Echanis was once the youngest political prisoner at two years old when she was detained with her parents Randall and Linda for trumped-up charges.

MANILA — A mother holding and breast-feeding her baby. This was the scene writer and organizer Amanda Echanis vividly remembers when her unlawful arrest happened five years ago. The court finally granted her release, proving the charges against her wrong.

“Wala po akong hawak na baril, baby lang,” Echanis told the more than 20 armed searching officers during her arrest. “Sabi ng isa, baka ‘baby-armalite’ ‘yan.”

 (I don’t hold a gun, only my baby. One of them told me, it may be a ‘baby-armalite’.)

The Tuguegarao City Regional Trial Court Branch 10 ruled that the searching officers demonstrated a patent lack of substantial compliance with the hierarchy of witnesses under the Rules of Court.

Several irregularities with the arrest were also pointed out by the court, questioning the integrity of the operation. 

Read: ‘Justice prevailed’ | Amanda Echanis speaks out after release from prison

Echanis recalled that the searching officers did not wear nameplates, only their battle gear and long guns pointed at her and her baby. They forcibly entered her home around 3 a.m. but the arrest concluded around 8 a.m.

“They even asked me: don’t you feel sorry for your child?” she recalled in Filipino. “I said yes, I did. But they should have thought of that before they planted the evidence against me.”

Childhood and motherhood

Echanis was once the youngest political prisoner at two years old when she was detained with her parents Randall and Linda for trumped-up charges. Ironically, the second time that she spent time in prison was as a mother — a gruelling experience at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to her detention, she suffered a heavy loss. Her father, peasant leader and peace consultant Randall Echanis was killed and tortured in his rented house on August 10, 2020, months before the arrest transpired.

“I was not able to come home when he died because of the (pandemic) lockdown then. Then the arrest happened in December,” she said. “Both of us were victims. My father was a victim of extrajudicial killing, while I was detained under trumped-up charges.”

During the detention, she was also being forced to sign a certificate of orderly conduct during the search, but she refused.

There were calls to release her and all political prisoners in the Philippines back then under humanitarian grounds but the administration of Rodrigo Duterte refused to heed the call.

Fides Lim, spokesperson of Kapatid, said that she and her husband Vicente Ladlad met her when she was still a child at Camp Crame with her parents. They were political prisoners then. 

“Tiny, with doleful eyes, which seemed too big and old for her, baby Amanda maybe saw more than we did. I remember we would all laugh whenever she blurted out the individual owners of all the water pails and water jugs (for drinking water) lined up every morning in front of the gripo in the open area outside the common kitchen,” Lim wrote, adding that she could also identify all the owners of the clothes hanging up to dry.

Randall Emmanuel, her son, is now six year-old. Like Echanis, he spent his toddler years in detention. As a mother, she asserted that the best interest of her child is to be in her presence. 

“They have already taken away my right to freedom—must they also take away my right to be a mother to my child? That is not acceptable. Imprisonment will not be a barrier to being a mother, an activist, or a writer,” she said.

Her plea succeeded. She was able to take care of her son until the age of three. Eventually, Randall Emmanuel stayed with her grandmother Linda.  

“This is what fascism looks like: they use all sorts of weapons, not only physical violence, to suppress our human rights. And it continues,” Echanis said.

Fight continues

Even after her acquittal, Echanis has been a subject of political vilification through disinformation campaigns on social media.

“Amanda is a victim of illegal search. But until now, she continues to be a victim of red-tagging. Even if the court ruled that the accusations against her were false, state forces continue to vilify her, especially the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict,” Zoe Caballero, Amanda’s legal counsel from Sentra, said. 

The Supreme Court already ruled that red-tagging threatens the right to life, liberty, and security of an individual or an organization as it becomes a precursor to violence and other forms of grave human rights violation.

Despite the continuing attacks against her, Echanis and her allies strengthen their resolve to fight. She also vowed to continue campaigning for the freedom of all political prisoners in the country.

“We should not think that we are alone. There is the broad movement of masses, the people, who will always fight with us,” Echanis said. “This is also my message to my fellow political prisoners who remain in extremely difficult situations. We should not lose hope.”

Just last year, she topped the UP Diliman Student Council race in the councilor post, making history as the first political prisoner to be elected. She will also continue her studies as a creative writing student in the university.

She also showed excellence in creative writing. Despite being in detention, she was selected as one of the fellows of the Palihang Rogelio Sicat (PRS), an annual national workshop on creative writing using Filipino and various languages in the Philippines. It was the first time in the history of the workshop to have a political prisoner as one of its 15 participants.
“I want to remember the words of my father: they might imprison the body but not my fighting spirit,” she added. (RTS, DAA)