In "Part 1" of this three part entry I discussed the iconic NPA leader Leonicio Pitao. Much better known by his moniker "Ka Parago," Pitao joined the NPA in 1978 and despite the best efforts of dozens of very capable AFP and PNP commanders, noone has ever been able to stop him for long (the "AFP" and "PNP" being the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Philippine National Police). Indeed, Pitao's lone arrest resulted from his sister, Evelyn Pitao, who at the time was herself an NPA guerilla in Front 3, the Alejandro Lanaja Command, in Pitao's own Southern Mindanao Regional Committee (SMRC), who ended up serving the AFP as a Deep Penetration Agent until that arrest, when she was then pulled out of service.
Their brother Danilo, who in 1985 changed his surname to Santiago so as to stay one step ahead of inquisitive bureaucrats as he first attempted to leave the Philippines to serve aboard ocean going freighters, had stayed clear of the Maoist Insurgency that had seduced his brother and sister. I discussed both his sad fate and perhaps the poetically justified fate of Evelyn, but left the jist of my entry for this, the second and concluding part.
Rebelyn Maasin Pitao was Leonicio and his wife Evangeline Maasin Pitao's third child. Though the only one of their five children to be given a "revolutionary" name, Rebelyn was anything but a rebel. A quiet, selfless, unassuming young lady, she had not gravitated towards her father's activities or even his political leanings. Instead ahe had gained a university education and began working as a substitute teacher at Saint Peter's College of Technology in her hometown of Davao City.
Each morning at 630AM Rebelyn would leave her mother's home in Gallera de Oro Subdivision in Davao City's Talomo District. Walking the quiet streets of Barangay Bago Gallera she would catch a triksiad, or motorcycle sidecar taxi, to jeepney terminal in Barangay Bago Aplaya where she would then take a jeepney to the school where she eagerly welcomed her second grade students. At 445PM each day she would leave the school and walk to the Terminal where she would take her second triksiad of the day, always arriving at home by 645PM. It was this regular schedule that ended up costing Rebelyn Maasin Pitao her life.
On the evening of March 4th, 2009, Rebelyn climbed into Danny Peliciano's triksiad for the return trip home. A middle aged female passenger, Dina Talaboc, was already waiting, and just before Peliciano got ready to leave the terminal, two men in their late 20s or early 30s climbed in as well. The short ride to Barangay Bago Gallera was uneventful but as they cruised down Talomo National Hiway a white Toyota Revo cargo van almost passed them at a high rate of speed but as it pulled abreast of Peliciano's triksiad a male passenger was staring daggers at the passengers before the van decelerated and fell in behind the triksiad. Then, 300 meters before the Gallera de Oro Subdivision's entrance, that same white van did finally pass them but then immediately cut in front of them as it slammed on its brakes.
As Peliciano stopped his triksiad two men jumped out of the van wielding 45 caliber pistols. As the female passenger, Dina Talaboc, and Danny Peliciano began to quickly climb out of their seats the two male passengers both grabbed Rebelyn. Both Peliciano and Ms.Talaboc ran screaming as Rebelyn pleaded with them to help her. As Peliciano turned around, perhaps feeling guilty about leaving Rebelyn to her unfortunate fate, the two gunmen drew down on him and warned him to keep running. As Peliciano did just that, not stopping until he got to the Talomo District Police Station, while Rebelyn was dragged into the van which then sped off into the night.
At the police station officers listened to whay for them is a run of the mill report and then brought Peliciano with them as they notified Rebelyn's mother Evangeline. Knowing the significance of the purported victim they immediately notified police brass who in turn notified Davao City Mayor Rodrigo "Roddy" Duterte. Counter-intuitively Duterte is NOT anti-NPA. In fact, after first becoming in Mayor in 1988 he surrendered more than 40% of his city to Leonicio Pitao along with a quarterly stipend in exchange for Pitao guaranteeing to keep the NPA out of the rest of the city. In the mid-1980s, the NPA in Davao City turned Mindanao's population centre into a veritible blood bath. Duterte's concession spared the bulk of the city's population and virtually business interests from that very real concern.
As the province around Davao City, Davao del Sur, continued to suffer the pains of insurgency Davao City proper was a magnet for investment, the one place investors felt assured of avoiding the pressures of armed attack, Kidnap for Ransom (KFR), and of course, in NPA-speak, "Revolutionary Taxes." The relationship was highly advantageous to both Duterte AND Pitao. While it cut the latter off from significant streams of revenue, AFP Intelligence estimates that by the time Rebelyn's murder took place, in the First Quarter of 2009, Pitao's Southern Mindanao Regional Committee, the SMRC- which covers parts of North Cotabato, Surigao del Sur, and Agusan del Sur Provinces in addition to all of the Davao Region, aka Region 11- was raking in an impressive P20 Million every Quarter just from the Davao Region's four provinces alone. Of course that P20 Million, equal to nearly $500,000, is a conservative estimate. Ergo, losing the 60% of Davao City which contained the city's industrial AND commercial base hasn't hurt the NPA in the least. Consigning the 40% of the city0containing its most rural districts has allowed the NPA to develop a power base that is just about untouchable at this point.
Therefore then-Mayor Duterte was very concerned about what had transpired within his city's borders. As powerful as Duterte is, and make no mistake he is VERY powerful, he has nothing on Leonicio Pitao. Pitao had stupidly entrusted his family's safety- their very lives- to Duterte's "deal," and now the man's daughter had been violently abducted. It must have been a rare sleepless night for the Mayor, and a long day afterwards as the media descended upon City Hall. The mystery didn't last long though...
At 530PM the next day, March 5th, 2009, rice farmer Rafael "Raffy" Agres and his friend Noel Lanoy, a labourer on a nearby banana plantation, were walking down a dirt road in the nearby municipality of Carmen, in Davao del Norte Province. As the two walked Raffy happened to glance into a shallow irrigation canal running parallel to the road. All of a sudden he stopped and screamed that he had just seen a body. Noel looked to see for himself and soon realised that what he had first assumed to be a fallen banana trunk was actually a person's body. Raffy excitedly opined that it had to be a "Salvaging" victim, a comment that some might find highly curious if they aren't all that familiar with our fair isle. Indeed, inside of Davao City alone the Church-based NGO "Tambayan Center for Childrens' Rights" had recorded 894 "Salvaging" victims just in a 10 year period, in other words, on average 89 people a year were executed extra-judicially. Of those 894, 80 were under the age of 18 with the youngest being 12 years old (and some readers actually wonder why I use Duterte as a verbal punching bag!). Indeed, in that very same spot where that body had just been sighted, a Salvaging victim had been dumped 5 years before.
The unnamed road, in Barangay San Isidro is bereft of much more than rice paddies. The only house in sight of the body is that of Egles Brieta and her family. Curiously, despite the home being less than 100 meters away the killers, or their compatriots, had chosen that exact spot to dump at least two bodies. Moreover, despite vehicular traffic almost never passing down the road, neither Ms.Brieta nor anyone in her family hear anything on either occasion.
The Carmen Municipal Police Office, like all area police stations, had been alerted to the Rebelyn Pitao Abduction and upon learning that the body was female alerted the Davao del Norte Police Provincial Office, or PPO. As soon as operatives arrived and compared a stock photo of the missing girl to the partially nude body in the canal, they knew that Rebelyn Pitao was no longer missing. Her discovery didn't shock her family at all. The initial shock of realising that whomever had abducted her Rebelyn had tossed all the heretofore (unofficial) Rules of Engagement out with the trash had quickly dissipated. After that initial shock disappeared her entire family knew that if she ever surfaced it would be as a cadaver.
After recovering Rebelyn's body it was transported to a local funeral home. In the Philippines autopsies are rarely- if ever- performed under clinical conditions. A private physician contracted to an agency performs at the funeral home. Obviously nothing too technical is ever performed OR discovered. In Rebelyn's autopsy the attending physician (he is not a pathologist of course) noted rope burns on her neck, five puncture wounds, all with the same ice pick-like implement, two above her left breast, two below that same breast, both of which lacerated her liver, and one in her lung, and most troubling of all, she had been raped by a materiel object. The only "good news," and I mean this strictly in the relative sense, is that she had died before midnite. Having been found 60 kilometers from the abduction site, where she was taken at nearly 7PM, she wouldn't have suffered excruciatingly long. Her attackers finished her off rather quickly.
Within two days Leonicio Pitao named four AFP Military Agents attached to Military Intelligence Group-11 (MIG-11), operating out of an AFP safehouse in Panabo City, just over the border from Davao City's Paquibato District:
1) Sergeant Helvin Bitang
2) Corporal Orly Pedring Pedregosa
3) Sergeant Ben Tipait
4) Sergeant Adan Masluao
While many outside the security echelon wondered just why the AFP refused to act on Pitao's information many within the AFP at least brushed off Pitao's "information" as ridiculous nonsense. First of all, Ben Tipait and Adan Masluao don't exist, at least under those names. Secondly, both of the two actual men named happened to have been Danilo Santiago's AFP handlers- Santiago of course being Pitao's brother. Pitao's claims of an "NPA investigation" was sheer bufoonery. Worse yet, his publicising these men's names was consigning them to, at the very least, lives of extreme paranoia, if not an actual torturous murder.
Leonicio Pitao was fully aware that his brother Danilo had been killed by an NPA SPARU Team. SPARU, or Specially Armed Partisan Units, often misrepresented as "Sparrows," are three to five man teams of highly experienced NPA cadres. Almost always in their late 20s or early 30s, and thereby having at least 15 years experience as NPA guerillas, they are basically the NPA's Extra-Judicial Execution entities though unlike their counterparts in the AFP, they never engage in abductions. The NPA likes to claim it has a form of Due Process, that it "arrests" people who have been "charged" in their so called "People's Court." In reality, no such court exists outside of one or two high ranking members ordering an execution and if the SPARU gets your name, rest assured that they are being sent to kill you, not arrest you.
Although his sister Evelyn was killed a year later, in 2010, her death is quite instructive. Soon after Evelyn was murdered (along with her common law husband), the NPA's political wing, the CPP, issued a media release in which it noted Evelyn's death. They accused the AFP, whom they labeled as "fascist," and said that Evelyn's death had been designed to "break" Leonicio Pitao's "spirits." By the end of the month however, the organisation had opted to come clean. The NPA itself then issued a media release in which it admitted that Evelyn had been killed with Pitao's full knowledge (indeed he had ordered it). It even credited the killing to the SMRC's own SPARU Team, the Ka Paking Guimbaolibot Red Partisan Brigade.
It wouldn't take long though for Leonicio Pitao to begin adding other names to what seems to be an ever expanding list of "guilty" AFP personnel. By the time April 1st, 2009 came around, three and a half weeks after Rebelyn's terrible death, Pitao had publicly listed thirteen men, all AFP Intelligence Agents or Assets, the latter simply men just like Danilo Santiago, strongarmed into serving as sources or spies. April 1st was the day that then Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) Leila de Lima- currently serving the Aquino Administration as its Secretary of the DOJ, or Department of Justice- hastily convened a three day Hearing on the Rebelyn Pitao Murder.
I will continue with the third and final part of this entry shortly...
