AFP: Philippine Army tied to death squad

[oblivious]

Evidence has emerged for the first time the Philippine military is involved in the murders of left-wing activists. A member of a death squad sent to kill a pastor is killed by friendly fire, and found carrying army ID.

Pay to read: http://www.scmp.com/
http://asia.scmp.com/asianews/ZZZJT4M47UE.html

same AFP story:
Activists, peasant leaders live in fear of death squads

The Philippine Star 11/13/2006

Peasant leader and Protestant pastor Isaias Sta. Rosa was enjoying the company of his children on a balmy August night when 20 heavily armed men barged into his home and forcibly snatched him. Thirty minutes later he was dead, his bullet-riddled body dumped on the muddy banks of a creek less than 100 meters from his modest two-bedroom home in Malobago, a quiet, impoverished farming village in the eastern Bicol region.

Sta. Rosa’s case got little attention in the national press, his death only a statistic added to the more than 700 activists gunned down by so-called paramilitary "death squads" in the Philippines in the past five years alone.

But what made this case different was that it offers the first real hard evidence that the military was involved in the killings: one of the abductors was accidentally killed in the burst of gunfire that also felled Sta. Rosa.

An ID card in the gunman’s pocket identified him as Lordger Pastrana, a member of the army’s intelligence group who was out on a "secret mission" to liquidate leftist dissidents.
http://www.philstar.com/philstar/News200611130402.htm

Background: A killing season

Saturday, November 11, 2006

...Human rights groups here and abroad say the government of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has crossed the line with an anti-left campaign that some say has claimed nearly 800 lives since she took office in 2001. Amnesty International says 51 leftist leaders were assassinated in the first half of 2006 and the group earlier in the year condemned the killings in a strongly worded report. "Attacks rarely lead to the charge, arrest, or prosecution of the murderers," Amnesty said. "A long-existing failure to prosecute and convict those suspected of human rights violations is having a corrosive impact on public confidence in the rule of law."

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/weekend_news_detail.asp?pp_cat=31&art_id=31504&sid=10752832&con_type=3&d_str=20061111

[AliceWonderland]

1. Thank you for posting this

An important story -- we don't get enough news about the Philippines.

[oblivious]

2. Thanks. I make a valiant attempt every once in a while knowing it'll get at best a response or two.

But at least with the new VIEWS column you get the sense that people are reading it.

I agree it's important. Everyone in the Philippines knew the army was behind the killings, despite Arroyo's insistence that her government was doing everything possible to investigate it. Now there is hard proof.

It seems to be peaceful activists being targeted by these death squads, rather than "armed insurgents'.

From the HK Standard article:
Indeed a staggering variety of victims, united only by their involvement in groups seen as allied with the left, have been reported on a regular basis in recent years. Activist pastors, including an elderly Bishop of the Philippine Independent Church who was slain in his home in early October, have been victims. But so have student activists who have disappeared, labor leaders, journalists, small town politicians and former rebels.

[MetaTrope]

3. Heckuva job there, Glory