Arrest of Left leaders

HISTORY has never been friendly to the Left obviously because it is still currently being written by the Right. After a short honeymoon with the Duterte administration, militants are being pushed again to the margins and, in the case of four of their prominent leaders, are now facing a difficult choice of either accepting a stint in jail or going underground.

On July 11, Judge Evelyn AtienzaTurla of the Regional Trial Court Branch 40 in Palayan, Nueva Ecija, issued warrants of arrest against militant leaders Liza Maza, Rafael Mariano, Teddy Casiño and Satur Ocampo. Maza is a commissioner of the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) while Mariano was formerly President Rodrigo Duterte’s agrarian reform secretary. Ocampo and Casiño are former Bayan Muna partylist representatives.

Maza and Mariano were the faces of the particular phase in the militants’ struggle that saw them support Duterte’s candidacy in the 2016 elec- tions and even joining the Duterte Cabinet after he became president. Aside from Maza and Mariano, Judy Taguiwalo became Department of Social Welfare and Development secretary. Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III is also a nominee of the Left.

Mariano and Taguiwalo were eventually rejected by the powerful Commission on Appointments while Maza largely owes her NAPC stint to Cabinet Secretary Leoncio Evasco, a former activist. Like many militants who wiggle into the government bureaucracy, Maza and Evasco are increasingly getting marginalized.

The case against Maza, Mariano, Casiño and Ocampo was filed in 2006 yet. They were accused of murdering three supporters of the rival Akbayan party-list based on testimonies of dis- credited witnesses. Bayan Muna and Ocampo even filed a case for damages against them in 2007 and won in the lower court.

Judge Turla remanded the case against the four to the prosecutors claiming that the conduct of the preliminary investigation was not followed. But the petitioners appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the remand was improper and ordered Turla to decide if there was probable cause to arrest them. Turla thus decided that a probable cause did exist.

Interestingly, the issuance of the warrants of arrest against the four came at a time when the peace talks between the government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) is on the verge of totally breaking down and with the Left increasingly becoming critical of the Duterte administration. The Left’s stance was summed up by NDFP consultant and Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison this way: it is easier to oust the Duterte administration than for the peace talks to succeed under it.

Which brings to mind the experience of the leftist Democratic Alliance (DA) in 1946. It won seven seats in Congress after it forged an alliance with then president Sergio Osmeña Sr. of the Nacionalista Party against Manuel Roxas in the presidential elections in 1946. The seven DA legislators were eventually unseated from Congress via Roxas’s instigation.

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