EARLY morning of Monday last week, a friend told me that 19 persons had been killed in an encounter near her childhood home in Negros. Surely it had to be exaggerated, I thought — or was it a massacre? There had been encounters in Negros in recent years with up to 10 killed, but 19? A staggering number, even for Negros.
What remains of the island’s five guerrilla fronts are “remnants” primarily engaged in liquidation of civilians. Last April 17, or two days before the fatal encounter, the New People’s Army Northern Negros — also known as the Roslyn Jean Pelle Command — mocked the 79th Infantry “Masaligan” Battalion in a statement: “#DiMasaligan79IB continues to bank on their fake encounters to support their claim that there are only seven “remnants” of the NPA left in Northern Negros.”
The mocking continues in the aftermath of the April 19 encounter. “The military’s account of the encounter is a study in calculated exaggeration. Of those who fell, only a small squad was composed of revolutionary fighters led by Roger “Ka Jhong” Fabillar,” the NPA Negros Island Command said in an April 23 statement. “The rest were civilians documenting a peasant activity, standing alongside farmers who are consistently pushed to the margins by landgrabbing and systemic neglect.”
Were the “civilians” simply at the wrong place at the wrong time? Were they combatants? Or were “civilians” and “revolutionary fighters” the two sides of the same coin, the former being the indispensable educators, organizers and propagandists of the insurgency?
Marvin Marquez, prominent youth leader in Cebu, was already a full-fledged non-combatant member of the NPA when he and activists from Cebu were killed in crossfire in Bohol in 2000. They were staying in the rebel camp. The public was told they were undergoing immersion in the community.
Cebu nursing graduate Rachelle Mae Palang was killed in Negros Oriental in 2008. The public was told that she was on a medical mission in the hinterlands. She was a firearms-carrying member of the NPA. The NPA even renamed the guerrilla front in her honor. Ericson Acosta, killed in Kabankalan City on Nov. 30, 2022, is still referred to as an “NDF consultant” despite the CPP’s identifying him as “an important leader of the CPP and NPA in Negros.” The deception is familiar.
A statement from the Office of the Student Regent of the University of the Philippines condemning “human rights violations” in Toboso before the identities of casualties were known raised suspicion that individuals connected with UP were among those killed. UP has produced a number of rebels over the years. There is deliberate recruitment among UP students, using national democratic student, youth and sectoral organizations to identify, groom and prepare recruits. Armed struggle and “martyrdom” are glorified if not romanticized. “UP Cebu has also produced revolutionary martyrs who embodied the call for armed resistance,” Tug-ani, the official student publication of UP Cebu, wrote on a Facebook post last March 29. The post described placards, seen on the UP Cebu Campus, of the underground organization Kabataang Makabayan, calling on the students to join the NPA. The placards were signed “Cheene.” The spokesperson of KM Negros uses the pseudonym “Cheene Dacalos.”
Previously, Tug-ani shared an essay about Dacalos, “the first martyr of UP Cebu,” who took “the road less traveled” by becoming a revolutionary. A road that, the article says, “is where true glory lies: to die in a brave way.” Dacalos died in an encounter in Ilog, Negros Occidental, on Sept. 14, 2021. IS, too, convinced young women to abandon their lives of relative comfort and seek ultimate purpose in sacrificing for the great revolution.
The UP Student Regent statement condemned the “militarization” of Negros. It blamed Memorandum Order 32, issued by Malacañang on Nov. 22, 2018, for “[facilitating] increased deployment of AFP forces since 2018” as it declared a “state of lawless violence” in Negros, among other areas. Before MO 32, there were ceasefires, peace talks and release of jailed top CPP-NPA leaders. Army troops were pulled out of Negros. The NPA wasted no time. A new front was activated in Negros in early 2018. The NPA Central Negros carried out at least 18 liquidations from January to October 2018. There was torching of heavy equipment and deadly ambushes. The government could hardly just look the other way.
That being said, the two installments of Oplan Sauron (Dec. 2018 and March 2019) were horrific. Insurgency-related atrocities, perpetrated by both NPA and anti-communist vigilantes, continued in a tit-for-tat fashion. There have been numerous encounters. But the April 19 encounter or whatever we think it was, was by far the deadliest among a long list of insurgency-related incidents.
Was the high number of casualties the result of a “give no quarter” military strategy (though some managed to escape the encounter site)? Or because of the difficulty of distinguishing between armed enemies and non-armed persons — enemy or not in a firefight? Our preexisting biases usually make us jump to conclusions without knowing all the facts, or select the facts that fit in the narrative we like. At the very least, let’s not deliberately deceive members of the public.
