By ANNE MARXZE D. UMIL
Bulatlat.com
MANILA – Activists and a multimedia reporter are slapped with financing terrorism charges filed by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, Regional Field Unit 2 in Tuguegarao, Cagayan.
On Jan. 10, the Office of the Provincial Prosecutor in Cagayan issued a subpoena against peasant activist and former political prisoner Isabelo Adviento, fellow peasant activist Cita Managuelod, Karapatan human rights worker Jackie Valencia, Makabayan-Cagayan Valley coordinator Agnes Mesina and Pinoy Weekly multimedia contributor and former correspondent of The Northern Dispatch, Deo Montesclaros, ordering them to submit counter-affidavits and other evidence to answer the complaint filed against them.
Human rights group Karapatan decried the charges, noting that there has been an increase in such cases ahead of the visit of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to the Philippines. The FATF, a global group that sets standards to fight money laundering and terrorism financing, met with government officials on January 20-21.
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In a statement, Karapatan Secretary General Cristina Palabay said that the Ferdinand Marcos Jr administration has been accusing activists left and right of financing terrorism in its attempt to exit the FATF’s “grey list” of governments deemed to have fallen short of FATF’s standards of combating money laundering and terrorism financing.
“Thus the flurry of arbitrary cases filed against activists and their organizations who have long been in the crosshairs of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC),” she added.
The case stemmed from a complaint by PSSG Percival P. Carag, Deputized Anti-Money Laundering Council Financial Investigator, alleging Adviento and others as members of the Regional White Area Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines. In his complaint, Carag narrated a series of events between 2017 to 2019 where he alleged that the respondents gathered supplies and cash for the New People’s Army.
Those named in the complaint are victims of red-tagging.
Adviento was repeatedly red-tagged prior to his arrest in 2022. Mesina and Valencia were also subjected to the same form of harassment and judicial harassment in the past years due to their work.
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In 2020, the NTF-ELCAC labeled Montesclaros as a communist rebel during a Senate hearing, which forced him to flee from Cagayan Valley.
Montesclaros has been a community journalist since 2017, covering human rights, social justice, the environment, and indigenous peoples. He also contributes as a photojournalist for international agencies such as IMAGO Images and Alto Press.
Karapatan meanwhile demanded the repeal of the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act of 2012 as well as Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 which it said “are being increasingly weaponized by the State against activists and other dissenters to comply with the FATF’s impositions.”
“The NTF-ELCAC must be abolished for being the foremost red- and terror-tagger and instigator of such trumped-up charges,” she added. “The manufactured terror cases against activists must be dismissed, and the freeze orders on their assets lifted,” Palabay concluded. (RTS, RVO)
