BACOLOD City – As President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivered his third State of the Nation Address on Monday, 100 political prisoners in the newly-created Negros Island Region held a day-long protest fast to amplify their call for the government to immediately address their human rights concerns.
The political prisoners, who skipped eating their three meals, weare detained at the Negros Occidental District Jail in Bago City and in a few other jails run by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) in the provinces of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental.
They called for the following:
* immediate release on humanitarian grounds of sick and elderly political prisoners;
* a stop to the threats of arrest and other persecutory measures by the Marcos administration against the Paghida-et sa Kauswagan Development Group (PDG) and other peasant-oriented nongovernment organizations in Negros and elsewhere in the country; and
* resumption of the formal peace talks between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP)
According to Karapatan, there are 90 sickly and 102 elderly political prisoners, out of the 755 total all over the country. Many of them also conducted concerted activities in their respective jails on Monday to advance their call for the eventual release of all political prisoners, among other human rights concerns.
Currently needing urgent release is Ernesto Jude Rimando Jr., a Cebu-based labor rights advocate now fighting for his life from stage 4 liver cancer. The other sickly and elderly political prisoners are 79-year old Rosita Taboy, 72-year old Evangeline Rapanut, and septuagenarian couples Frank Fernandez and Cleofe Lagtapon, Ruben and Presentacion Saluta, and Alberto and Virginia Villamor.
Negros political prisoners also called for a stop to the efforts of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute members of the Negros Occidental-based Paghida-et sa Kauswagan Development Group (PDG) and the Cebu-based Community Empowerment Resource Network (CERNet), which are among the nongovernment organizations (NGOs) red-tagged and accused of financing terrorist organizations for undertaking socio-economic projects for farmers and indigenous peoples in areas in Negros classified by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as “geographically isolated.”
They emphasized that the work of these NGOs, which filled the yawning gaps in the government’s anti-poverty programs, benefit the rural communities in the Visayas.
The Negros political prisoners also emphasized that the Marcos Jr. administration should follow through its joint statement with the NDFP on its interest to resume the peace talks.
They affirmed that discussions on social and economic reforms, as well as political and constitutional reforms are much-needed especially with the intensified poverty and hunger levels experience by poor Filipinos, including peasants and farmworkers in Negros./PN
