In a province where three armies reign

Sitio Melancoly sits on a mountainside half a day’s ride by jeep from Cadiz City in Negros Occidental. NGO leader Mardi Mapa-Suplido arrived well before sundown of Aug. 10 to break the good news. Her Non-Timber Forest Products Task Force had just received a hefty order from the US for placemats that Melancoly women weave out of copious cogon grass. That would mean cash in the pockets of families who have been poor ever since they can remember. Mardi was explaining all this to barrio guides Abit and Marlon Peña when six men with rifles barged in. Growling that they were with the Revolutionary Proletarian Army, the men asked why Mardi and her companions, Joy Ordaniel and Benedicto Sanchez, were "organizing" in their territory. The RPA is a guerrilla band that broke from the communist New People’s Army in Negros Island in the ’80s. Hunted down by erstwhile comrades for "betraying" the cause, it partnered with the Manila-based Alex Boncayao Brigade, another NPA splinter, and ultimately signed a peace pact with the government. Sitio Melancoly, with adjacent Sitios Alimatok and Hiyang-Hiyang, is RPA terrain and only it may organize the barrio folk for any activity. Mardi countered that she was there only to give the womenfolk the next morning the strict specifications for the placemats. Dodoy the squad officer calmed down only after realizing that Mardi was on "official mission." Not only had Cadiz Mayor Salvador Escalante Jr. lent her the jeep, but RPA chieftain Carapali Lualhati also had cleared her visit the previous day. Mardi knew the "protocol": she used to be an elected provincial board member of Negros Occidental, and general secretary of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process which conducted the peace talks with the RPA-ABB.

In an Aug. 29 letter to the OPAPP, Mardi said she and her colleagues thought the harassment was over when they spent the night with the Peñas. But the next morning, when the weavers started gathering outside the hut at 8 o’clock, a dozen more armed men arrived, this time with M-60s and M-203s aside from the usual M-16s. The higher RPA boss, Reymar, demanded that the trio leave at once. They did not like the way that Joy photographed the women’s meeting, and announced that Benedicto was in fact at the top of their hit list of enemies. When Mardi pleaded that she only be allowed to discuss the weaving project, Reymar and the men raised their voices and threatened them with harm. Although they knew the RPA members, the women grew scared and begged off from breakfast. Not a few went to the toilet more than once. Those who were weaving had to stop because their fingers were trembling.

Mardi has yet to hear from the OPAPP, to whom she complained that the RPA harassment was hurting the livelihood of the very barrio folk it professes to serve. Meanwhile, RPA head Lualhati reportedly has assured her there is no hit list, only a mysterious blacklist of certain NGO workers. Veronica Tabara, widow of RPA founder Arturo Tabara whom the NPA assassinated in 2004, also reportedly told Mardi that the RPA men were edgy because government soldiers had skirmished with NPA rebels only the day before in the jungle near Sitio Melancoly. RPA cadres Dodoy and Reymar were just being careful that the NPA does not stray into RPA territory. They don’t want troops from the Armed Forces of the Philippines patrolling their area either. Negros Occidental is a province where three armies operate – to the distress of the little folk.

Very recently, Left-leaning party-list Rep. Etta Rosales denounced the NPA for levying "progressive taxes" on Negros peasants. It appears from her Congress speech that on Aug. 13, four days after the AFP-NPA firefight that provoked the RPA stalking at Sitio Melancoly, the NPA in Negros Occidental also had burned a truck of an NGO called AlterTrade. The arson was "punishment" for AlterTrade’s refusal to give the NPA P30 million each month since 2001. Three armed males, two of them minors according to the driver’s report, waylaid the banana-laden vehicle on a dirt road in Toboso town. They honked the horn for two-dozen men to emerge from the thicket, and set truck and cargo on fire.

AlterTrade, as Rosales recounted, is no ordinary NGO. Organized in the midst of famine of Negros farmhands when sugar prices plummeted in the ’80s, it aimed to help the poor help themselves. AlterTrade started small, with minimum capital and a modest loan from Japan to produce muscovado, the poor man’s sweetener, from leftovers of sugar mills. The product proved to be a healthy alternative, and orders soon came from Europe and the US. AlterTrade has since formed three subsidiaries from its export earnings. But such earnings are not big enough to justify remittance of "taxes" that several Negros tycoons and sugar barons pay to the NPA’s shadow revolutionary government. More importantly, AlterTrade founders were one-time Leftist militants and NPA cadres who believed in vain that they could reason with their ex-comrades. The first taxation demand came in 2001, Rosales said, but collection was delayed when AlterTrade reported the matter to the authorities and foreign clients. The NPA vowed to get even sometime soon, the NPA allegedly wrote to the NGO managers.

Rosales cried that progressive taxation is "plain, outright extortion", thus a violation of human rights provisions in the NPA’s interim peace pact with the government. Unfortunately, that accord may no longer hold after the many attempts at ceasefire collapsed. Rosales also filed a bill to stop the NPA from exacting "campaign fees" from election candidates who enter its "Red zones". But it has been gathering dust in the archives of Congress because legislators feel that extortion long has been criminalized under the Penal Code. It’s just a matter now of enforcing the law, but the National Police is hard-pressed to do so against well-armed rebels while the AFP is busy carping about businessmen who pay taxes to the NPA to be used against soldiers.

"In this war nobody wins," Rosales shakes her head, "and it is the innocent, unarmed civilians who suffer."

* * *

E-mail: [email protected]