For anyone seeking proof that the extrajudicial killings, frustrated assassinations, enforced disappearances, tortures and massacres of progressives, activists and even bystanders are state policy, this case of Pastor Guerrero is the smoking gun.

BY CAROL PAGADUAN-ARAULLO
Business World
Posted by Bulatlat
Vol. VII, No. 18, June 10-16, 2007

In undemocratic, politically repressive societies such as ours, cases of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing by state forces, almost always end up in the waste basket of law enforcement agencies. This is not surprising, especially when closer scrutiny discloses that far from being exceptional and isolated instances of abuse, such cases stem from a militarist internal security policy coupled with a scorched earth, leave-no-quarter, counterinsurgency program that brooks no dissent, even legal and unarmed, against the ruling regime and status quo.

Victims and their families end up facing a blank wall when witnesses are intimidated, harassed into silence, or themselves killed; the police botch the investigation, cover up the crime and absolve the prime suspects; government prosecutors are unenthusiastic about building up a case or deliberately undermine it; judges are pressured or enticed to dismiss any cases that reach the courts no matter how meritorious; and the highest civilian and military authorities persist in wallowing in what the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings describes as a “state of denial.”

It is not for want of leads that the authorities come up empty handed and declare their investigation stymied. In the case of the “Erap 5,” followers of the former President Joseph Estrada were kidnapped by armed men from a house in the heart of Quezon City (QC) and later turned up shaken and severely tortured, in the custody of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, only after a high-profile effort by Senator Jinggoy Estrada to have the men surfaced. No heads rolled in that case, not even the
torturers who tried to beat the “Erap 5” into confessing that they were the top-level communists the government is hunting down.

Another celebrated case is the abduction of the activist son of journalist and much admired freedom-fighter Joe Burgos. Despite many eyewitnesses in a crowded QC mall, the kidnap vehicle being traced to the army’s 56th Infantry Battalion headquarters, appeals by big names such as former President Corazon Aquino and quiet lobbying by European Union governments, Jonas Burgos remains missing close to six weeks since the incident. Perhaps to fend off international flak over the unsolved political killings during President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s current trips abroad, Malacañang has taken the highly unusual move of directly intervening in the desaparecidos case, with no less than Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, who claims to be a family friend, belatedly promising to take action.

Last May 27, Naval Intelligence Security Forces (NISF) and purported elements of the Cavite provincial police abducted United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) Pastor Berlin Guerrero in Biñan, Laguna, in full view of his wife and three children. He had just come from the local church where he had been serving for the last two years.

He was subsequently turned over to the Cavite Provincial Police Office at Camp Gen. Pantaleon Garcia in Imus, Cavite – beat up, dirtied and still blindfolded – together with his laptop (with his personal files deleted and alleged subversive materials uploaded) and other confiscated personal belongings. The police merely noted that the pastor was arrested by virtue of a 1992 arrest warrant, conveniently overlooking the true facts and circumstances behind his terrible ordeal.

The abductors, with the connivance of the police, are trying to make it appear that the arrest was in accord with law. But one does not have to be a lawyer to see clearly, from Reverend Guerrero’s and other eyewitness accounts, that the “arrest” was anything but lawful.

The abductors were not in uniform. They did not introduce themselves as officers of the law. They did not show Rev. Guerrero any arrest warrant even when he demanded one. They used guns, pointed it at him and his family, with one of the assailants hitting him in the nape. They dragged him to a van with covered-up plate, brought him to a safe house where he was tortured and threatened with death unless he incriminated himself and others to be ranking officers of the Communist Party of the Philippines. His whereabouts were hidden from his family and lawyers so that the abductors could do their worst.

Several questions beg to be asked.

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