Who is Bambi Santos?

Bambi Santos was an activist, a full-time staff member of the national democratic alliance, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN). She was in charge of many things foremost of which was mobilizing artists to contribute to the cultural work attendant to the political mass campaigns that BAYAN led. She was also a budding creative writer who graduated with a journalism degree from an exclusive all-women college, the only child of science professionals who had dedicated all their lives to government service.

She was killed at the age of twenty-seven, in what military authorities said was an encounter [Note: Oct, 2000 in Zamboanga del Sur]. Witnesses contend however that there was a raid on a farmer’s hut where Bambi was resting with several companions. She was hit in the leg and thereafter allowed to bleed to death. She was unarmed. She had gone on a leave of absence from BAYAN to do political immersion among poor peasants in Mindanao. She had planned to write stories and poems about her experiences.

I had the difficult task of informing her family about her death and of traveling all the way to Pagadian City to retrieve her remains and bring it back to Manila. She died at the height of the campaign to oust President Joseph Estrada and after we had grieved for her and buried her, we just had to tell ourselves that justice would come with the change of government.

But that didn’t happen. We did what we could to try to determine who were the military officials involved in the raid but they had been quickly reassigned and we faced a blank wall regarding their whereabouts. We filed a case with the Commission on Human Rights; we even filed a case with the Joint Monitoring Committee of the Negotiating Panels for the government-National Democratic Front peace negotiations.

Impunity is still the name of the game in this country ruled by the elite classes of big landlords, big traders and local partners of multinational corporations as well as several generations of politicians who make politics and government one big, profitable business as well.

They craft the socio-economic policies that fuel armed revolution and political dissent. They direct the counter-insurgency campaigns that engender such gross human rights violations. They authorize and then protect from prosecution and punishment the state forces and paramilitary death squads that do the dirty work of killing the likes of Bambi Santos.,,,,,

Excerpted from the column of Carol Araullo

March 12, 2009
Justice for Rebelyn