By CATHRYNE ENRIQUEZ

Vicente Ladlad was on the verge of sleeping when loud knocks on the door suddenly jolted him awake. What greeted him were a dozen high powered rifles carried by police personnel dressed in all-black. They took him in a police car tailed by 75 more vehicles to Quezon City Police District where he spent the rest of the morning.

“Wow, para palang parada,” he said, recalling his most vivid memory of the arrest. A boy who supposedly witnessed Vic cleaning an M16 rifle became a key to the charges that led to his arrest when, in fact, this boy is fictitious, and Vic had neither rifle nor guns, to begin with.

It is difficult to imagine Vic, a man with a frail gait, possessing a high-powered firearm. A fingerprint test of the evidence would not even yield a match to that of Vic’s because it was clearly planted, said his wife Fides Lim.

Underground

Every day that Vic spends in prison does not get any easier, what with his chronic asthma and old age. Nights are made more uncomfortable by the bedbug-infested thin cot where he sleeps.

Yet it is as if he is used to this kind of life all along. At the age of 69, it is not Vic’s first time getting detained for his political activities.

His activism traces back to his time as an Agricultural Economics student at UP Los Baños (UPLB). The roots of his progressive leanings stem from listening to progressives like Kabataang Makabayan founder Jose Maria Sison.

Vic then joined progressive student organizations, such as the Student Cultural Society. He was a third-year student in 1969 when he led various student demonstrations against the violation of academic freedom, the rise of unemployment, and high inflation, among other issues of the day.

By 1970, the local demonstrations culminated into the First Quarter Storm. As the chairperson, then, of the UPLB Student Council, Vic mobilized the students in protest of lopsided economic policies between the US and the Philippines.

The 22-year-old student eventually had to go underground when the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. Vic had to leave behind the life he was used to, such as his academics, to organize peasant communities in the Southern Tagalog region.

It was around this time that he was first detained. Vic was charged with rebellion and imprisoned in Quezon province for three years.

In the Open

A year after his release from prison, Vic met his wife, Fides, at the introduction of fellow activists while on a trip in the Netherlands. Fides, a UP Diliman alumnus, motivated him to finish his studies and helped him complete his thesis in 1992.

Vic stayed out of the limelight in the succeeding years, but this did not stop him from continuing his political career. In 1993, he became a consultant for the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the political arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), a year after peace talks with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) began.

Throughout the peace process, two landmark documents were inked between the NDFP and the GRP under the leadership of former President Fidel Ramos—the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) in 1998, and the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) in 1995.

CARHRIHL upholds international human rights principles, while JASIG protects members of the NDFP panel from surveillance and arrest, among others.

Past administrations, however, had no qualms about detaining NDFP consultants and negotiators, even though the effectiveness of JASIG is independent of the peace talks, said lawyer and member of Vic’s legal counsels, lawyer Kristina Conti.

It came as no surprise, then, that under incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte, the GRP once again called off the peace negotiations and the ceasefire with the CPP-NPA. The administration went so far as to intensify the crackdown on members of the NDFP as a spate of arrests later ensued.

Emancipation

The termination of the peace talks was formalized in November 2017 under Proclamation No. 360. The following year, 10 NDFP panel members were arrested, and a year later, consultant Randy Malayao was killed by an unidentified gunman.

On November 8, 2018, Vic joined the roster of NDFP consultants arrested over trumped-up charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives. National Union of People’s Lawyers Secretary General Ephraim Cortez says such charges are often used to indict people whom the government considers as its enemies.

Throughout the whole ordeal, Vic remained calm—too calm for the police’s liking. “I was prepared for the worst,” he said, pertaining to his arrest.

It has been more than a year since that fateful day, yet he remains hopeful about attaining justice for himself and his fellow political prisoners. 

“Para siyang bula [na naglaho]. Hinanap namin siya at tinanong sa lugar kung may nakakakilala sa kanya [pero wala] ... ito yung sinasabi namin sa judge kung saan napunta yung case,” said Atty. Conti, referring to Vic’s supposed househelp who filed the charges.

Like Vic, political prisoners at Camp Bagong Diwa are detained over trumped-up charges, with false witnesses testifying against them in court.

They are reminders of how the state punishes people who do a better job at addressing people’s struggles than supposedly democratically elected officials. There remains a lot of people like Vic who persist despite such injustice.

In a time when people who fight for the rights of others are being persecuted, it becomes the responsibility of those whom they have been fighting for to struggle alongside them. ●

The article was first published in the Collegian's December 13, 2019 print issue, under the headline “The People’s Warrior.” It has been updated to correct factual inaccuracies in the earlier version of the article.