This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 10, April 17-23, 2005
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
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.
But there was an eyewitness.
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.
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.”
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.”
© 2004 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
BACOLOD CITY – Edwin Bargamento must have been eager to get home to Hacienda
Emma, Barangay Tortosa, Manapla, late in the afternoon of April 14.
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.
Good look
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.”
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”?
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