Mayor Otaza and Reina Nasino both deserve justice

DENNIS Rodinas became the second New People’s Army (NPA) personality wanted in Mindanao to fall in Central Visayas since September 17. On October 11, military and police shot and killed Rodinas at his house, still under construction, in Barangay Pung- ol Sibugay, one of Cebu City’s mountain barangay (villages). Rodinas — 46, from Magpet, North Cotabato, with plenty of blood on his hands — and Junifie Dagale, who was arrested in Bohol on September 17, were both wanted for their participation in numerous crimes in Mindanao, including the abduction of the Compostela Valley jail warden in 2014 and attacks on the properties of the Lapanday and Lorenzo group of companies in Davao City in 2017. But the crime that Rodinas was wanted for in particular was the abduction and murder of the mayor of Loreto, Agusan del Sur, Dario Otaza, and his son, Daryl, five years ago. The bodies of the two men were found hogtied and with multiple gunshot wounds in the morning of Oct. 20, 2015.

The “crime” for which the NPA meted Mayor Otaza ( and his son) the “death penalty” was the mayor’s having been successful “in encouraging 246 NPA members and leaders, majority of whom are lumads, to surrender” ( OfficialGazette, Oct. 23, 2015). Not long before his brutal murder, Otaza had facilitated the surrender of 154 rebels. More were expected to follow. “Several NPA rebels, who enjoy kinship with Mayor Otaza through the IP (indigenous people) network, have indicated a desire to reenter formal society because of the mayor’s integrity, credibility and the success of his program,” then Undersecretary Manny Bautista said in an official statement.

Otaza was a threat to the NPA. They murdered him to prevent him from convincing more rebels to abandon the armed struggle. His death was a great loss not only to his family and to his town, but to the efforts of the government to bring back rebels to mainstream society and reduce enemy forces.

Not many months after the murder of Mayor Otaza and his son, the State that owed him so much declared a ceasefire with the NPA, entered into formal peace talks with the Communist Party of the Philippines, released some of their high-profile members, and personalities from what Jose Maria Sison calls “the legal forces of the national democratic movement” were appointed to key positions in the government.

With Rodinas’ death, at least one of the perpetrators of the abduction and murder of Mayor

Otaza and his son has been brought to justice. For this we must congratulate and thank the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police. The contribution of Mayor Otaza to bringing peace and prosperity to insurgency-affected communities must not be forgotten but offered as an example to be emulated by other local officials.

The death of Mayor Otaza cut short his and the government’s plans for the mass surrender of NPA members. The death of the three-month old baby of Reina Mae Nasino cut short everything. Maybe the death could not have been prevented but it is hard to find words to describe the way the government handled the situation. It revealed everything that is wrong with our government. Nasino may be a hardcore ideologue, having spent at least six years of her young life in the embrace of Sison’s “legal forces” of the national democratic movement. Her tasks, including organizing in urban poor communities, were as indispensable to the socialist revolution as the tasks of an armed NPA combatant. Nasino’s recruitment to the movement seems to have happened in 2014 when she joined the Anakbayan chapter of the Eulogio Amang Rodriguez Institute of Science and Technology,

a state university in Manila.

The police claimed that there were firearms and explosives in the Bayan office where Nasino was arrested. But she wasn’t wanted for murder, she isn’t a suicide bomber or known to have carried out terrorist attacks, abductions, robbery or arson. Anyhow, that isn’t the point. As a civilized society, we are still expected to treat detainees with dignity and compassion. Nasino is a young woman who went through pregnancy in jail, without the reassuring presence of parents, siblings or other relatives. She lost her baby twice, first when the baby girl was taken from her, then when she died. Within the omnipotent State apparatus, with its vast material resources and pool of highly educated, well- paid civil servants, where was — if not the much-touted malasakit — then at least the wisdom to try and save the life of the baby, to soften the blow for the mother, to reach out, to be kind? Of course, the situation has become a case of very bad PR for the government, a wasted opportunity to show the doubters, especially Nasino and her colleagues in the national democratic movement, that the government is their government, too.