Artists against assassination

by Carmela Cruz for Towards Freedom

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Woman in Black

Gabriela Krista Dalena sits on a painter’s stool, narrating a harrowing incident from a night in April 2003. A ray of late morning sunlight comes through the parted doors of the verandah across her. It illuminates the corners of oil paintings hanging on the room’s high walls and the delicate features of terracotta sculptures sitting on the tops of wooden cabinet and tables and lining the wooden floor. Dalena, an independent filmmaker, recalls how 20 men, armed and masked, abducted five of her colleagues, including her ex-boyfriend, a cameraman. The team had just finished a fact-finding mission investigating allegations that soldiers from the Philippine Army had beaten up leftist activists helping peasants in a town in Oriental Mindoro, an island province about four hours from Manila.

Human rights activist Eden Marcellana from Karapatan, a human rights group, and Eddie Gumanoy, a leader of a local peasant organization, were found dead the next day, with bullets wounds and signs of tortures on their bodies. Dalena’s ex-boyfriend survived, but only after being hogtied and threatened with death if he returned to Mindoro.

"He was able to live because Eden told the men, ‘Don’t touch him. He’s just a volunteer. His parents are prominent artists in Manila,’" says Dalena, 31, whose parents are also well-known artists. In the 1980s, her father, Danny Dalena, a painter, had worked as an editorial cartoonist for a newspaper critical of the dictatorial rule of then-president Ferdinand Marcos. Her mother, Julie Lluch, a terracotta sculptor, was a founding member of the feminist group, Kasibulan.

"He was told not to return and to change jobs," says Dalena, who also worked on the films Red Saga and Echoes of Bullets about peasantry and insurgency in the Philippines.

Mindoro’s mountainous terrain has long been a base for the communist rebels, the New People’s Army (NPA). Its jungles and coastal communities have been battlefields for insurgents and military troops. As the communist insurgency across the country rose and fell as a threat to national security, the mostly fishing and farming folks of Mindoro have lived in relative peace, occasionally interrupted by violent skirmishes between the military and rebels. The NPA’s popularity among the Filipino poor has been less due to its communist ideology than to their search for a better life. Its membership has dwindled from about 25,000 in the 1980s to about 7,000 today. With the political killings, however, the NPA has called Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo its "greatest recruiter."

Since 2001, Karapatan has recorded more than 800 extrajudicial murders in the Philippines. Among some of Manila’s intellectuals and artists, these killings have opened new discussions about old and interwoven woes such as peasant landlessness, the powerful oligarchy, and the legacy of colonialism. Following the country’s rich tradition of artistic dissent and nationalist struggle, rock musicians, painters, poets, and other artists have taken up their pens and brushes and video cameras to protest the latest in a long series of political outrages.

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