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Amid the national outrage and international concern raised over the March 7 “Bloody Sunday” killing of nine activists in the Southern Tagalog region, urgent calls are being addressed to the Supreme Court to do what it can, while it can, to protect the people’s constitutional rights.
“How can [the judiciary] distance themselves [from the police action] if they themselves signed the documents used to make the operations seem legitimate?” - Defend Southern Tagalog
The Calabarzon killings were actually the latest of the killings that have provoked such condemnation. Still unresolved are the killings of nine Tumandok indigenous community members in similar police operations in Panay Island last Dec. 30, the attempted slaying of the Tumandoks’ lawyer in Iloilo, as well as the killing by police anti-drug operatives of the mayor of Calbayog City.
She graduated in 2014 feeling on top of the world, not because she was one step closer to escaping the life she left behind in Batangas, but because she finally understood her role as a daughter and a daughter of the nation.
"You have no mercy. All you do is kill, kill, kill."
“The appalling inhumanity of the State does not end with their gruesome, extrajudicial killings: they continue to deny the remains of their victims from death to funeral while putting their families to the torturous experience and misery of having to beg on their knees for the remains of their own loved ones.”
“We are deeply worried that these latest killings indicate an escalation in violence, intimidation and harassment and red tagging of human rights defenders.” -- UN
Bulatlat looks back on Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr.’s bloody rule in Southern Luzon.
“The attacks on Atty. Guillen and the Southern Luzon activists are not just a condemnable assault on a member of the legal profession and civil society actors, but also a stab to the heart of the Constitution..."
This latest spate of attacks against activists came a mere nine weeks since the PNP launched a similar operation in Panay island. Nine people were killed and 17 were arrested by the police in several indigenous Tumandok communities on Dec 30, 2020.
Five activists were killed and three arrested in a simultaneous police raid on March 7, just two days after President Rodrigo Duterte issued yet another kill order to finish off communist fighters in the Philippines.
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