Trail of blood

His first assignment, as a 2nd lieutenant with the 24th Infantry Battalion stationed in Indanan, Sulu at the height of the revolutionary armed struggle waged by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in the 1970s, was already a foreshadowing of the path that he would take – one on which he leaves a long list of human rights violations in his areas of assignment. In a July 2, 2006 interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Fe Zamora, he admitted that among the victims of his men were children from the Tausug tribe – whence hail most of the MNLF fighters. There, he said, soldiers saw Tausug children as “future enemies, so the thinking was to finish them off while they were still young” – a mode of thinking reminiscent of an American general, Gen. Jacob Smith, during the Philippine-American War who ordered the killing of everyone capable of bearing arms – including 10-year-old boys – in Samar.

The 24th Infantry Battalion was transferred to Central Luzon in the early 1980s, this time to fight Communist-led revolutionaries. There Palparan rose through the ranks, eventually assuming the post of battalion commander in 1989. He held the post until 1991.

A fact sheet released by Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights) in 2004 shows Sta. Cruz, Zambales to have particularly suffered the brunt of operations by the 24th Infantry Battalion in 1991. In September that year, while soldiers were stationed by a chapel there, about 100 townsfolk were arrested, interrogated, and forced to sign “affidavits of surrender”. From Oct. 13-18, 10 families were forced to evacuate as a result of shelling operations. Three days later, more than 1,000 residents of the same town were forced to attend a “peace rally”, in which Palparan claimed that they were “rebel surrenderees”.

Karapatan’s tally also lists at least seven extra-judicial killings, one incident each of massacre and assault, two grenade bombings, five harassment cases, and five cases of illegal arrest and detention in Central Luzon during Palparan’s first assignment there. He was also implicated in the abduction and torture of peasant organizers and other activists during his first stint there, Karapatan records show.

His next assignment was in the Cordillera region. One of the most prominent cases of human rights violations in the said region during his stint there was the torture of Marcelo Fakila, a leader of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (CPA) in Mountain Province and a village elder in Sagada.

Based on combined data from the CPA and Karapatan, in 1992 alone there were six cases of illegal arrest, five harassment cases, one case of disappearance, one summary execution, one case of wounding, and two cases of evacuations – all in Mountain Province during Palparan’s assignment in the region.

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