After the Philippines was ranked among the most dangerous countries in the world for land and environmental defenders by watchdog Global Witness, the situation does not appear to improve anytime soon with two missing environmental activists turning up at a government press conference, only to go off script and accuse the military of abduction.
Jonila Castro, 21, and Jhed Tamano, 22, had been working with coastal communities opposed to reclamation activities in Manila Bay when they disappeared on September 2 in Bataan province.
On September 15, nearly two weeks after their disappearance, where rights groups have alleged that the women had been violently abducted, possibly by “state actors”, apparently in relation to their activism, the National Security Council and police announced at a news conference that Castro and Tamano were being held in a safe house after they sought help from authorities.
“They were portrayed as environmentalists. They are not environmentalists but leftist organizers. They left the movement of their own free will,” NSC spokesman Jonathan Malaya told reporters then.
However, on Tuesday, at a news conference hosted by the government’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, Castro and Tamano offered a different version of events.
“The truth is we were abducted by the military via a van,” Castro told the news conference at the Plaridel Municipal Hall in Bulacan. “We were obliged to surrender because they threatened to kill us. That’s the truth. We did not want to be in the custody of the military.” She added that the statement they signed was not true. “We had no choice during that time. We want to show today the state’s blatant fascism towards activists, who only want to fight for Manila Bay,” she said.
Recordings of the botched news conference were widely shared on social media, but the links were later removed from the Facebook pages of Plaridel municipality and the task force.
In a statement, the task force said it “felt betrayed” by the allegations and accused the women of parroting “the propaganda lines of leftist groups on their supposed abduction by security forces.”
The agency, which has been at the forefront of red-tagging, said it stood by the military and the police investigation in to the incident.
This is a serious case of conflicting statements, and ideally, when state forces are being accused of a serious offense, government has to step in and launch a thorough investigation to find out what truly happened and deploy measures to ensure such despicable actions never happen again. However, so far, aside from lame denials, high government officials do not seem to be interested in the case.
Government’s non-interest in the case of its own forces being accused of abducting environmental activists could explain why the Philippines continues to be the among the most dangerous countries in the world for certain people who are not only denied equal protection by their government, but are even being actively targeted for abduction as well.
If there is any interest from government to make this country safer for all Filipinos, there has to be a serious push to get to the bottom of these very serious accusations hurled against state forces and how they wield their awesome power.*
