2025 YEARENDER
People rise up again and protests flood the streets in 2025. It is a year that saw the rift widened not just between the ruling dynasties, but also the divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Injustice was seen in floods that ravaged cities and villages amidst corruption of contractors and politicians. Human rights score victories against trumped up charges. Issues in Davao City are brought up — floods, public transportation, human rights, good governance and accountability. Our stories reflect the changing tides of 2025.
DAVAO CITY, Philippines – In a year when human rights defenders across the nation scored legal victories with courts dismissing trumped-up charges against them, the Court of Appeals (CA) decision to uphold the conviction of the Talaingod 13 strikes hard on their hope for justice.
On December 16, the Court of Appeals upheld the Tagum City decision released last July 2024 that found members of a solidarity mission in 2018 guilty of child abuse when they protected schoolchildren fleeing after they were driven out of the Salugpongan Community Learning Center in Barangay Palma Gil in Talaingod.
The decision raised questions from human rights and indigenous peoples advocates as the CA convicted teachers and human rights defenders including former ACT Teachers Party-list Representative France Castro, former Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo, Salugpongan school administrator Ma. Eugenia Victoria Nolasco, and their school teachers and staff Jesus Madamo, Meriro Poquita, Maricel Andagkit, Marcial Rendon, Marianie Aga, Jenevive Paraba, Nerhaya Tallada, Ma. Concepcion Ibarra, Nerfa Awing, and Wingwing Daunsay.
The Talaingod 13 will appeal its case to the Supreme Court as groups called the decision “unfair” for “weaponizing the law” against indigenous peoples.
NTF-ELCAC’s hand
Katribu Kalipunan ng Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas (KAMP), an alliance of the country’s indigenous peoples, went further and slam the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) which “institutionalized red-tagging, harassment, and attacks against Indigenous Peoples and Moro communities.”
The group pointed out how the task force, which was formed in 2018, has persistently tagged Lumad schools such as Salugpongan as fronts of the New People’s Army, and influenced the Department of Education to discontinue the permits of the schools in 2018.
Beverly Longid, KAMP convener, sees the hand of NTF-ELCAC in the prosecution against the Talaingod 13.
The prosecution was led by indigenous groups represented by lawyer Israelito Torreon, who is the legal counsel of preacher Apollo Quiboloy now facing human trafficking and sexual abuse charges. Quiboloy at one time provided airtime in his sequestered TV broadcast station to NTF-ELCAC.
“What the NTF-ELCAC now seeks to persecute is not just activism and dissent, but also solidarity,” Longid said in a statement last year after the Tagum court decision. “The unjust conviction of Teacher France Castro, Ka Satur Ocampo, and other advocates is not justice—it criminalizes compassion.”
Indigenous rights and environmental lawyer and professor Antonio La Viña also noted how the previous Duterte administration has red-tagged the schools “often without credible evidence and without due process.”
Longid, who is also convener of the Defend Talaingod 13 Network, said they will continue to seek justice to stop the narratives that malign the indigenous peoples and their advocates.
“We have to bring out the narrative: the Lumad communities suffered incessant bombing, hamleting, and some were killed. Their schools forcibly closed and paramilitary groups swarmed to threaten them.”
“inverted reality”
La Viña, in an opinion column he wrote for Rappler, said the prosecution “inverted reality”.
“Children who had fled fear and insecurity were portrayed as kidnap victims. Parents who testified that their children left voluntarily were sidelined. The broader context of militarization, school closures, and official hostility to Lumad education was treated as irrelevant,” the human rights lawyer wrote.
La Viña will be representing the Talaingod 13 in their appeal to the Supreme Court, as he said the courts should look at how the law was used in the instance of the Talaingod 13.
“Legality does not always mean justice. Law can be applied in ways that are formally correct yet morally hollow, especially when cases are shaped by power, fear, and institutional bias,” he points out.
He noted that courts should have “listened downward” to the experience of the indigenous peoples more than the narratives of the prosecution consisting of the police and military.
Testimonies and interviews from the schoolchildren revealed how they were forced by soldiers and paramilitary to leave their school village on that night and had to walk for three hours, uncertain of where they were heading. A student said they were fortunate to be able to contact the solidarity mission who rescued them. https://news.mongabay.com/2024/12/in-the-philippines-persecuted-lumads-push-for-indigenous-schools-to-be-reopened/
Castro said the decision seems to absolve the military and paramilitary which were the ones who have harassed the Lumad school teachers and students. She noted that during their solidarity mission, they were informed of the harassment that happened in the school in Brgy. Palma Gil.
“This is unacceptable. This is heavy on my part as a teacher,” Castro said in a press conference with the Defend Talaingod 13 Network. “The Lumad students and volunteer teachers were harassed, suffered from food blockade, and even to the point they had to look for sanctuary. It (was) utmost priority that time to rescue them.”
What now, education?
La Viña also pointed out that years after the Lumad schools were closed, none of them have been re-opened. Former Salugpongan students claimed that many schoolchildren in their villages find it difficult to trek to DepEd schools given their condition of poverty and presence of the paramilitary.
The Save Our Schools said the closure of many Lumad schools in Mindanao have impacted 10,000 Lumad school children.
La Viña said the public must understand that the Lumad schools, created along the support of NGOs and religious groups, addressed education gaps in the rural areas, and complied with international and national laws that uphold the indigenous peoples’ rights to education. The rise of Lumad schools was permitted under DepEd’s Alternative Learning System under then education secretary Bro. Arman Luistro.
“Education was treated not as a right to be fulfilled but as a threat to be eliminated,” he said.
As 2026 will find the Talaingod 13 case challenged in the Supreme Court, La Viña issues a challenge to the current education secretary Sonny Angara for next year to look into this situation and “realign policy” back to upholding indigenous peoples’ right to education.(davaotoday.com)
