[The Slingshot] Jovito Palparan and the missing of 17 years

Has democracy prevailed against how it defines terror? Not when the very government that denounces terrorism uses the methods of terror itself.

The face of that two-faced terrorism was Jovito Palparan Jr. Hailed by government as an anti-communist fighter, he was also known as The Butcher (berdugo) for using means that categorically run counter to democracy.

This month, a Malolos Regional Trial Court acquitted Palparan and seven other military men for the 2006 kidnapping and serious illegal detention with physical injuries of the brothers Raymond and Reynaldo Manalo. The brothers were severely tortured and were made to spend months in a cage four feet long and two feet wide, almost crippling them. Their tormentor was Jovito Palparan Jr.

The acquittal may obscure our better memory of Palparan as a convicted man in another case, the disappearance of Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño. While in detention, Raymond saw the two girls in April 2007. Sherlyn was lying naked and was tied to a chair that had fallen on the ground, beaten, electrocuted, half-drowned. He also saw Karen stripped naked, bound, beaten, water-tortured, burned with cigarettes, and raped with pieces of wood.

In her 2006 State of the Nation Address, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo acknowledged Palparan for his offensives against insurgents. In the same breath she also said that she condemned political killings.

2006 was also the year when Cadapan and Empeño disappeared in Hagonoy, Bulacan while doing a school research project. The date was June 26, 2006, exactly a month before Arroyo faced the nation in a constitutionally mandated speech to demonstrate government’s accountability to the people.

Palparan went into hiding in December 2011 after a Bulacan RTC issued a warrant for his arrest for the kidnapping and serious illegal detention of Sherlyn and Karen. He was arrested in August 2014 after the last Aquino government raised a bounty of P2M for the fugitive.

Ironically, it was Raymond Manalo’s testimony that was vital in convicting Palparan. Let the court testimonies speak:

“The soldiers were drinking one night when I heard them say that two pretty girls had been captured. They wanted to make the girls dance. One of them said the two should make good f_cks. I saw the girls pass by the door of my cell. They were blindfolded.”

“I was sweeping the floor one day when I saw a girl chained alone to the foot of a bed. At first I wasn’t allowed to talk to her. When I finally did, she said they would take off her chains during the day, so she could do the soldiers’ laundry. She said her name was Sherlyn, that she was from Laguna. She said they tortured her the moment they took her and Karen from Hagonoy.”

“She said it was Jovito Palparan who came to torture her. He hit her on the mouth, she said, until she bled. He punched her breasts and her stomach. He slammed planks of wood against her. She bled everywhere.”

“I met Karen and Manuel later. The five of us – the girls, Manuel Merino, my brother, and myself were taken from camp to camp, cooking and washing and cleaning for the soldiers. I saw the soldiers steal from villagers. I saw them bring in blindfolded prisoners. I saw them digging graves. I saw them burn bodies, pour gasoline on them. Once I saw them shoot an old man sitting on a carabao.”

“I saw them hit Karen with wooden planks, saw her electrocuted, beaten, half-drowned. They were playing with her body, poking sticks into her vagina, and shoving a water hose into her nose and mouth. I heard the soldiers force Sherlyn to admit whom it was with plans to ‘write a letter.’ She said it was Karen’s idea. They dragged Karen out of her cell, stripped her, and tied her at the wrists and ankles. She was beaten, water-tortured, burned with cigarettes, and raped with pieces of wood.”

“I was ordered to wash their clothes the next day. There was blood in their panties, and chunks of blood in their bucket of piss.”

“I was there when they killed Manuel Merino. They took him away, and I followed. I heard him begging and moaning. There was a gunshot. Then there was fire.”

On September 17, 2018, the Malolos Regional Trial Court convicted Palparan and two others and sentenced them to life imprisonment without eligibility of parole. The court also ordered them to pay the heirs of the victims P300,000 in moral and civil damages.

On June 2022, the Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction of Palparan, almost 16 years to the day Sherlyn and Karen were abducted. The court ruled: “The testimonies of these witnesses are credible, clear, and categorical.”

Since the current Marcos presidency assumed office in June 2022, state agents have abducted at least 18 community organizers and activists. Most of the time, the victims do not surface. Jovito Palparan Jr., even in prison, remains our red flag that the state’s forces can become the monstrous anomalies from what they are mandated to do because the state itself allows it.

Until this day, Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan remain missing. Where could they be now? It is a question of democracy that the state, as protector of the people, must categorically answer. – Rappler.com

Antonio J. Montalván II is a social anthropologist who advocates that keeping quiet when things go wrong is the mentality of a slave, not a good citizen.