It was now eight months since the killing of our mayor and his four companions on the back
road to Tabugon. There were two theories as to who did it. First the NPA. A mineographed
issue of the NPA newspaper called Paghimakas (Struggle) appeared fourteen days after the
killing claiming that the NPA did it by way of 'execution'. There were pen-and-ink drawings
showing how it was done. The 'newspaper' looked genuine. And after a quick investigation
the army declared that it was the NPA that did it.
The second theory was that the army did it. Many people in Kabankalan held to this,
especially among the hacenderos. They pointed out how close the army HQ was to the point of
ambush - two kilometres - and they claimed that the local school had been mysteriously
closed early on that day to make sure there would be no homegoing children on the road.
They pointed out how the mayor had been at odds with certain army men who were smuggling
logs from the mountains through Kabankalan. Others wondered if the Long Range Patrol was
not afraid that the mayor would eventually point to them as the killers of those seven
peasants who had been buried alive on his farm certainly without his knowledge, since on
the night of the killing he was in the house of his daughter.
The theorizing had died down when eighteen months later out of the blue a bombshell was
dropped. The army investigator discovered the 'real' murderers. I heard about it like this.
The woman next door to the convento used to sell vegetables at the crossing to support her
family. Her husband had been a guerrilla fighting the Japanese during the war and had lost
an eye and an arm, but never got onto the coveted veterans' pension list. At the crossing
she overheard a radio announcement saying that I and Father Gore and Father Dangan and
Father Gore's six core group members were being indicted for the murder of the mayor and
his four companions. She immediately sent word to me, so I hurried down to the market to
get it from her own mouth. I was stunned and decided to check it out straight away. A young
man from Manila, Vicente, had been acting as our cook for the last few months since our
cook was in prison. I asked him to go to the town hall in Kabankalan and try to find out if
there was any such accusation.
Meantime all we could do was listen to the radio for more news. But the news did not come
on at any fixed time - they did not seem to use clocks - so the only thing was to keep all
the stations on all the time, which caused a great cacophony in the house.
No further broadcast was made of the accusation that day, but in the evening Vicente the
cook returned and said that he had learned in the town hall that not only was the
accusation for real but right now they were looking for witnesses and willing to pay them.
Unbeknownst to me, he himself had agreed to be a witness and to say that he was along with
me and the others when we were killing the mayor! With that sort of witness up their sleeve,
no wonder the military were able to announce to all the new agencies that they had evidence
and that it was only a matter of time.
The next few months were filled with tension. Lying awake at night, quite unaware of the
role the cook would play, I weighed the seriousness of our situation. It could mean sudden
deportation. It could mean a show trial. There had been many of these recently. I thought
especially of the case of Father Kangleon, whom I myself had seen speaking on television
with glazed eyes, telling us that he was a communist. Unknown to us at that time, he had
been tortured and sexually harassed, and of course they finally killed him.
Just then there was a carefully orchestrated campaign to denigrate the Church and
especially the small Christian communities, with such newspaper headlines as 'Priests Plan
to Kill Their Bishops', 'Two Bishops, Nineteen Priests, Linked to Dissidents.' And on the
same day that the headline 'Murder Complaint Poised vs. Fathers Gore and O'Brien' appeared,
Marcos was reported to have ordered a national manhunt for '117 Radical Religious'. The
interesting thing about our case was that it was immediately released to the international
press. Also, unlike the other cases, we were not accused of subversion of any kind, just of
plain straightforward multiple murder. The motive to be suggested was clearly revenge
against a mayor who they claimed had thwarted us. Why had they gone after me and Brian when
both of us had clearly shunned violence?...
By accusing us of killing the mayor and his companions it seemed to be now that they were
revealing how necessary it was to show that we were violent people in order to justify
their own violence and, most of all, to impugn the credibility of the Church, particularly
Monsignor Fortich, who continually told the world what was happening in Negros.
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