Akbayan solon slams NPA for slay of pro-CARP peasant leader

By Marlon Ramos
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 21:56:00 06/17/2008


MANILA, Philippines -- Akbayan party-list Representative Risa Baraquel on Tuesday slammed the communist New People’s Army (NPA) for allegedly sowing fear among residents in Masbate following the rebels’ admission that they were behind the killing of a peasant leader allied with the party-list organization.

“You have no right to intimidate people who want to fight against abusive landlords and for their rights to land in a way different from yours,” an emotional Baraquel said at a news briefing at the Akbayan office in Quezon City.

“You have no right to torture and kill people just because they do not share your political beliefs."

Akbayan held the news conference after receiving a copy of the letter to Baraquel from Luz del Mar, spokesman of the NPA’s Jose Rapsing Command in Masbate.

In the 12-page letter, the NPA owned up to killing Mark Anthony “Butchoy” Vale, who was shot dead last December.

Del Mar likewise admitted that they briefly held Vale’s brother, Salvador, who claimed he was physically and mentally tortured by the NPA rebels.

Baraquel said the Vales are leaders of a peasant group allied with Akbayan in Barangay (village) Roroy, Batuan town, which openly supported the extension of the controversial Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP).

She said the rebels gunned down Vale and harmed his brother “simply because they did not support the NPA’s ideology.”

The solon said the incident was not only “an assault on democracy and human rights, but more particularly, on community organizing and state-sponsored agrarian reform.”

The letter, which was also posted on the website of the Communist Party of the Philippines on June 5, was the communist guerillas’ response to Baraquel’s privilege speech at the House of Representatives a few weeks ago.

In a strongly-worded letter written in Filipino, del Mar vehemently denied that the NPA’s “people’s court” handed out “revolutionary sentence” on Vale because of his different political ideology.

The group likewise denied that they tortured the Vale brothers.

“If they happened to be leaders of [Akbayan], we did not consider that as basis in handing out the punishment against them,” the NPA leader said. “In fact, they would have met the same sentence even if they belong to mass organizations allied with us.”

But Baraquel slammed the NPA’s letter as meant to terrorize their group and other people’s organizations supporting the call for the extension of CARP.

Akbayan, on the other hand, took offense at the NPA’s purported “warning against those pursuing a path different from that chosen by the NPA.”

“Akbayan condemns in the strongest possible terms this letter designed threaten democratic organizations like Akabayan, to create a culture of fear among people’s organizations and farming communities, and to warn against the pursuit of agrarian reform via CARP,” the group said in a separate statement.

Baraquel said they were willing to meet in a dialogue with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the CPP’s political arm, regarding the incident even as they are awaiting the official response of the communist group’s hierarchy.