Court asked to compel military to produce abducted activists

By Nestor P. Burgos Jr.
Visayas Bureau
Last updated 09:21pm (Mla time) 04/18/2007

ILOILO CITY, Philippines -- The families of two abducted militant leaders in Panay asked the Iloilo Regional Trial Court on Wednesday to order military officials to produce and release them to their families.

In a petition for habeas corpus, Luis Posa, brother of Ma. Luisa Posa-Dominado, and Rosemarie Arado, wife of Nilo Arado, asked the Iloilo RTC to summon the officials involved and order them to explain the two activists’ detention.

Three respondents were named in the petition -- Major General Juvenile Narcise, commander of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division (3ID) based in Jamindan, Capiz; Colonel Renato David, commander of the 301st Brigade in Dingle, Iloilo; and Colonel Mariano Perez of the Military Intelligence Battalion in Camp Martin Delgado in Iloilo City.

Dominado is the Panay spokesperson of the Samahan nga mga Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at Para sa Amnestiya (Selda)-Panay, the nationwide organization of former political detainees. Arado chairs the Panay chapter of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan and is the seventh nominee of militant party-list group Anakpawis.

They were reportedly waylaid by armed men in the village of Cabanbanan in Oton town on April 12 and forcibly taken from the pickup truck they were riding in.

Their companion, Jose Ely Garachico of the rights group Karapatan, was reportedly shot and gravely wounded.

The petitioners said no valid arrest warrants had been issued against Dominado and Arado, “nor have they committed criminal wrongdoing in the presence of the respondents, nor attempted to commit a crime, nor actually committed a crime.”

They claimed that the two activists were taken to military camps or safe houses.

Reached on the phone, Lieutenant Colonel David Tan, Third Infantry Division spokesperson, said the AFP respected the right of the kin and colleagues of the missing activists to go to court.

“But this is witch-hunting,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer, parent company of INQUIRER.net.

Tan called on the kin and colleagues of Dominado and Arado to “name names -- and we will arrest any of our men found to be involved in the incident.”

Members of militant groups visited military camps on Monday in search of the missing activists and found no trace of them.

On Tuesday, members of the Gabriela Women’s Party assembled at Gate 1 of Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City to condemn the twin abductions and demand the activists’ release.

Investigators are studying the possible involvement of former communist rebels or the military in the shooting and wounding of Garachico and the abduction of Dominado and Arado.

Chief Superintendent Wilfredo Dulay Sr., police director of Western Visayas, said there was “a big possibility” that the Revolutionary Proletarian Army-Alex Boncayao Brigade (RPA-ABB) was responsible.

Dulay said the attack could be an act of reprisal for the February killing of RPA-ABB commander Jose Cabunagan in Tigbauan, Iloilo, for which the New People’s Army had claimed responsibility.

This theory was boosted by the discovery of the activists’ badly burned pickup truck in a sugarcane field in Janiuay town, where the RPA-ABB operated, Dulay said.

But Demetrio Capilastique of the RPA-ABB in Panay denied this, pointing out that Dominado, Arado and Garachico were noncombatants.

The RPA-ABB broke ties with the NPA in the early 1990s over ideological differences, and signed a peace pact with the government in December 2000.

Dulay said investigators were not discounting the involvement of members of the military, especially after suffering casualties in a recent clash with insurgents in Lambunao town.

But Tan said: “The Army has nothing to do with it. In fact, we have dispatched our operatives to track down the suspects in coordination with the police.”

There appears to be an emerging pattern of abductions of leftist activists.

In Cebu City, some 20 placard-bearing members of militant party-list groups Bayan Muna and Kabataan on Wednesday held a silent demonstration in front of the Marcelo Fernan Hall of Justice to protest the abduction and detention of two of their members, purportedly by the military.

They named the two as Beethoven Avila, 28, Cebu City South district coordinator of Kabataan, and Preciosa Daño, 48, a Bayan Muna coordinator of Cebu’s second district.

Avila and Daño said they were abducted on April 12 and released the next day.


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