Retired Major General Jovito Palparan Jr. Arraigned
Research by Ferdie L. Bravo
If you were the parents of bright UP students who simply vanished one day doing a case study about the plight of poor farmers in Hagonoy, Bulacan, what would you do to the man or mastermind behind their disappearance?
The enthralling story of murdered UP collegiates Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan, and torture survivors brothers Raymond and Reynaldo Manalo, gripped the nation for many years. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan Jr. was caught in Teresa, Sta. Mesa, Manila almost 3 years after going into hiding when a warrant for his arrest was released on December 21, 2011.
Prosecutors from the Panel of National Prosecution Service found probable cause to charge retired Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan Jr., retired Lt. Col. Felipe G. Anotado, retired Master Sergeant Rizal Hilario, and Staff Sergeant Edgardo Osorio with two counts of Kidnapping and Serious Illegal Detention in connection with the abduction of UP students Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeno.
Case of Mistaken Identity or Police Brutality?
We all know about stories of brutal torture employed by military officers when investigating a case or interrogating a suspect. Human rights advocates have been campaigning for better treatment of suspected criminals or a more proper and appropriate way of extracting confessions/evidences from them not only in the Philippines but in other civilized nations so as to avoid torturing the wrong person. Furthermore, once a person is nabbed for an alleged violation and put into custody of the military, the fate and destiny of that subject lies on the hands of the interrogators, devoid of any right to defend himself.
Raymond Manalo, the principal witness in this case, has been hiding for more than 7 years. Just like in scenes of your action hero’s movies, the simple guy slept in places he has never seen before, constantly changing safehouses to elude arrest. He has not slept in their house in San Ildefonso, Bulacan for 7 years, terribly missing his worried mother and father. During that span of time, the ordinary farmer has not been able to ride a jeepney or tricycle alone, walk in the market or mall freely, ate in fastfood shops or turo-turo like common customers, without watching his behind for unscrupulous shadows who might be following his footsteps. Like in a detective movie, he was thrown into a web of trouble unwillingly, telling nobody about where he lives, except for a select few who are close to him and who keep him secured.
His simple life in the farm turned hellish by one single mistake committed by people he has never seen nor heard before, Raymond was determined to survive to tell the atrocities perpetrated by these military hooligans. The heavens might have heard his plea, he went to the right persons once he escaped from his abductors’ captivity. A question may have been lingering in his mind: What if like in movies, he consulted the wrong person/s who is connected to or an ally of the mastermind?
Today, his life is very different from the life he thought he would have had when he was a 25-year-old whose only trouble was the girl he was trying to court. The trauma caused by the brutal torture he experienced at the hands of Palparan’s cohorts changed the simple man, worsened by the feeling of fear for his life because of the threat of retribution from the man he is trying to pin.
He is used to this life, to 7 years of safehouses and travels in the night and the questions that are asked again and again. It is not a good life, or a peaceful life, but it is enough for him to be alive. Alive, he can fight. Alive, he can tell his story of rape and murder and torture of the sort that drives men mad. He’s seen it happen, in the cell next to him, the man who had hung himself by the garter from his briefs.
Raymond Manalo was tagged by Jovito Palparan as a liar, as he also called all the people who has filed cases against him liars. The retired general considers himself as the government’s agent in eradicating the festering sore of the leftist movement of the New People’s Army (NPA). The former was called a fraud, neither a victim nor a hero, but a communist ideologue desperate to continue the armed struggle against capitalist imperialism. Bragging about his achievements the general said, “Modesty aside, I have been successful in routing the communists.”
But to the eyes of the majority, who in his proper mind would want to fabricate stories of brutal torture, rape and murder, and putting one’s self tiptoeing in danger against a seemingly impenetrable opponent? It is possible, yes it is possible that Raymond may be no more than a talented actor with an exceptional imagination, in love with the limelight and desperate for public attention. It is possible, as many things are possible, the same way it is possible that two young women simply wandered off into oblivion while their doting mothers wept and a country searched.
But what is certain is this – that for a full year, between February 2006 to the 14th of August 2007, Raymond Manalo disappeared.
Manalo and his brother Reynaldo were abducted in the early afternoon of February 2006 from their farm in San Ildefonso, Bulacan, unrelated to the cases of the two missing kolehiyalas. They were bound and blindfolded, then shoved into the back of an L300 van. Their mother ran to help them, but an armed man shoved a gun against her head.
The beatings began long before they reached Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija. Then they were separated and told to confess. Reynaldo was first. Raymond heard his brother scream, and by the time they were done with him, Reynaldo had confessed to the murder of 10 policemen.
Reynaldo Manalo two days after Jovito Palparan is arrested.
When it was Raymond’s turn, they punched him in the face and kicked him in the gut. They slammed a gun against his cheek and against the back of his head. They pumped a water hose up his nose. They smashed planks of wood into the backs of his knees.
It happened again and again for days. Armed men shoved Reynaldo into a drum. One of them took a bottle of Raymond’s own urine and poured it down his nose and throat. They burned his shoulders and the skin under his eyes and smashed barbed wire against his legs. They told him he was going to die. They told him he was a killer. He said yes, yes he was, anything to make them stop.
Raymond tried to run away. He failed. When he was caught soldiers poured gasoline over him, and debated whether to set him on fire.
They were transferred after a month into metal cages 4 feet long and 2 feet wide. Four men crouched in a line inside each cage.
It was where they slept, where they woke, where they urinated and defecated and ate when there was food. They stayed for 3 months, until one day Raymond Manalo was summoned for questioning by the man the soldiers called ‘grandfather’.
His name, he said, was Jovito Palparan.
In the story Raymond Manalo tells, Jovito Palparan – former commanding officer of the 24th Infantry Battalion, holder of the Gold Cross Medal and Distinguished Service Star – was the same man who threatened the massacre of Manalo’s family.
Palparan, dressed in shorts and sandals, told Manalo that another escape attempt would mean the murder of Raymond’s parents in San Ildefonso.
Palparan told Raymond he would be allowed a visit home. He was told to tell his parents to stop filing cases on their sons’ behalf. He was told if he could only prove that he was on Palparan’s side, Raymond and his brother would be allowed to live.
A chain was wrapped around Raymond’s waist. The military surrounded the family farm. Raymond’s mother opened the door weeping, and he tells her what he is supposed to say.
The brothers are taken to Camp Tecson, under the command of the 24th Infantry Battalion. Raymond made himself useful. He was allowed to cook, to clean, to wash cars, to feed animals. One day, he saw a young woman chained to the foot of a bed in the house he was kept.
She said her name was Sherlyn.
She told him she had been tortured from the day she and Karen Empeno were abducted. She said Palparan came personally. She said Palparan hit her on the face until she bled, that he punched her breasts and her belly and slammed planks of wood against her. She said Palparan insisted she confess to being a soldier of the New People’s Army. She said she wanted to go home.
On April, 2007, Raymond Manalo saw the woman he knew as Sherlyn lying naked on a chair that had fallen on the floor. Her wrists were bound. Her leg was tied down. He saw soldiers beat her with lengths of wood. He saw her electrocuted, saw a water hose shoved into her mouth, saw the men play with her body, saw them poking sticks into her vagina.
He saw them drag Karen out of her cell, saw how she was stripped, bound, beaten, water-tortured, burned with cigarettes and raped with pieces of wood.
He was ordered to wash their clothes the next day. There was blood on their panties, and chunks of blood in their bucket of urine.
On August 14, 2007, Raymond and Reynaldo Manalo ran away. Almost 7 years since, the arrest of the alleged mastermind of this film-material case happened last August 12, 2014.
On Monday, August 18, 2014, Jovito Palparan Jr. was presented for arraignment at Branch 14 of the Malolos, Bulacan Regional Trial Court. Fear for his life evident in his eyes, the once mighty general succumbed to his own fear as he earnestly requested the presiding judge to transfer him to Manila or a better detention center like that of Napoles, Enrile, Estrada and Revilla. Amidst the clamor for justice and roars of ‘berdugo’ from a throng of activists, friends and families of the victims, the unremorseful Palparan was taken back to a nearby cell where he will be billeted until his next arraigment.
Raymond Manalo will be waiting to stand as witness. He knows he needs a lot of guts and courage to face the man who caused him too much trouble and to obtain justice for them especially for the two innocent girls.