Peace Soldier’s Legacy : Cruel Death Parable for Philippines

There was nothing traditional about Lt. Col. Rrex Baquiran--not in the gentle way he lived, nor in the brutal way he died.

He was a soldier who wrote poetry, a combat officer who abhorred conflict, a key military operative in an increasingly brutal psychological war who preferred his ancient tribal beads and programs of peace to M-16 assault rifles and the logistics of guerrilla warfare.

When Baquiran was fresh out of the Philippine Military Academy in the early 1970s, he was thrown in the stockade three times as a suspected subversive after he publicly challenged the oppressive policies of then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Disclosed Corruption

Years later, as an idealistic lieutenant colonel, Baquiran was quietly reprimanded and transferred from the southern island of Mindanao after he publicly disclosed rampant corruption and extortion in the military’s highway patrol.

Finally, in January, Baquiran was assigned to his home province of Kalinga-Apayao, in the extreme north of Luzon Island 250 miles north of Manila. It was here, among his own tribesmen, that Baquiran quietly scored some of the greatest victories in the Philippine government’s war against the Communist insurgency.

And it was here, in the rebel-controlled mountains of Kalinga-Apayao, that Lt. Col. Rrex Baquiran, 42, now celebrated as “a soldier of peace” by everyone from his family to Philippine President Corazon Aquino, was tortured and killed Sept. 13.

Just after 2 p.m. on that day, while carrying free seed to impoverished farmers and a proposal for them to make larger profits on their coffee crop, Baquiran was kidnaped by the Communist New People’s Army.

Found in Shallow Grave

He was found three days later in a shallow grave. The rebels had sliced off both his ears, stabbed him 14 times in the back, gouged out his eyes, crushed both his feet and cut off his genitals.

Baquiran’s death, and especially the manner of it, angered people throughout the Philippines. And in the weeks since, his life and death have become a parable of the war, bringing into focus the forces involved.

The military now talks of using his death as justification for abandoning Aquino’s “path of peace” in favor of a decisive counteroffensive, and Baquiran’s relatives and friends are calling on everyone involved to “stop the madness.”

“Let us, I appeal to you, take up and continue his struggle,” his widow, Loretta, pleaded on national television recently. “Not by blindly killing one another, but by striving for unity and understanding as one family, one people, one nation.

“Let my husband’s senseless murder be seen as a warning of what this 17 years of advocating war, of overlooking our blood bonds as Filipinos, has led us to. Let Rrex’s poor mangled body speak for all the victims of this fighting between brothers.

“Let his slaying be a portent of the barbarism that will spread like a forest fire over our land if we continue to pursue this same destructive course.”

Loretta Baquiran’s appeal has gone largely unheeded.

Crackdown Urged

Philippine Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile has used Baquiran’s murder in several speeches as a justification for his public campaign urging Aquino to abandon her peace talks with the rebels and crack down militarily on the insurgents.

In one recent speech to the Manila Rotary Club, Enrile described the colonel’s murder in gruesome detail and declared, “This is not an isolated case.” It is proof, he said, that the Communist insurgents “have reached a level of boldness where they feel they can confront us openly. . . . The insurgency has increased to a degree that it alarms us.”

Reacting to the widespread public outrage, the top leadership of the Communist Party and other leftist organizations have publicly condemned it and denied responsibility.

Alan Jazmines, the alleged former chief of logistics for the New People’s Army and now general secretary of the leftist People’s Party, issued a statement that denounced the slaying. It said Baquiran was “a friend of many progressive and patriotic elements in the movement for national freedom and democracy.”

Communists Blamed

The Communists speculated that Baquiran was assassinated by enemies within the military.

But interviews with farmers, local officials and schoolteachers, with Baquiran’s friends and enemies, and even with Communist rebels in the region where he was killed, make it clear that it was the Communists who were responsible.

The story of Baquiran’s slaying goes beyond his death. It is the story of what happened to one soldier who tried to find a peaceful, grass-roots solution to a conflict that has left thousands of Filipinos dead. And it underscores the fact that the economy, the disparity between rich and poor, is the root cause of the insurgency.

Roberto Pascua, a 28-year-old Communist militia leader who said he voluntarily surrendered to the government, in part because of Baquiran’s death, explained that Baquiran was a military target in an area controlled by the guerrillas.

Liquidation Squad

According to Pascua, who fought for the Communists as “Commander Junior,” Baquiran was executed by a five-man New People’s Army liquidation squad headed by one of his close friends and former classmates, whom he identified as Levy Dumlan, known as “Commander Naldo.”

The liquidation unit had been planning Baquiran’s killing as early as June, Pascua said, because, “we believed that Col. Baquiran was operating discreetly in the remote mountain areas. He was spying.”

In explaining the brutality of the torture and killing, Pascua said that “the gravity of the torture depends upon the rank of the target.” Baquiran was a colonel and merited severe treatment, he said. His ears were sliced off, he said, because he was suspected as a spy, and the stab wounds were part of a ritual.

Pascua said his uncle, a village official in the region, was similarly executed by the same commander last December and added that he surrendered because, “I cannot accept in my conscience that they just kill brutally.”

‘The People Are Silent’

As further evidence of the Communists’ role in the killing, Doroteo Condaya, chief of the village where Baquiran was kidnaped and later found dead, told a Times reporter that a heavily armed detachment of 150 rebels returned to his village 16 days after the killing and told residents that Baquiran had been executed because he was spying on the rebels under cover as a merchant.

Condaya was asked if the villagers believed the rebels, and replied: “The people are silent, silent because they are afraid. The people are still angry, but it is deep in their hearts. I asked the rebels, ‘Why did you execute him in my barangay (village)?’ They told me executions of (intelligence) officers can happen anywhere. I told them Rrex was very popular, and the people liked him. They said, ‘That’s why we came around--to enlighten the people as to why we killed him.’ ”

Condaya, 63, a retired soldier who fought beside the Americans in Korea and during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, said that talking about the rebels to a Times reporter could result in his being targeted for death. But he was willing to take the risk, he said, because of his anger.

Threats and Fear

Baquiran was a friend, he said, to him and to his people. What is worse, he said, the rebels told him to resign his post as village chief simply because he had organized the civilian search party that located and dug up Baquiran’s body on Sept. 16.

“They told me to think twice,” he said. “They said they would be back.”

Condaya said he has not told his story to the military, which entertains three theories about why Baquiran was killed. The motives behind these theories are intertwined with the economic factors that fuel the insurgency, which has grown from a ragtag band of just a few hundred to more than 22,000 armed regulars in less than 20 years.

Officially, Baquiran was assigned to a branch of the military called the Civilian Relations Service. It is a largely self-styled detail in which each officer, using his personal initiative, is charged with finding ways to bridge the ideological gap between soldiers and civilians.

Personal Roots

As the region’s military commander, Col. Manuel Avila, put it: “There are two forces now at work in the country. We have the government and the Communists, and here, in the middle, we have the masses. Whoever wins the people will win the war.”

Such work came easily for Col. Baquiran in Kalinga-Apayao. His own personal roots were among the ancient tribes in the province, and he always wore the traditional beads of the Kalingas around his neck.

Soon after Baquiran was assigned to the region, he learned of inequities in the coffee trade. More than 80% of the families in the region depend upon the coffee crop. But, for the past two decades, the farmers say, the coffee trade has been controlled by a wealthy businessman in the northern Philippine city of Tuguegarao.

Coffee Monopoly

The coffee trader, Antonio Go Cedenio, is known to everyone in the region as Tony Go, and his company, Happy Merchandising, had built a virtual monopoly in the region by indenturing the farmers with loans and hiring a network of coffee buyers loyal to him.

When Baquiran arrived in the province last December, Cedenio was paying the farmers just 17 pesos per kilogram (80 cents for 2.2 pounds) at a time when coffee was selling in Manila for 50 pesos per kilo.

“When he discovered how Tony Go was cheating the people, paying prices way below the price in Manila, Rrex wanted to stop this,” said Baquiran’s younger brother, Glen, who was helping the colonel get into the trade.

Baquiran used his family contacts in Manila and began buying coffee from the farmers for double the rate that Cedenio was paying. Gradually, Baquiran kept raising the price, until finally, in May, he was paying 50 pesos a kilo. Eventually, Baquiran was buying from the majority of the farmers in the region, and Cedenio was forced to increase his price.

Worked to Win the People

“The people here loved Rrex,” said Ernesto Quilantes, the head teacher at Pinukpuk’s elementary school and a friend of the colonel’s. “He is the one responsible for discovering the anomalous way of buying. Through him, we learned the secret of coffee buying.

“He felt he could fight the insurgency by keeping the people busy and by improving their economic situation. He felt the people eventually would turn away from the rebels and accept the government that he represented.”

But the coffee trade was made all the more complex by the guerrilla war. Most of Pinukpuk and the region surrounding it is known as a red area, a region controlled by the New People’s Army, which uses such remote mountain strongholds to launch its ambushes on the military and on local officials they view as abusive and corrupt.

Rebels Paid Off

Rebel sources, local officials and even Cedenio’s son, Arsenio, said Cedenio was paying heavy taxes to the Communist rebels, who rely on such “donations” to survive.

“It’s not just the traders,” Quilantes said. “All the families around here are being taxed. The rebels come and ask you for rice; you give them rice. Of course you have to cooperate. If rebels are there, you dance the cha-cha if it is necessary.”

Baquiran was paying no such taxes, and regional commander Col. Avila, who headed the investigation into Baquiran’s death, suspects that this, together with his intense competition against a powerful trader who was cooperating with the rebels, is the most likely motive behind the killing.

It was from a house owned by one of Cedenio’s buyers that Baquiran was kidnaped. A witness, Baquiran’s secretary and guide, Julie Binaglen, told a Times reporter that one of the kidnapers, whom she recognized as a Communist rebel, shouted, “So you’re the Col. Rrex Baquiran who has been coming here in our Red area pretending to buy coffee.”

Plenty of Motives

Noting that Cedenio’s local coffee buyer in the village “may have had a hand in the incident,” Avila said he “cannot discount business rivalry as another possible motive.”

Finally, military and civilian leaders in the region said the rebels also may have executed Baquiran because of his “close friendship” with a renegade priest who heads an armed, tribal-rights movement in the Kalinga mountains.

In recent months, Baquiran had made several contacts with Father Conrado Balweg, who had aligned himself with the Communist rebels until he signed a peace treaty with Aquino last month and threw his support behind the Philippine military. Avila said Baquiran’s role in laying the groundwork for the pact may have given the Communists yet another motive.

‘Feeling of Hopelessness’

For such men as schoolteacher Quilantes and village chief Condaya, though, the motive for the killing is far less important than its impact. Baquiran tried “the way of peace” and was killed in the process, they said. “And now, the fear in the (village) is even deeper,” Condaya said. “If this can happen to Rrex Baquiran, a colonel who is interested only in peace, it can happen to any one of us.”

“It just gives you a feeling of hopelessness,” Quilantes added.

But Baquiran’s widow insists that her husband’s death is a positive message to the nation: to continue his nonviolent struggle to end the conflict.

She cited an entry in her husband’s diary: “I am taking chances,” the colonel wrote. “But even if there is a risk, at least my forebears cannot curse me for not doing anything. At least I have done something. At least I have tried.”

And, describing her husband as a “white dove of peace,” she quoted from one of the colonel’s poems:

It is firmness

and commitment

that doves go on

flying

over hills and mountains.

And further

gasping

for precious breath

saving for their kind.

We know

why they struggle.

On a jungle hilltop in Pinukpuk, though, the commander of an infantry battalion of the Philippine army was sitting over lunch and discussing his plans to launch an all-out attack on the rebels.

“We have to punish the ones who did such a thing,” he said. The only snag, he added, is that there is a temporary cease-fire in force in the province.