THE nine farmers killed in Sagay City Saturday night might have been led into believing that they could own the land they had occupied under the government’s agrarian reform program, a police official said yesterday.
Chief Supt. John Bulalacao, director of the Western Visayas regional police, said based on their initial investigation, the victims were not workers of the Hacienda Nene in Purok Fire Tree in Barangay Bulanon, site of the gruesome massacre.
Bulalacao said the victims were encouraged by a local left-leaning organization to squat in the area.
“They came from other barangays in Sagay City and they are not actually the tenants there. So their sudden presence there might have triggered tension,” Bulalacao said during an interview at Camp Crame in Quezon City.
Bulalacao said the victims’ presence did not sit well with legitimate and regular workers who already had in their possession deeds of donation executed by the owners.
The hacienda is reportedly owned by a certain Carmen Tolentino who had leased the land to a financier.
Investigation showed that the hacienda farmers had a confrontation and when the regular farmers found out that a small group of outsiders had set up camps on the land, they immediately went to the area to confront them and ask them to leave.
Accompanied by three members of the Negros Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), the victims reportedly stood their ground.
Land conflict is one of the motives raised by the police.
Police said there are 40 farmers working at the hacienda, some of them allegedly with links to the local communist rebels.
It is possible, according to Bulalacao, that some of the regular hacienda tenants took matters into their hands with the possible help of Communist rebels.
Bulalacao said they are not discounting the possibility that there was a shootout.
“Some of the victims had guns. A .38 revolver and they also have cartridges for shotgun,” said Bulalacao.
This was corroborated by some of the residents who said that they initially heard a few gunshots, followed by a series of gunshots later.
To reinforce the second angle, Bulalacao said the squatting farmers may have been used as baits of the NFSW in order to pin the blame on the government if something bad happen to the farmers.
He said that there were two main indications leading to such police theory.
First, he said that the squatting farmers had just joined the NFSW two days before the killing and were even assisted when they went to Hacienda Nene on Saturday morning.
“There are witnesses and statements and based on the circumstances, they were just a two-day old member of the NFSW,” said Bulalacao.
The second indicator, he said, was that several minutes before the killing, the three core members of the NFSW left the area allegedly to charge their cellular phones.
“Curiously, the attack happened several minutes after the core NFSW members left the area to allegedly to charge their phones. Why would they leave them when they know that it is a critical area and anytime, they might be attacked?” said Bulalacao.
Two of the three core members were taken under police custody but were later released to their lawyers.
“Based on these, it appears that they were used as baits. That’s why we came up with our angle that this was perpetrated by the New People’s Army (NPA) in pursuance of their campaign to discredit the Philippine government,” said Bulalacao.
Another angle, according to Bulalacao, is that the land owners may have hired private goons to harass the victims.
“It is a common knowledge in Negros that there were a lot of armed individuals because the land owners usually assemble local farmers to help them in the security of their hacienda,” said Bulalacao.
The fourth angle, according to Bulalacao, is the possibility of the involvement of members of Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Units (CAFGU), local militiamen who are helping the government in the campaign against the communist rebels.
He disclosed that three to four years ago, some CAFGUS had a quarrel with NFSW.
“The detachment of the CAFGUs is very far from the site but we still included it as another angle because we learned that there was a dispute before between CAFGUs and NFSW,” said Bulalacao. (Aaron Recuenco)
