to her Investigative Journalism class taught by VERA Files trustee Luz Rimban.)