As President Marcos Jr. delivers his third State of the Nation Address today, 100 political prisoners in the newly-created Negros Island Region will hold a day-long fast to dramatize their calls for the government to immediately address their human rights concerns, said a press release from Human Rights Advocates Negros.
The political prisoners, who will skip eating their three meals today, are detained at the Negros Occidental District Jail in Bago City, and in few other jails run by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) in the provinces of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental.
They are calling for the immediate release, on humanitarian grounds, of political prisoners who are already sick and elderly, a stop to the threats of arrest, and other persecutory measures by the Marcos administration against the Paghida-et sa Kauswagan Development Group (PDG) and other peasant-oriented NGOs in Negros and elsewhere in the country, and the resumption of the all-important GRP-NDF formal peace negotiations.
According to the political prisoners’ support groups Kapatid and Karapatan, there are 90 sickly and 102 elderly political prisoners, out of the 755 total all over the country. Many of them will also conduct concerted activities in their respective jails today to advance their call for the eventual release of all political prisoners, among other human rights concerns.
Currently needing urgent release is Ernesto Jude Rimando Jr., a Cebu-based labor rights advocate now fighting for his life from stage 4 liver cancer. The other sickly and elderly political prisoners are 79-year-old Rosita Taboy, 72-year-old Evangeline Rapanut, and septuagenarian couples Frank Fernandez and Cleofe Lagtapon, Ruben and Presentacion Saluta, and Alberto and Virginia Villamor.
The Negros political prisoners are also calling for a stop to the efforts of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to jail members of the Negros Occidental-based Paghida-et sa Kauswagan Development Group (PDG) and the Cebu-based Community Empowerment Resource Network (CerNet), which are among the NGOs being red-tagged and falsely accused of financing terrorist organizations merely for undertaking socio-economic projects for farmers and indigenous peoples in areas in Negros classified by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as “geographically isolated.”
They emphasize that the work of these development NGOs benefit rural folks by somehow filling in to the yawning gaps in the country’s anti-poverty initiatives, which the political prisoners say can best be addressed only if the GRP-NDF formal peace negotiations to resolve the Philippines’ basic ills is finally resumed in earnest, as promised by the Marcos government in November last year.*
