Activists suspect that the increasing number of abductions of political activists in the past few months suggests a possible shift in strategy by state security forces. This strategy, they said, designed to blunt the international outrage generated by the extrajudicial killings but at the same time continue with the campaign to, as one activist put it, strike fear in the hearts of government critics.
By Carlos H. Conde
Davao Today
MANILA — Berlin Guerrero has been an activist for much of his adult life. Aside from being a pastor for a Protestant church in Laguna, a province just south of Manila, he has also been involved in protests and helping to organize Bayan Muna, the Philippiness largest leftist party.
But nothing prepared him for what happened on May 27. He had just attended a service late afternoon that day when a van without plates cut his path. Several men got out and, despite his pleas for a warrant of arrest, dragged him to the vehicle and sped away, leaving behind Guerreros horrified wife and children.
In the next 12 hours, Guerrero recounted in a statement he released three days later, the pastor was tortured and accused of being a communist.
Guerreros abduction and his claims of subsequent torture highlighted what human-rights groups consider as a resurgence of enforced disappearances and torture in the Philippines. Activists suspect that the increasing number of abductions in the past few months suggests a possible shift in strategy by state security forces designed to blunt the international outrage generated by the extrajudicial killings but at the same time continue with the campaign to, as one activist put it, strike fear in the hearts of government critics.
Nearly 900 people have been summarily executed since Arroyo took power in 2001, according to the human-rights group Karapatan. In recent months, the killings have generated intense international attention, embarrassing the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
The perpetrators have resorted to quiet abductions instead of high-profile assassinations, said Renato Reyes Jr., secretary-general of Bayan, an alliance of leftist groups. Abductions are on the rise, he said. There were more abductions than killings in the last three months.
In May alone, according to Desaparecidos, a group of relatives of the disappeared, 10 activists including Guerrero were abducted allegedly by military agents. Two of them turned up dead.
Enforced disappearances was widely used by the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos from the 70s up to his ouster in 1986. Desaparecidos, the group of families of the disappeared, said more then 1,500 activists and government critics were abducted during the Marcos regime.
The first documented desaparecido was Charlie del Rosario, a leader of a youth organization who was abducted by suspected military agents in 1971. He was never found.
According to the group, the abductions continued in the regimes after Aquino but has been increasing since 2001, the year Arroyo took power in a military-backed civilian uprising.
According to Desaparecidos, the number of documented abductions has increased, from seven in 2001 to 28 in 2004, the year the Arroyo administration was beginning to be besieged by anti-government protests due to allegations that Arroyo rigged the 2004 presidential elections.
The number of victims went up to 50 in 2005 and 75 in 2006. So far this year, there were 19 such disappearances.
A number of the disappeared in the present administration are Filipino Muslims who were abducted on the mere suspicion that they were terrorists, said Karapatan, a human-rights group.
Moreover, perhaps reflecting the continuing agrarian unrest in the countryside, where a communist movement fueled by poverty and landlessness persists in the last three decades, most of the victims of disappearances 106 of the 198, according to Desaparecidos — are farmers and workers.
And most of these abductions occurred in regions such as Central Luzon, Southern Tagalong, Eastern Visayas and Southern Mindanao — that are among the most militarized in the country.
It now appears that abduction, torture and salvaging is the method of choice in the persisting terror against the people and critics of the government, said Eman Villanueva, co-convenor of the Hongkong Campaign for the Advancement of Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines, which sent a team to the Philippines earlier this year to investigate the political killings. “This is so reminiscent of the martial-law years,” Villanueva said.
Extrajudicial Killings
