VIGILANTES RESURGENT
Friesen, Dorothy
Vigilantes Resurgent Filipino rightists take the law into their own hands BY DOROTHY FRIESEN Davao City, Mindanao, is known as the political bellwether of the Philippines. The third largest city...
...I hid for a long time until finally I thought, 'Why am I hiding...
...This is not from Vietnam...
...More than 10,000 people fled their homes either because their neighborhood was hit or out of fear that it would be hit...
...As far as the citizens' groups are concerned, as I understand it, they are being organized within the framework of government authority," Shultz said on his June visit to the Philippines...
...After that we don't know what we will do...
...The usual smiles were absent...
...Part of the anticommunist insurgency drive in the Philippines, the Alsa Masa has put up checkpoints on roads leading into the various poor communities...
...We drove in a vehicle supplied by "Cory's Crusaders," a group of upper-middle-class housewives who worked in Aquino's presidential campaign...
...According to the newly ratified Philippine constitution, the CHDF must be disbanded...
...The third largest city in the country, it is a vibrant, bustling port handling export crops from neighboring countries...
...I have never been as afraid during martial law as I am now," confided Len-ora, a long-time friend and human-rights worker, almost as soon as I had arrived at her house...
...They are part of the "total strategy" to beat the communists, he says...
...The truth is that the Alsa Masa movement is being utilized by the military as a vehicle in campaigning to win the hearts and minds of the populace," wrote Colonel Franco Calida, head of the Davao Metropolitan District Command of the Philippine Constabulary, in a secret memo of December 1986...
...Eat grass, I guess," one of them replied...
...They visit homes to persuade the people to support them...
...We felt that there was military involvement and it was important to bring the perpetrators of the crime to justice," she recalls...
...With those words, Ramos strode out of the room, leaving the media and his own staff to ponder the significance of his remarks...
...One registration certificate indicated that a three-year-old child was an NPA surrenderee...
...Every day I hear my name on the radio...
...When I developed the film and printed the picture, I noticed that the children in the back row had slanted their hands so that the "L" looked more like a gun...
...We are employing the same strategy as the Americans did in Vietnam," admits the Mindanao colonel in military intelligence...
...It became the symbol of Corazon Aquino's 1986 presidential campaign...
...rations were in short supply...
...The strategy in Davao City is well under way...
...Aquino orders us to dismantle and disarm the CHDF, I am not sure we will be able to do it...
...These paramilitary units have taken on a life of their own," he said...
...These are just children.' " Norma sent a message to them, asking for a meeting...
...He threatens organizations, agencies, communities, and individuals, warning them to proclaim their hatred of communists or the Alsa Masa will eradicate them...
...The newer vigilante groups, like the Alsa Masa, have the blessing of Corazon Aquino and U.S...
...The children at the center had noticed our cameras and were eager to pose for pictures...
...They bunched together and gave the pro-Aquino sign: index finger pointed up, thumb straight out to form an "L...
...In late February, the military conducted operations and aerial bombings in the outlying barrios of Davao City...
...The officer supplied them with spending money, marijuana, and, later on, arms...
...One colonel, active in military intelligence for twenty years in Mindanao, doubts that they will be...
...their abuses just turned the people against us...
...Even if Mrs...
...counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam, notably the Phoenix Program...
...This is a home-grown Philippine invention...
...And Pres-ident Aquino has supported that approach, and we support what she is standing for...
...These days, the real action is a coun-terinsurgency campaign waged by the Philippine military and right-wing vigilante groups...
...Hundreds of old people, children, and mothers and fathers were gathered around a cement platform beside a large tent...
...Like herself and many others in Davao City, he had provided hospitality to members of the New People's Army (NPA) several years ago...
...She traces her trouble to May 1986, when a woman active in human-rights work was murdered and another seriously injured...
...barrios, it has forced each household to register its members with the organization...
...This is not foreign...
...Secretary of State George Shultz...
...The people of Davao City have for the most part complied with the vigilante demands...
...When I lived in Davao City in the late 1970s, I observed first-hand the courage of Davao residents in the face of extreme military pressure from the regime of Ferdinand Marcos...
...A Davao City disc jockey, Jun Pala, plays a crucial role in General Ramos's "total strategy...
...Lenora conducts a Montessori kindergarten in one of the barrios, and as we walked surreptitiously from her house to the school, she explained how Alsa Masa had become such a presence in Davao City...
...In the past, social-development agencies would move swiftly to provide relief to evacuees, and human-rights agencies would pressure the military to allow the families to return to their homes as quickly as possible...
...Being in depressed areas and considered to be living below the poverty level, we cannot expect that they should strictly adhere to the moral values in the same way as those who belong to the middle and upper class of our society...
...Within an hour, his entire village had packed up and left the area...
...An old man described his feelings when he saw the bombs falling on a nearby barrio...
...General Ramos says the roots of the insurgency are economic, but then he applies a military solution...
...He was afraid, he said...
...A vigilante group called the Alsa Masa (Uprising of the Masses) stalks Davao City...
...Sanitation was virtually nonexistent at the center...
...In one community, the heading of the registry list read, NPA Surrenderees...
...She confronted him with this...
...This is nothing new in Davao City...
...I have tried to stand up for the truth, but now I feel like I am all alone...
...They are our safety ticket into the evacuation center," said the nun who was briefing our delegation...
...At the kindergarten I met Norma, a teacher who ranks number one on the local Alsa Masa hit list...
...I tell my husband, I tell the human-rights groups, we have to do something, but everyone is scared or confused...
...I returned to Davao City earlier this year, a month after the ceasefire ended between the New People's Army (NPA) of the National Democratic Front and the government of Corazon Aquino, and I was surprised at what I found: The level of fear and paralysis—especially among the urban poor and human-rights workers—was greater than it had been a decade ago...
...The tension in March was so high, however, that most development workers were afraid to go to the evacuation centers...
...He felt a sense of panic, a sense of imminent death...
...The "L" is for Laban (to fight), the name of the political party under whose banner Aquino's late husband, Benigno, ran for office from his jail cell in 1978...
...Magsaysay's chief adviser and confidant in handling the Philippine Huk insurgency in the 1950s was American CIA operative Edward Lansdale...
...So stop harassing me...
...Some younger men told us that their corn crops were ready to be harvested, but the army would not allow them to go back...
...Don't you know that even before Vietnam, we had our own President Magsaysay...
...These youth are running around the community with guns and grenades, Lenora says...
...What will you do if you can't harvest the crop...
...They sit there and toss their grenades up and down as they talk," she says...
...The army gave us food," said one young mother, "but it is only enough for three days...
...Within the space of a few months, the signs painted They sit there and toss their grenades up and down as they talk...
...You are pointing your finger at me, saying I am a communist," Norma told him...
...She recently returned from a seven-week factfinding tour of the Philippines, and she is writing a book on the politics of that country to be published by Eerdmans...
...Only one woman, a grandmother, refused to sign, insisting she had never been a combatant...
...A professor and department head at the local Jesuit university, Ateneo de Davao, Ilagan joined the City Council during the period of "democratic space" soon after Aquino was elected in 1986...
...At a March press conference in Davao City, Ramos was asked whether this "hearts and minds" strategy wasn't similar to the U.S...
...Norma called a community meeting, urging that the incident be taken up with the mayor, the police, and the military...
...They hopped in their car and roared off, leaving us with the evacuees, the military-liaison officer, and several banana-plantation employees...
...Norma recognized one of the Alsa Masa youths...
...In the 1970s, as head of the Philippine Constabulary, he formed the Civilian Home Defense Forces (CHDF...
...Households that refused to register or to contribute financially to the Alsa Masa have been marked with an X. Opponents of Alsa Masa have been murdered...
...In June 1986, a soldier from a local camp befriended a group of unemployed youth who hung around the community, she said...
...They speak about Manila the way Chicagoans speak of New York City or Washington, D.C...
...They should have been dismantled long ago...
...Some children had contracted measles, and there was fear that an epidemic might spread among the hundreds of children in such close quarters...
...Vigilante groups are springing up "spontaneously" all over the Philippines as a "buffer between the people and the abusive New People's Army," says General Fidel Ramos, chief of staff of the Philippines...
...Clean drinking water was limited...
...But what I did, you did...
...Norma is the exception...
...We both know that before your armed group began, the NPA had already withdrawn from this neighborhood...
...These children have no training in the use of arms.' on the walls changed from Mabuhay [Long Live] NPA...
...Forlorn and suspicious looks greeted us...
...The Manilans think they are the center, but the real action is here," residents boast...
...In February, the Davao City Council set aside 180,000 pesos ($9,000) of the mayor's discretionary fund to pay for supplies for the Alsa Masa...
...After a dusty half-hour ride up to the banana plantation, we arrived at a dismal sight...
...to Mabuhay Alsa Masa...
...The two council members who objected have been publicly denounced...
...Luz Ilagan, one of the dissenting council members, has been singled out by Pala...
...Your group is not a protection from the NPA, and you know that I am not an NPA...
...They are not sort of free-floating vigilante groups...
...So we will probably end up with the same result here as the Americans did in Vietnam...
...I asked...
...The cause-oriented groups projected me into this position," she says...
...The CHDF were often cited for their human-rights abuses...
...I accompanied a small group of Filipino journalists and medical staff to a center set up on a banana plantation just outside of the city...
...After taking such a public stance, Norma became the target of the Alsa Masa...
...Residents are proud of their cultural diversity and their frontier mentality...
...I looked at this soft-spoken, middle-aged woman as she interacted with the children, and I wondered what she could have possibly done to become the object of the counterinsurgency drive...
...The CHDF was never that helpful in defeating the insurgency...
...Ramos is no stranger to such groups...
...It is a fact that some of the Alsa Masa members have criminal and other derogatory records...
...In some of the Dorothy Friesen is a director of Synapses, a Chicago-based grass-roots interfaith organization linking domestic and international issues of economic justice...
...Before we had a chance to talk to the evacuees, Cory's Crusaders announced that they had to return to the city...
...Pala spends four hours a day on the airwaves naming specific priests, nuns, human-rights and social-development workers, and government figures as "agents of Satan...
...This is not American," he exploded...
...These children have no training in the use of arms...
Vol. 51 • November 1987 • No. 11
