I am not sure if, by saying the killing was politically motivated, the police meant electoral rivalry or intimidation by the insurgents. Samar is, after all, an insurgent hot spot where only the week before NPA rebels shot down a former guerrilla turned anti-communist advocate right in front of the capitol in Catbalogan.
In an election season, the violence is magnified. Nearly all election-related violence involves local political rivalries where the contenders nurse blood debts and the contests are winners-take-all.
Election- and insurgency-related violence used to be two separate drivers of senseless bloodletting. Of late, however, the two drivers of political assassination have combined to intensify the synergy of deaths brought about by political causes.
The merging of the two drivers of politically induced violence is a direct consequence of the communist movement’s fragmentation on one hand and its decision to exploit the electoral sphere on the other, plumbing that sphere for resources and the chance to magnify its political leverage.
Communist involvement in the electoral sphere raises the violence quotient in at least two ways.
First, the CPP-NPA, using the campaign period as a means to beef up their dwindling finances, extort money from mainstream politicians. They issue "permits to campaign" for a fee. For this method of extortion to be workable, the communist armed bands employ violence. Their ability to use their guns against those who refuse to comply is their only capital. A number of politicians have been killed because they refused to pay "permit to campaign" fees to the communists.
Second, the CPP-NPA, seeking to win more party-list seats at the House of Representatives (mainly for pork barrel purposes), is inclined to used the movement’s capacity for armed violence against rival party list groups. They threaten volunteers for rival party-list groups, burn down assets of NGOs supporting other factions and killing leading members of anti-communist party-list organizations.
Other leftist groups like Akbayan have complained loudly about the violent tactics of groups aligned with the CPP. In Negros island recently, the NPA burned down a truck used by an Akbayan-affiliated NGO Altertrade. Akbayan activists have been threatened at gunpoint. The party-list representative of that group once delivered a privilege speech on the floor of Congress denouncing the gangster tactics of the CPP.
Much earlier, even non-leftist party-list groups such as Abanse Pinay! have complained of their campaigners being harassed by communist guerrillas and their constituencies being intimidated.
A friend from high school, Benedicto Sanchez, who had spent more than two decades as a senior cadre for the CPP before he decided the movement he served has descended into insanity, was kidnapped by the NPA last year and threatened at gunpoint while performing grassroots work for an NGO in Negros. With him at that time was a colleague from the same NGO, Mardi Mapa, a former provincial board member and a member of the reformist group Pagbabago@Pilipinas.
On two consecutive days last week, NPA assassins gunned down volunteers for the anti-communist party-list group Alliance for Nationalism and Democracy (ANAD). That seems to be dark promise of more such things to come.
On January 17, Augusto "Ka Agoy" Daclitan, ANAD regional coordinator for Eastern Visayas was shot in the nape inside Imelda Park, fronting the Western Samar capitol building.
Daclitan, 55, was a former NPA guerrilla who is now campaigning against the evils of the communist movement. He is likewise a key person in building a constituency for the anti-communist party-list group that is confident for winning a seat in Congress in the next elections. He was, therefore, a major nuisance for the CPP-NPA which is quickly losing its base in that island.
On January 18, anti-communist radio commentator Jose Lorena was gunned down in Daraga, Albay inside his store by a three-man NPA hit squad pretending to negotiate for the surrender of a communist guerrilla.
Like Daclitan, Lorena was a former communist guerrilla himself before he had a change of heart. He was a leader of the Kilusang Kontra Komunista (KKK), a local affiliate of the ANAD. More significantly, Lorena was a broadcaster who courageously argued his ideological position on radio in a province infested with insurgents.
Daclitan and Lorena are the 17th and 18th activists of the ANAD killed by communist assassins. Ironically, some of those activists killed by the NPA have been included in lists of militants supposedly murdered by pro-military death squads put out by pro-communist "human rights" groups waging propaganda against our government.
Lorena, a practicing broadcast journalist, will surely be added to the list of murdered media practitioners used by the leftist groups as grist in the campaign to discredit the "US-Arroyo regime."
The entry of the forceful CPP-NPA into the party-list game has raised the death toll attributed to "election-related violence." It has sent a chill down the spines of non-ideological party-list formations seeking to genuinely represent the underprivileged in our society. They have become potential victims of communist violence.
As I ponder the trend towards even more violence as the campaign period nears, there is news that the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines is going to convene to put together a massive campaign for voter education and the protection of the integrity of the electoral process.
I humbly suggest that the bishops put election-related violence – particularly of the sort employed by the communists to inhibit participation by peaceful and unarmed formations – at the top of the list.
There is little sense in curbing retail election cheating if the field of contenders is, from the onset, inhibited by fear arising out of the CPP-NPA’s willingness to murder for a larger share of the pork barrel.
The communist movement is, after all, the largest private army on the electoral field these days.