HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Union Leader Was in RPA-ABB Hit List

Edwin Bargamento’s relatives relayed what the witness recounted: of how his uncle tried to flee for his life with the killers giving chase, firing at him again and again, missed shots kicking up the dirt around his feet, how he fell into a ditch he tried to leap over to get to the sparse cover of the surrounding canefields and how, finally, one of the gunmen pumped a final round into the back of his head to make sure he was dead.

BY JAIME ESPINA

Contributed to Bulatlat

BACOLOD CITY – Edwin Bargamento must have been eager to get home to Hacienda Emma, Barangay Tortosa, Manapla, late in the afternoon of April 14.
 

The 46-year-old auditor and regional executive committee member of the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW)-Negros had left for Bacolod the day before to attend meetings of the militant union and stayed overnight to join a picket at the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) office.

After another round of meetings, he left the NFSW office in Bacolod for Manapla just past 3 p.m. As he walked past the canefields of Hacienda Gin-ulayan, about half a kilometer from the small community where he lived, he received a text message on his cell phone. Seeing that the message was not intended for him, he forwarded it to the friend it was meant for.

It must have been as he was keying in commands on his phone that the two gunmen who had lain in wait for him since 2 p.m. opened fire on the union leader with a .45 caliber pistol and a shotgun. Fellow unionists said he managed to forward the text message plus a message of his own that was, however, nothing but an unreadable jumble of letters. “He must have tried to send out a call for help as he tried to flee the assassins,” one of them said.

It might have been the perfect crime.

But there was an eyewitness.

Good look

A nephew of Bargamento who had met him at the highway junction where he got off the vehicle from Bacolod was walking several meters ahead of the NFSW officer and managed to get a good look at the assassins just before they opened fire.

The young man is now hiding out with relatives. Skilled in drawing, he managed to sketch the faces of the two killers. The sketches are now with the police.

Bargamento’s relatives relayed what the witness recounted: of how his uncle tried to flee for his life with the killers giving chase, firing at him again and again, missed shots kicking up the dirt around his feet, how he fell into a ditch he tried to leap over to get to the sparse cover of the surrounding canefields and how, finally, one of the gunmen pumped a final round into the back of his head to make sure he was dead. The gunmen then fled on board a motorcycle driven by a third accomplice.

Police counted no less than 22 bullet holes in Bargamento’s body, mostly in his shattered back. NFSW-Negros chairman John Milton Lozande said they have no doubts about who killed Bargamento and why. “The murders of activists that have been happening around the country, the campaign of terror and repression by the Arroyo regime against critics of its corruption and abuses has finally reached Negros,” he said.

He also noted the ominous coincidence that his friend and colleague’s murder took place just a few days after 3rd Infantry Division commander, Brig. Gen. Alphonsus Crucero, visited Negros. Reacting to the uproar over the PowerPoint presentation “Knowing the Enemy,” which lists more than 30 so-called “rebel front” organizations, including media and church groups, that the military confirms has been used in secret briefings for a year now, Crucero said those on the list had no reason to fear unless they had done something wrong.

“Crucero’s statement was a clear threat and challenge,” Lozande said. “We had a feeling something was bound to happen after he said it.”

Bargamento was the 33rd activist murdered or forcibly disappeared throughout the country since mid-January of this year.

Credence

Accounts by Bargamento’s family and friends tend to give credence to Lozande’s observation. A bosom friend of the slain union leader said that last December, “a former member of the New People’s Army (NPA) who is now a military asset visited me and accused me of meeting with Edwin and the kaupod (comrades, the popular term for NPA guerrillas). Despite my denials, he visited me twice more, in January and February. After that, I knew he was just around the area monitoring.”

For years, residents of surrounding haciendas had also been warning Bargamento to be extra careful because “they had been told by the RPA (the Revolutionary Proletarian Army, a breakaway faction of the NPA) that he was on their order of battle,” the union leader’s widow, Vicenta, said.

The RPA has long been threatening organizers and leaders of the NFSW. Several cases have been reported of NFSW organizers being driven from areas they work in, sometimes at gunpoint, by the RPA. The RPA is also suspected to be behind the killing of NFSW local leader Pedro Trabajador in Escalante City in 2003.

With the peace agreement the breakaway rebel faction entered into with then President Joseph Estrada, the RPA has since shed off all pretensions of being revolutionaries and has, by the military’s own admission, often joined government forces in counterinsurgency operations, other sources said.

Vicenta also relayed what friends and neighbors had told her, of how, as early as three weeks before Edwin’s murder, unidentified men, often riding motorcycles, had been seen in the vicinity of Tortosa, most of the time just hanging around stores at the highway junction but a few times asking about the union leader, the most recent the Monday before the killing.

However, she said, “We did not pay too much attention because we are so used to people asking about Edwin and where he lives because, as a union leader, workers from surrounding haciendas often went to him for advice or help with their labor problems.”

And, if anything, she said her husband was “a very trusting man.”

Despite the warnings about being on the RPA’s list, Vicenta said, “he told me not to worry and even befriended some of the members of the RPA unit based in a neighboring hacienda.”

This was confirmed by Bargamento’s close friend, who said he, too, had often warned the union leader about the RPA and invariably got the same reply: “Don’t worry. They are our friends, too. They will not harm me.”

“Mistaken identity”?

Oddly enough, provincial police director, Sr. Supt. Charles Calima, going by the initial statement of Bargamento’s relatives that he had no known personal enemies, immediately declared the union leader’s killing a case of “mistaken identity.”

However, Manapla police chief, Sr. Insp. Gary Alan Resuma immediately refuted this, pointing out that “there were too many shots fired at (Bargamento) for it to have been a simple case of mistaken identity” and, more crucial, the killers “made sure they finished him off, even finishing off with a shot to the head from close range.”

To Lozande and Bargamento’s fellow unionists, there is no question that the killers were either military agents, hired guns used by the military or, the most probable according to those familiar with the insurgency in Negros, RPA hitmen under orders or in coordination with the military.

Although Resuma declined to comment on the possible identity of the killers, he did observe that they were “obviously not professionally trained or proficient in firearms. A professional would have needed only one or two shots to finish the job, especially since he was shot from behind and apparently from relatively close range.”

That a shotgun, not the typical assassin’s weapon of choice but a gun often issued to rebel militia units, was used also bolsters the theory that an RPA team may have carried out the hit.

“This was a political murder,” Lozande said. “We see no other possibility. The pattern is there. It is the same as the other political killings nationwide. But if they think they have cowed us, they are dead wrong. Edwin’s martyrdom has only strengthened our resolve to struggle for justice and our rights. It has also made clear that, for the people, there is no other option. This repressive government has to go.” Bulatlat

BACK TO TOP ■  PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION  ■   COMMENT

© 2004 Bulatlat ■  Alipato Publications

Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.