As in past regimes, the military approach to fighting the armed revolutionary movement has once again underlined giving the AFP, police, paramilitary and other security forces – including anti-communist vigilantes – the upper hand in the fight against the armed Left. In the long-drawn war against the Marxist guerrillas where force takes the lead, the country’s security forces have had a reproachable record in human rights threatening even legitimate political dissent, the peaceful advocacy of radical reform and, now, the use of the legislature to push for patriotic and progressive legislation. This is based consistently on the findings of the UN Committee on Human Rights, Amnesty International, other reputable international and Philippines rights watchdogs and lawyers groups, the World Council of Churches and other church organizations, the country’s own Committee on Human Rights (CHR) and even human rights investigations by the Congress itself.
List of atrocities
Macapagal-Arroyo, however, can no longer evade responsibility for the politically-motivated killings that have claimed the lives of, to date, 725 persons many of them identified with cause-oriented organizations and progressive political parties. The victims have included regional and provincial leaders of these organizations, rights volunteers, church leaders, lawyers, physicians, students, journalists as well as farmers, workers, women and children. In recent months, several rights watchdogs and fact-finding groups have fingered the presumptive president’s security forces as the probable perpetrators in the reported killings that became a pattern after Macapagal-Arroyo took power in 2001.
Seen recently as proof of the presumptive president’s role in the political killings was when she publicly commended in her July 24 state-of-the-nation address (Sona) Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan for his anti-insurgency record. Tagged as the “butcher” of many activists and several times promoted by the president herself, Palparan has been most aggressive in the AFP’s anti-insurgency drive particularly in “neutralizing” the underground Left’s alleged legal political infrastructure. Sixty percent of reported killings and abductions during the past year occurred in Central Luzon – Palparan’s present assignment. The presidential praise heaped on Palparan sent a signal for the military to stay on course insofar as the “neutralization” of alleged leftist front organizations is concerned. Thus in just three weeks, the number of summary executions and abductions victimizing activists, organizers and party-list leaders has increased.
