Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts

Volume 2, Number 8              March 31 - April 6,  2002           Quezon City, Philippines







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Black Saturday – a Day of Mourning in Baguio

March 29, a Black Saturday, became a day of mourning when concerned Filipinos in Baguio were beaten up by forces of the Arroyo administration.

BY BULATLAT.COM

It was March 29 – a Black Saturday. It could as well be a day of mourning, a day when a group of concerned Filipinos tried to exercise their freedom of expression only to find themselves beaten up by forces of the Arroyo administration.

On that day, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, spending a traditional holy retreat in Baguio City, some 230 km north of Manila, inaugurated the Freedom Monument depicting the struggle of the Cordillera indigenous peoples against colonial occupation and for ancestral domain and self-determination. The marker was built on Igorot Park.

After Arroyo delivered her speech, members of the Cordillera People’s Alliance (CPA) and the Tongtongan ti Umili (roughly translated, People’s Forum) unfurled streamers and placards bearing the slogans, “U.S. Troops, Out Now!” and “No to the Imperialist Plunder of the Cordilleras!” The lightning rally was meant to symbolize the declaration of Baguio as a “U.S. troops-free zone.”

It turned out that military and police authorities guarding the president knew nothing what the “Freedom Monument” symbolized. Immediately, elements of the Presidential Security Guard, the Baguio city police and several armed military agents in civilian clothes swooped down on the protesters, a press statement by the CPA said.

Joseph Torafing, Jr., chair of Anakbayan and Vernie Yocogan, secretary-general of Innabuyog-Gabriela, were collared by Arroyo’s bodyguards. They were about to be taken away for interrogation when their colleagues protested vehemently.

“The military tried to confiscate our streamers,” the statement issued by Emil Carreon Voltaire Tupaz, CPA deputy secretary-general, said. “We were manhandled in a violent dispersal. We were threatened with guns and arrest.”

Tupaz, who is also the secretary-general of Tongtongan, said the two organizations attended the inauguration to hear what the president had to say to the people of Baguio and to exercise their right to freedom of expression through a peaceful picket outside the park.

“We wanted the president to know of our opposition to U.S. military intervention in the country,” Tupaz said. “Yet we were met with unwarranted force.”

CPA said it condemns the violent dispersal of the peaceful demonstration by police and military authorities and the growing wave of harassment government is carrying out “to quell the people’s opposition to U.S. military intervention in the country.”

CPA, Tongtongan and other militant groups have been waging campaigns to advocate the Cordillera people’s rights to ancestral domain and self-determination. The Igorots’ struggle has also taken the form of an armed struggle since the 1970s spearheaded by the New People’s Army. Bulatlat.com


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