By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: March 11, 2007

MANILA: Christine Colsuegra is not used to seeing uniformed men brandishing rifles in her neighborhood, a slum area in Quezon City, adjoining Manila. But one day in December, they came looking for her mother.

“I was terrified,” Colsuegra, 11, explained. “I kept telling myself that there was nothing to be afraid of.”

In several poor neighborhoods in the capital region, the military has moved in, sometimes supplementing the activities of the police, but also, human rights advocates say, targeting leftist agitators and government opponents for harassment.

Colsuegra’s mother, Auret, 46, is well known in the area. She heads a neighborhood association that deals with the problems of residents, like the demolition of their houses. She also helps organize anti-government demonstrations, often on issues like wages, high food prices and homelessness.

Auret Colsuegra said the military considers her a troublemaker.

“That is why the soldiers have been watching me and my family,” she said. “Every time I step out of my house, I always have this feeling that it might be the last.”

Not since the martial law imposed by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and ’80s have residents of the Manila region seen soldiers in full battle gear stationed in their communities, said Gloria Rodriguez, secretary general of the Manila chapter of Karapatan, a human rights organization.

The army has said that nearly 300 soldiers have been deployed to “problematic areas” in the capital, but army officials have offered differing explanations for the deployment.

Major General Benjamin Dolorfino, head of the army command that covers the Manila region, said the presence of soldiers on the streets was “indirectly related” to the counterinsurgency campaign being waged against Communist and Islamic insurgents throughout the Philippines.

“We are trying to help solve peace and order problems so the people will not go to streets or think of fighting the government,” Dolorfino told reporters last week. “If we continue fighting the government, airing our complaints in the streets, we are like termites.”

Other military officials said the deployment was part of a training program for junior military officers. Residents in these areas, according to the army chief of staff, General Hermogenes Esperon, have welcomed the soldiers because they are tired of the disruption caused by leftist groups in their neighborhoods.

Those groups presumably include Bayan Muna (People First), a leftist organization competing for seats in Congress in the May elections. Soldiers have been witnessed photographing Bayan campaigners with camera phones, according to Karapatan.

One Bayan volunteer, Alberto Cortez, said he was accosted by soldiers after he was seen handing out membership forms. Cortez said the soldiers warned him against campaigning for the group.

Luzviminda Solayao, a 52-year-old community organizer, has been playing hide-and-seek with soldiers since they arrived in her poor neighborhood of Isla Puting Bato, a breakwater covered with shanties astride Manila Bay.

Often, she said, two or three soldiers would linger in front of her house, chatting or drinking with neighbors. Solayao said she had heard that the soldiers wanted her and her family out of Isla Puting Bato because she had been organizing people for protest rallies.

“We have been living here since the ’60s. We fight for our welfare. We expose government neglect. We are merely exercising our right,” she said. “Why should we leave?”

“The armed forces are violating the law that says they should be neutral during elections,” said Karapatan’s Rodriguez. “What’s happening in these communities is an implementation of an undeclared martial law.”

Lydia Bentulan, a 44-year-old community organizer for the women’s group Gabriela in a slum area called Payatas, said she has also been harassed by armed soldiers.

“They would ask my neighbors certain things about me. They would peek into my house,” she said. Bentulan has been a vocal opponent of government plans to demolish shanties for a housing project.

In addition to patrolling villages, the military is organizing forums in schools in which they identify groups they describe as “Communist fronts.”

In one such forum last week, soldiers displayed a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Knowing the Enemy” that listed Bayan Muna, as well as other legal groupings critical of the government, as organizations deserving suspicion.

Satur Ocampo, a congressman and the president of Bayan Muna, pointed out that the military has employed similar tactics against leftist government opponents in rural areas for years. Karapatan and other organizations have accused the military of waging a campaign of intimidation against rural leftists for years, claiming that they provided a critical and unlawful base of support for the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Ocampo says the growing popularity of Bayan Muna and allied groups in the cities — polls show it is now the most popular urban force heading into the May elections — is the real reason for the deployment of soldiers into the slums.

“They are hell-bent on destroying us,” he said last week before going into hiding after the military secured a warrant for his arrest on charges that he took part in murdering dozens of communist rebels during a Communist Party purge in the 1980s.

Ocampo called the charges absurd, as he was imprisoned by the Marcos regime at the time the alleged murders took place.

Under the current political system in the Philippines, parties, not just politicians, can run for Congress. This system was adopted after the fall of Marcos in order to attract “marginalized sectors,” including the urban poor, to mainstream politics. It was also meant to encourage the left to abandon armed struggle.

But the government says the Communists have abused the system, fighting the army in the countryside on the one hand and, on the other, using government money to wage political struggles in the streets.

Norberto Gonzales, the national security adviser, accuses Bayan Muna, which has three sitting congressmen, of using government political funding to finance the Communist rebellion, a charge the groups deny.

It doesn’t help that some of the key people in Bayan Muna are former Communist rebels. Ocampo had gone underground twice in the past and was a member of the negotiating panel representing the Communists during peace negotiations with the government in the late 1980s. He now insists that he is not a member of the New People’s Army.

To residents like Luzviminda Solayao, however, it does not matter whether the military campaign targets Bayan Muna, to which she also belongs, or some other group.

“This is simply wrong,” she said. “It is not the job of the military to police our streets. It is not their job to harass us.”