The Human Rights Record of the Arroyo Administration: : QC IMC

The Human Rights Record of the Arroyo Administration:
Four and a Half Years of
State Terror

Prepared by KARAPATAN Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights
July 18, 2005

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A People Power President who rules by force, suppression, and deception – that has been the painful irony plaguing the Philippine human rights situation for the last four and a half years.

Instead of promoting democracy and human rights consistent with the spirit of People Power that catapulted Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to power in 2001, her government has curtailed civil liberties, disregarded human rights and international humanitarian law, and launched fascist attacks on its people.

Battered by chronic economic, political and social crises, the Arroyo regime has gone from weak to desperate. The state-sponsored terror it has unleashed on a people struggling for reforms and fighting for their rights and welfare defines the government’s dreadful human rights record.

In the four and a half years of the Arroyo Presidency (January 2001 to June 2005), the government has committed massive violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. It has come to the point that the very people sworn to uphold and protect the people’s rights are committing the atrocities with impunity. (See Appendix: Table of Human Rights Violations under the Arroyo Administration)

The following trends depict the overall human rights situation:

• Intensified Militarization

As the local version of the US-led “War on Terror”, the Arroyo administration’s all-out war against rebel groups such as the CPP-NPA-NDFP, MILF and MNLF has further intensified the militarization of the countryside.

Heavy government troop deployments have led to increased human rights violations, as clearly documented in the Southern Tagalog region where 39 battalions are deployed, including Mindoro Island which hosted nine battalions at one time.

Heightened military presence in the following regions and provinces have been reported: 5 battalions and 1 brigade in Cagayan Valley, 10 battalions in Western Mindanao, 11 battalions in SocSKSargen, 9 battalions in Eastern Visayas, 11 battalions in Southern Mindanao, 1 division and 1 brigade in CARAGA, 5 battalions in Central Luzon, 5 battalions in Bohol and 2 battalions in Cebu.

Reinforcing the military, police and Civilian Armed Auxiliary (CAA) forces are “rebel returnees,” vigilante groups and paramilitary formations like the Cordillera People’s Liberation Army (CPLA), the Revolutionary Proletarian Army-Alex Boncayao Brigade (RPA-ABB) and the Rebolusyunaryong Hukbong Bayan (RHB).

Consistent with the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ (AFP) strategy of concentrating its combat operations in areas where it believes the NPA, MILF, or MNLF are strong, military units have been concentrated in the provinces of Kalinga, Mountain Province, Abra, Ilocos Sur, Tarlac, Pampanga, Mindoro Island, Batangas, Albay, priority barrios in Bohol and Cebu, the three Samar provinces, Compostela Valley, Agusan del Norte, 11 barangays of Agusan in CARAGA, and in the quadri-boundary of SocSKSargen. These areas have borne the brunt of military atrocities and human rights violations.

Reprisals by the AFP against rebel ambushes are swift and brutal, targeting civilians in so-called “rebel-infested” communities. For example, out of the 96 cases of human rights violations in Northern Mindanao, 89 occurred in Agusan del Norte as reprisals for NPA ambushes on AFP troops. Likewise, militarization in Catanduanes Island intensified after an ambush conducted by NPA guerillas. In the same manner, Sulu was a virtual garrison after the MNLF conducted ambuscades on AFP troops after the latter’s massacre of a Muslim family on February 1, 2005.

A state of martial rule is imposed by government troops in areas with massive military operations. Local government and police forces are rendered inutile. In November 2004, municipal mayors in Occidental Mindoro told a humanitarian mission that they could not assure the mission’s safety because the military considered KARAPATAN and other human rights groups as security threats. While rendering medical services to residents of Sta. Cruz town, civilian-clad military men and vigilantes attacked the medical team and the residents as well.

The local government of Tarlac City has not lifted a finger since the assassination of Councilor Abelardo Ladera who died taking up the cudgels for his poor constituents, including striking farm workers at the Hacienda Luisita. To date, hacienda residents are complaining of more than 200 soldiers deployed in their villages.

In Eastern Visayas, the notorious Major General Jovito Palparan, Jr., known as the “Butcher of Mindoro,” lords it over local officials. His pronouncements outline the government’s hard-line, militarist policy towards political dissidents. He told members of the media that he would wipe out anti-government protests in the region as he did in Mindoro during his stint as commanding officer of the notorious 204th brigade. In a public meeting he called in Tacloban City, Palparan announced that the military would be abducting one peasant activist every month from so-called "NPA-infiltrated" barrios.

Following such declarations, a human rights lawyer, a Protestant pastor and scores of farmers have been summarily executed in Palparan’s area of responsibility. Some have been abducted and remain missing.
In 2001, the Macapagal-Arroyo government virtually declared martial law in Basilan. As a result, scores of residents were arbitrarily arrested and accused of being Abu Sayyaf members. The Basilan 73, a group of residents arbitrarily rounded up by the military, were imprisoned and later transferred to Camp Bagong Diwa in Bicutan, where they continue to languish. On March 15, 2005, a botched jailbreak of hardcore Abu Sayyaf inmates in that detention center resulted to the deaths of 23 other Moro inmates, including 10 from the Basilan 73. Families of the victims assert that their kin were used as human shields but authorities treated all inmates as hostile elements, hence resulting in the bloodbath.

In the wake of such “anti-terrorist” or “counter-insurgency operations,” human rights violations are committed with impunity, targeting entire communities, legal organizations and even local officials suspected of supporting rebel groups. There is a long list of documented cases of harassments, grave threats, use of civilians as guides and human shields, killings, massacres, forcible abductions and disappearances, forced evacuation and reconcentration, fake surrenders, indiscriminate firing and bombings of communities of peasants and indigenous peoples in suspected guerrilla lairs and strongholds.

• Attacks on Human Rights Defenders, Activists and Journalists

In April 2003, KARAPATAN-Southern Tagalog Secretary General Eden Marcellana and peasant leader Eddie Gumanoy were abducted and killed by AFP soldiers while on a fact-finding mission in Oriental Mindoro. The twin murders remain unsolved to this day even as the alleged mastermind, then Col. Jovito Palparan, Jr., was promoted twice by Mrs. Arroyo, despite protests by various human rights organizations and the withdrawal by the Commission on Human Rights’ (CHR) of his human rights clearance.

Twenty human rights defenders have been killed under the Arroyo administration. Not even during the fascist Marcos dictatorship were there so many human rights defenders killed. (See Appendx: List of Human Rights Defenders Killed)

Human rights defenders, church people, lawyers, government officials, leaders and organizers of people’s organizations and progressive parties are targets of attacks either by troops in uniform, military agents or their death squads.

The first half of 2005 saw a new wave of extra-judicial killings, abductions, and harassments against unarmed civilians. Twenty-six of the 45 killed in this period belonged to progressive parties and organizations. (See Appendix: List of killed and disappeared in 2005)

There were 6 victims of enforced disappearance in the first quarter of 2005, including BAYAN-Central Luzon leader Danny Macapagal, a distant relative of the president. Macapagal, an activist since the Marcos regime, survived martial law but not the Macapagal-Arroyo government. He was taken from his home in Nueva Ecija on March 3, 2005 and had been missing since then. In four and a half years, there were 130 victims of enforced disappearance.

The killings of journalists likewise increased. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines recorded 69 journalists killed since 1986. Out of the total, 33 were killed from January 2001 to July 2005. Mrs. Arroyo has ordered an investigation but her Task Force Newsman has not solved a single case to date.

KARAPATAN attributes the alarming pattern of killings and disappearances to a policy of state repression aimed not only at silencing government critics and quelling dissent, but also at annihilating the country’s progressive people’s movement. We particularly note the following:

1. The attacks against activists and progressive leaders appear deliberate, orchestrated and national in scope. This can only be part of a centralized campaign funded and organized by the national government through its armed forces.

2. Part of this repressive policy is a campaign of incitement to violence against cause-oriented groups and human rights advocates. In almost all cases of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, the atrocities are usually preceded by a military-instigated vilification campaign branding the victims and their organizations as “communists,” “terrorists” or “enemies of the state.” The AFP’s intelligence briefing compact disc, “Knowing the Enemy,” and other briefing materials and “orders of battle” include names of those subsequently killed, incarcerated or forcibly disappeared. For example, before suspected soldiers killed Marcellana and other activists in Mindoro, they were tagged as communists and terrorists in flyers and posters disseminated by the AFP.

President Arroyo herself is guilty of such redbaiting and incitement to violence. On national television, she tagged party-list congressman Crispin Beltran and urban poor leader Carmen Deunida as “communists” for opposing high power rates and her economic policies. She has also branded critics of the RP-US military exercises as “Abu Sayyaf lovers.”

Immediately after an attack, the military usually issues a statement denying involvement and insisting that the victims were killed or abducted either by “anti-communist vigilantes” or, ridiculously, even by NPAs themselves.

3. The action or lack of action of the Arroyo regime on this issue leads to a culture of impunity that facilitates, instead of hampers, the rise of human rights violations. As Commander-in-Chief of the AFP, for example, Pres. Arroyo is abetting human rights violations not only by ignoring the issue but also by promoting military officials with notorious human rights records.

• Constricting Civil Liberties

The Arroyo administration has rehashed repressive decrees from the Martial Law era to constrict the people’s growing unrest. Violent dispersals of rallies and other attacks on civil liberties intensified after the May 2004 elections when Arroyo reclaimed the presidency amid the Opposition’s charges of massive fraud.
Citing Batas Pambansa 880 or the “no permit, no rally” rule, elements of the Western Police District violently dispersed a peaceful rally in front of the Malate Catholic Church on April 7, 2005. The demonstrators wanted to bring the issue of the political killings to the attention of the International Parliamentary Union that had a conference nearby. In the said incident, a priest and a seminarian were mauled and arrested.
Like in the Hacienda Luisita massacre where government troops opened fire on the striking workers, workers’ picket lines are being violently attacked on direct orders by the Labor secretary whose authority to issue “assumption of jurisdiction” orders is based on a Marcos law designed to curtail the workers right to strike. In 2004 alone, the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights documented 91 cases of attacks on picket lines, arrests of union leaders and termination of striking workers involving 1,857 victims. Violent dispersals of picket lines were rampant in the Southern Tagalog region and Cebu.

Military and local police forces are regularly employed to harass, violently disperse and arbitrarily arrest union members. Arrested workers were charged with common crimes such as assault on persons of authority, robbery, destruction of property, etc.

Another Marcos law, General Order #66, still serves as the basis for setting-up military and police checkpoints. Warrantless arrests are still being justified through the Umil vs. Ramos Supreme Court decision and other jurisprudence.

The Movie and Television Review and Classifications Board (MTRCB) and the National Telecommunication Center (NTC), along with the Justice Department, curtailed press freedom when it issued warnings against the airing of the alleged wiretapped conversations implicating the President in electoral fraud. Earlier, the MTRCB issued an order (later recanted due to public pressure) requiring public affairs programs to submit a copy of their taped episodes before broadcast. Both the MTRCB and NTC were created during martial law.

DOJ Secretary Raul Gonzales, acting as the President’s lawyer, has filed and is threatening to file more cases of sedition and rebellion against persons calling for Mrs. Arroyo’s resignation. This was a favorite tactic of the Marcos dictatorship.

Worse, repressive bills that were successfully opposed during the Ramos regime are being revived. Among these are bills on anti-terrorism and a national ID system. Proposals are still pending to water down the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.

The Arroyo regime has used the unsolved series of bombing incidents in Metro Manila, Davao and General Santos to justify its repressive proposals. The Initiatives for Peace in Mindanao (InPeace Mindanao) has reported 33 bombing incidents that rocked Mindanao in 2003, including that involving US agent Michael Meiring who was spirited away by the FBI after a bomb he was making exploded in his hotel room in Davao City. In July 2003, Army officers involved in the failed Oakwood mutiny said that the Davao bombing incidents were the AFP’s handiwork.

• Increasing US military Presence and Intervention

The US government has been propping up the Arroyo government’s militarism and human rights atrocities. Its military aid package for 2004 includes $30M for training and arming light reaction units and Navy Seals for counter-terrorism. As a “major non-NATO ally,” the Philippines received a $4.6B military and economic package for the year 2004. Recently, the US government earmarked some $26.5M for development projects in Mindanao. (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 16 July 2005)

In exchange, the Arroyo regime has allowed more U.S. military presence in the country in the guise of joint training exercises under the Balikatan (shoulder to shoulder) program. Journalist Pauline Jelinek of the Associated Press reported, “More and more U.S. military activities in the Philippines have been noted under Pres. Arroyo as the U.S. is also considering shifting some of its Pacific forces to the Philippines to relieve the political pressure on U.S. forces especially in Okinawa and South Korea.” (US Military Intervention in the Philippines by Dr. Roland Simbulan, Forum Online, Mar. 2002)

Increasingly, US troops have been sighted in the field purportedly to conduct civic action operations, relief and rehabilitation missions and to study the feasibility of “development” projects.

U.S. troops have been monitored in Western Mindanao, at the quadri-boundary in SocSKSarGen, during intense military operations in Laguna, in known NPA areas in Quezon ostensibly to conduct relief operations, and in the AFP war room at the height of the renewed fighting in Sulu. From its role of training the AFP’s light reaction companies, the U.S. military is now involved in intelligence gathering and performing an advisory role in combat operations.

It is significant that the renewed total war of the Arroyo regime began with the increased presence of U.S. troops in the country. Apparently, the Arroyo administration now relies on U.S. support for its continued rule amid the worsening economic and political crisis. Likewise, pronouncements by U.S. Embassy officials and the active presence of American lobby groups like AGILE (Accelerating Growth Investments and Liberalization with Equity) point to more blatant interventions in the country’s internal affairs.

• Locking-up Dissidents

KARAPATAN-Mindoro Occidental Vice Chairperson Ricardo Solangon was abducted by suspected soldiers on July 9, 1999, tortured and charged with a multiple murder case. He was unfairly tried in a Court whose clerk of court was the murder victim’s sibling. In 2001, Solangon was recommended for release on recognizance on the basis of his arrest’s irregularities and as part of goodwill measures in the GRP-NDFP peace talks. The court refused to recognize this. Eventually, he was sentenced to death.
Other political prisoners meted the death penalty are Armando Vidar, Apolonio Varado, Sonny Marbella and Norberto Butalon. Butalon died of an ailment in October 2004, a month after his transfer to the death row.

To date, there are 260 political prisoners in the country. Two hundred and forty were imprisoned by the Arroyo regime. Among them are minors, women, and elderly persons.

Most of the political prisoners are victims of arbitrary arrest and detention. Among them are peasants involved in land disputes, political activists, suspected NPA and MILF supporters, ordinary Muslims and fall guys presented and paraded before the media in the government’s campaign against “terrorism.”

Many were abducted and made to disappear or were held incommunicado for days routinely tortured, as in the case of Eduardo Serrano, the Cuenca 7 and Angelina Bisuña-Ipong.

Many of them have been charged, tried or convicted of common crimes, which unjustly covers up the true political nature of their cases. This contravenes the political offence doctrine upheld by the Supreme Court in the Amado V. Hernandez case (99 Phil 515, 18 July 1956), otherwise known as the Hernandez doctrine. Together with other prisoners, political detainees suffer the deplorable conditions of congested and poorly maintained jails.

The Macapagal-Arroyo government made a commitment to release some 49 political prisoners in 2001 and 32 more in April 2004. Of the 32, only 10 were released on recognizance, 7 on the merits of their cases while 15 remain incarcerated along with the others.

Among the political prisoners recently released was Donato Continente who was implicated as an accomplice in the 1989 killing of U.S. Col. James Rowe. His jail sentence expired on June 28, 2005. The U.S. government had repeatedly intervened to ensure that Continente served his maximum jail sentence, despite qualifying for several amnesty and release programs since the mid 90s.

• Justice Eludes Victims of Human Rights Violations

There is minimal or no government action at all on complaints of human rights violations. Government human rights agencies play a mere coordinating role and have failed to support or facilitate the prompt investigation and prosecution of cases.

Worse, the increase in judicial fees in 2004 has made it more prohibitive to file cases against perpetrators of human rights violations.

To this day, the 9,539 victims of torture, summary execution and disappearances during the martial law period still clamour for justice and indemnification despite the favourable decision in their class suit against the Marcos family. The victims have expressed dismay at the way the Marcos Compensation Bill is being handled by legislators, especially Akbayan Rep. Etta Rosales who heads the House Committee on Civil and Political Rights. They say that provisions in House Bill 3315 exclude and alienate the victims and disregard the rights of the claimants in the original class suit.

Being a human rights violator itself, the Arroyo regime clearly lacks the political will to indemnify the martial law victims. There are fears that a huge part of the $684M recovered Marcos assets originally awarded to the 9,539 martial law victims bankrolled the President’s campaign in the last elections.

• CARHRIHL and Peace Talks in Limbo

The peace negotiations between the GRP and the NDFP bore fruit with the establishment of the human rights Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC) including the Joint Secretariat tasked with receiving and investigating violations of the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) signed by both parties in August 1998.

Since the opening of the JMC office in July 2004, the Joint Secretariat has received 387 complaints against the GRP and 8 complaints against the NDFP (A View on the Status of the GRP-NDFP Peace Talks, a paper by Atty. Edre Olalia). The JMC has yet to reconvene to discuss and act upon these complaints. The GRP says they will do so only when the formal talks are resumed, hence remedial steps that could be taken to address urgent cases have not been undertaken.

The peace talks have been suspended due to the GRP’s insistence on new demands and conditionalities and its refusal to honor previous agreements.

Under Arroyo, the GRP worked for the inclusion of the CPP-NPA and NDF political consultant Prof. Jose Maria Sison in the “terrorist listing” of the U.S. government and European Union, thereby adding another stumbling block to the peace process.

• Double whammy: economic and political rights violations

In the guise of economic development, more and more Filipinos are being denied of their economic rights. Such is the case in the mining industry, where residents in the mining areas have experienced massive dislocation and poverty. The biggest mining corporation, Sagittarius Mining, Inc. (formerly Western Mining Corporation), whose mining operation straddles four provinces in Mindanao, is displacing entire B’laan communities from their ancestral domain. Similar things are happening in other parts of Mindanao, the Cordilleras, Cebu and wherever large-scale, commercial mining is present.

In Cagayan Valley, six major projects being implemented by the government, in connivance with big landlords and businessmen, will cover 179,000 hectares, displacing approximately 635,400 individuals. Two big landowning families, the Cojuangcos and Lorenzos, have plantations covering 30,000 hectares each in SocSKSarGen.

Land grabbing cases were reported in Negros Occidental. In Northern Leyte, where most big landlords in the province are concentrated, peasants involved in land struggles are arrested en masse resulting in the most number of political prisoners, 35, in the whole of Eastern Visayas. Agrarian cases have been criminalized in Cebu, Negros Occidental, and North Central Mindanao.

The AFP is positioned in areas where there are CADC, CBFMA, IFMA, logging and mining areas. Bohol is being militarized not only because of the alleged presence of the NPA but also because it is the site of various government projects such as a Palm Oil plantation, regional airport, circumferential project, Bohol Irrigation Project II and the Leyte-Bohol Interconnection project. While the most militarized areas in Negros Oriental are in Guihulngan because of land struggles. These point to the trend towards an increase in agrarian issues and land-grabbing cases especially as land and crop conversion schemes are fast-tracked and agricultural and fisheries modernization programs are intensified.

Documented cases of violation of workers rights have increased in the span of three years under GMA. The practice of union busting is prevalent in most companies. The workers of Nestlé have been on strike since Feb 2002. Legitimate unions at SM, PT&T, LRT, Cosmos Bottling, Meralco, Nestle-Magnolia, Sulpicio Lines, Philippine Rabbit, Bombo Radyo, PNOC, among others were repressed and militant workers terminated and replaced by contractual workers. Workers from IBM, a federation of unions of the Cojuangco group of companies, are experiencing various forms of harassments such as withholding of union dues. In addition, the Arroyo regime remains deaf to the workers plea for increase in wages.
The November massacre of striking workers of Hacienda Luisita exemplifies the worsening exploitation and repression of the Filipino masses. Pushed to the wall by the Cojuangco family, workers affiliated with the United Luisita Workers Union (ULWU) set up their picket line last November 6, 2004. After two unsuccessful attempts to break the picket line by PNP forces and security guards, AFP troops were employed to attack and massacre the striking workers on November 16. As a result, 14 people were reportedly killed, seven of them were identified and documented, 114 injured, 39 forcibly abducted, and 110 unlawfully detained.

Violence was again used in the dispersal of the picket line of striking workers of Lepanto Consolidated Mining Corporation last July 9, 2005. As a result, 19 workers were arrested and scores were hurt.

Demolitions of urban poor communities were reported in almost all regions with urban centers such as Baguio, NCR, Iloilo, and Misamis Oriental, Southern Mindanao Region, and Pagadian City.

Conclusion

C
learly, the past four and a half years under the Arroyo regime has been one of the worst as far as human rights is concerned, comparable even to the martial law years.

In that short span, KARAPATAN documented a record 4,207 cases of human rights violations which included killings, frustrated killings, enforced disappearances, illegal arrests and unlawful detention, indiscriminate firings and forcible evacuation, among others. These cases affected 232,796 individuals, 24,299 families and 237 communities.

The dreadful human rights record of the Macapagal-Arroyo regime is one fundamental reason why Mrs. Arroyo must be removed from office.

Thus, KARAPATAN, along with its members and allied organizations, joins the Filipino people in demanding for Arroyo’s removal from office, which is a step towards justice. KARAPATAN likewise express solidarity with the Filipino people who have all the right to rise up against a cheat and a human rights violator.

The next government should have an agenda for meaningful reforms with a bias for the pursuit of justice and human rights if only to correct the decades of injustice wrought on human rights victims and the people at large. In this light, KARAPATAN also proposes the adoption of a 10-point Human Rights Agenda for the next government.

Recognizing that sovereignty resides in the people, the people’s voice and sovereign will to establish a just and democratic social order must reign supreme. 

Your report about human rights violations under PGMA is truly not complete because you had focused on alleged violation of rights of the leftist and opposition. Why not look on how our inmates were detained in PNP lockups then transferred to BJMP custody. You will see that majority of our inmates were continuously detained not by virtue of court order but by the fiscal's usurpation of judicial authorities of directing jail wardens to accept custody of persons under custodial investigation even the reglamentary period (Art 125, RPC) were expired. Please help those poor people in jails file petition for writ of habeas corpus and thousands of them will surely released for being illegally arrested, forced to signed waivers and not informed of their rights according to miranda ruling.