The men came in the small hours, between three and five in the morning, a time supposedly for sleep and peaceful rest, especially that day, a Sunday. The houses were all small and humble, the kind most Filipinos would recognize. The office building was similarly unassuming.
They came bearing search warrants, all issued by the same judge. They violently barged in, nearly knocking down flimsy doors. They barked orders, rousing people from sleep. Some led to discussions, negotiations. In others, altercation ensued, the targets dragged away from crying loved ones. Then gunshots, followed by deafening silence.
By sunrise, six had been arrested and nine had been killed. Dazed from a still-raging pandemic, the Philippines woke up to news of one of the bloodiest single-day offensives simultaneously launched by the police and military against progressives, no mean feat considering the ever-increasing death toll and the impunity with which such killings are committed.
The coordinated predawn raids on March 7, the most brutal in recent memory, targeted activists doing important work in the provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, and Rizal, in the rapidly developing Southern Tagalog region just outside Manila.
“Those killed and arrested were legal activists,” said Renato Reyes, secretary-general of the left-wing Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan or New Patriotic Alliance). Among the dead was Emmanuel “Manny” Asuncion, the group’s secretary-general in Cavite and a labor organizer in the region for over two decades.
They were unarmed, Reyes insisted. “They are not [members of the] New People’s Army,” he added, referring to the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. “They are known by their communities. They are staying at their homes… [and] above-ground legal offices.”
Condemnations of the “Bloody Sunday” raids were swift, with several senators calling for an immediate probe and Vice President Leni Robredo calling the killings a “massacre.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights was “appalled” by what it described as “apparently arbitrary” killings.
Not the first Bloody Sunday
“Bloody Sunday” recalls similar incidents of brutality by state security forces against civilians not just in the Philippines but elsewhere.
Not long ago on July 7, 2019—another Sunday—a string of unrelated killings took the life of an activist church worker, a provincial legislator, and a businessman in so-called “riding-in-tandem” operations by gunmen in motorcycles.
The incident highlighted the brazen impunity with which the killings are committed, with police estimating that about four people are killed via the modus every day, according to Human Rights Watch.
The church worker, Salvador Romano, was a staff member of Iglesia Filipina Independiente in Manjuyod town in Negros Oriental province and a former volunteer for human rights group Karapatan. Just months earlier, the same town was one of the sites of the killing of 14 farmers in the restive central Visayan province, in which police used search warrants issued by a faraway court, the same mechanism that some say enabled the recent bloodbath.
Several other events in history all over the world bear the name “Bloody Sunday.” They invariably involve a clash between unarmed civilians and authorities turning viciously against people they were supposed to protect. Labor issues and civil rights are recurring flash points.
One of the more well-known episodes took place on January 22, 1905, when police fired upon peaceful demonstrators then marching toward the Winter Palace in the then Russian capital of St. Petersburg. Led by priest and working class leader Georgy Gapon, the crowd of workers had gathered to take a petition for better working conditions and other reforms to Tsar Nicholas II.
When the smoke had cleared, scores were dead, the exact figure ranging from the official government estimate of 96 to as many as 4,000 demonstrators. Hundreds more were wounded. Anger over the event led to more worker strikes in industrial centers across the Russian Empire, as well as peasant uprisings and military mutinies, culminating in what would be called the 1905 Revolution.
More than half a century later, on March 7, 1965 in Alabama, US, a peaceful march for voting rights for African Americans was met with policy brutality. More than 600 protesters led by Martin Luther King Jr. had crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge when state troopers attacked them using nightsticks and teargas.
Almost seven years later, on January 30, 1972 in Northern Ireland, British soldiers opened fire at an anti-internment march in the city of Derry, killing 13 and wounding 14 others. The marchers consisting of about 15,000 people were protesting a policy that allowed the authorities to jail suspected members of the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, without trial.
Considered the worst mass shooting in Northern Irish history, it was widely seen as a turning point during the Troubles, as the 30-year conflict was called, resulting in the burning of the British embassy in Dublin, Ireland’s capital, and further fueling hostility between Irish nationalists and the British Army.
‘Direct orders from commander-in-chief’
In the Philippines, the deadly raids in Southern Tagalog are by no means new or unprecedented. They follow a bold and intensifying pattern of assault against civil rights and dissent in the country that critics say is state policy in all but name.
Two days earlier, President Rodrigo Duterte had ordered the military and police to “finish off” and “kill” the communist rebels in the country, his latest charge ostensibly directed at the New People’s Army that is waging the longest-running Maoist insurgency in Asia.
“Forget about human rights,” he said during a meeting of the country’s anti-communist task force. “That’s my order. I’m willing to go to jail, that’s not a problem. I do not have any qualms about doing the things that I have to do.”
Groups point out that such reckless orders have emboldened security forces to go on a killing spree heedless of due process, putting progressive organizers, activists, human rights workers, and even lawyers, clergymen, and journalists squarely within the crosshairs of such violence.
In the recent raids, particularly harrowing was the slaughter of young couple Ariel and Ana Mariz “Chai” Evangelista in Nasugbu town in Batangas. Ariel, leader of a progressive fisherfolk group campaigning against fish cages that threaten the livelihood of locals, was seized from bed by police and, weakened by a blow to the head, dragged helplessly to the next cottage.
Chai, whose family lived on the beachside property, was able to get away at first. Relatives heard her cry for help but could do nothing but wait in horror. She came back to be with Ariel in an effort to protect him. Gunshots rang in the air not long after.
Their death certificates indicate fatal gunshot wounds that hit Ariel’s heart and lungs, Chai’s heart, lungs, liver, and intestines. The two also suffered from broken bones and abrasions, kin said.
Worse, Ariel’s ten-year-old son saw everything, hiding in a small spot close to the ceiling then under the bed. At one point, he even heard one of the police say, “Sir, there’s a child,” before they finally left, rare mercy thrown at the child they had freshly orphaned.
The March 7 bloodbath was “a direct and concrete manifestation of how the police and military follow the direct orders of their commander-in-chief,” said Charm Maranan, spokesperson for the alliance Defend Southern Tagalog.
As part of the country’s well-funded counter-insurgency program, this effectively obliterates any distinction between armed combatants and members of progressive organizations, said Bayan Muna (Nation First) party-list representative Carlos Zarate.
ps said a disturbing pattern in the killings appears to give them the seeming imprimatur of complicit courts via so-called “search warrant factories.”
“[The police] apply for a search warrant, the judge issues a search warrant anywhere in the Philippines,” said Reyes of Bayan or the New Patriotic Alliance. “They’ll use the search warrant to enter homes, to arrest people, plant evidence, or, as in the case [on March 7], kill. The pattern of abuse is too glaring to ignore.”
“It is not just weaponizing the law but also court processes to give cover to extrajudicial killings and the filing of trumped-up charges,” said Zarate, adding that the pattern comes straight from the playbook of the government’s similarly notorious drug war, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives since Duterte came into power in 2016.
“It’s a dangerous precursor to the full-blown implementation of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020,” warned Cristina Palabay, secretary-general of human rights watchdog Karapatan.
Even before the arrests were served in early March, “we’ve been receiving a lot of reports of harassment and surveillance of leaders and activists, such as Ka Manny [Asuncion],” said Casey Cruz, Bayan Muna coordinator for Southern Tagalog.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque reliably came to Duterte’s defense, arguing that his fresh orders were directed at armed rebels and thus “legal.” This echoes the police leadership in the region who claimed the operations targeted “members of communist terrorist groups.”
If they really love their fellow Filipinos, Roque said, they’d lay down their arms.
Unarmed, poor, and fighting for rights
But the targets of the raids were all unarmed, their colleagues said, many of them full-time activists and organizers who are too poor to live in more comfortable homes, much less procure expensive guns, hand grenades, and ammunition.
Two of those killed, bus driver Melvin Dasigao and construction worker Mark Lee Bacasno, were even homeless not long ago.
Members of urban poor group San Isidro Kasiglahan, Kapatiran at Damayan para sa Kabuhayan, Katarungan at Kapayapaan, or SIKKAD-K3, the two had been fighting for housing rights since occupying idle government housing units in Rodriguez town in Rizal province with some 200 residents in 2017.
The group became the subject of red-tagging in May last year when the army’s 2nd Infantry Division and 80th Infantry Brigade summoned members to a so-called “local peace engagement” where they were accused of being members of the New People’s Army. Reports of profiling and a planned raid of houses came the following month.
Nine months later, police barged into their tiny homes, the two were handcuffed, and forced to lie face down on the ground. The women and children were ordered to step out, then the usual flurry of gunfire was heard, loud in the predawn silence.
“What they did was brutal,” said Rosalinda Salundaga, Dasigao’s partner.
“The people there come from homelessness, just striving to live,” said Mimi Doringo, secretary general of Kadamay, an alliance of urban poor groups of which SIKKAD is an affiliate. “The community doesn’t even have water and electricity, and yet the police accuse the people of having guns and bombs.”
“We live in poverty,” Salundaga said. “During the last typhoon, the water reached the second floor. We relied on relief for food. Our clothes came from relief, too. Everything was washed out. How can we have guns and grenades?”
Two more members of SIKKAD, brothers Abner and Edward Damas Esto, were also killed. They were both banana farmers.
All four live in a village in Rodriguez that Palabay said has long been militarized and where communities thus live in fear, casting doubt on the police narrative that they all fought back.
Indeed, the details border on ridiculous. One of those arrested is 61-year-old Nimfa Lanzanas of Karapatan, who had been soundly asleep next to her three grandchildren when police barged in to their Calamba, Laguna home, where they allegedly found three guns and a grenade.
Lanzanas, a self-taught paralegal aide, had been fighting for the release of her son, a political prisoner who was arrested in 2014. As a member of Families and Friends of Political Prisoners, or Kapatid (Sibling), she brought food to political prisoners in provincial jails and help deal with paperwork in faraway courts.
In a move that Karapatan said is strategically meant to further impair critical human rights work and dissent, the grandmother, who suffers from anemia and hypertension, is now a political prisoner herself.
Targeting causes
By targeting activists and human rights workers, the raids appear to be an attack against what the beleaguered sector ultimately works for: causes and struggles that seek justice and relief for vulnerable sectors, crucial in a society marked by deepening inequality.
Asuncion, the veteran organizer who was killed in Cavite, was involved in campaigns that mobilized people against seemingly Herculean interests.
These include the proposed jeepney phaseout that threatens the livelihood of jeepney drivers and the eviction of long-time farmers in vast agricultural estates Lupang Ramos and Silang in the province, where the residents had been asserting their right to the land for generations.
He was also involved in the fight against the big-ticket reclamation projects that threaten to decimate the livelihood of and displace countless fisherfolk communities along the coast of Bacoor town.
Perhaps a testament to his commitment, Asuncion was killed in the office of labor rights non-profit Workers Assistance Center. He tried to negotiate with police, who instead of producing the asked-for search warrant dragged him away from his wife Liezel. He was reportedly pushed to the ground, his mouth taped.
His last words in Filipino —“We’re people, too”—were interrupted by gunshots. Six bullets were recovered from his body, according to Karapatan.
“He was not resisting, and the police had no business being there in that office,” Reyes said. The address in the warrant—a crucial detail—was his residence in a different town, which was at least an hour away.
Meanwhile, Mags Camoral, spokesperson of Bayan in Laguna, was arrested at the Defend Yulo Farmers headquarters in Cabuyao town.
From the office organizers run the campaign against what they describe as a decades-long land grab at another agricultural estate, Hacienda Yulo, which had intensified recently with demolitions, arson, beatings, and continuing threats against residents.
Finally, two of those killed—cousins Puroy and Randy dela Cruz—belong to the indigenous Dumagat tribe in Tanay town in Rizal and were members of Dumagat Sierra Madre, a group that had been resisting the controversial Kaliwa Dam project.
A flagship water source project of the Duterte administration, the proposed dam sits within the Sierra Madre mountain range and partly in the ancestral domain of the Dumagat-Remontado peoples.
The impact on the environment, biodiversity, and the life of indigenous groups is expected to be unprecedented, according to the broad-based Stop Kaliwa Dam Network.
“Harry Roque today said there is a distinction between activists and rebels,” Reyes said. “Where is it? Why are you shooting activists?”
Be it in the Philippines or elsewhere, the targets of “Bloody Sunday” represent a myriad of persisting challenges—from housing, labor, and land rights to racial justice—while police brutality and violence in the face of protests and dissent is an enduring legacy. ●
Glenn Diaz’s first book The Quiet Ones won the 2017 Palanca Grand Prize and the Philippine National Book Award. His second novel “Yñiga,” on counter-insurgency and political killings in 2000s Philippines, was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize. Born and raised in Manila, he is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Adelaide in Australia.