Deaths of civilians, student challenge AFP narrative

📷: RJ Nichole Ledesma, writer and editor of Paghimutad‑Negros and regional coordinator of Altermidya in Negros Island, was among the civilians killed in the alleged AFP encounter with the NPA in Brgy. Salamanca, Toboso.

The Apolinario Gatmaitan Command of the New People’s Army (AGC-NPA) has denounced the 79th Infantry Battalion’s (IB) account of the Brgy. Salamanca, Toboso, Negros Occidental incident, calling it “a desperate piece of fiction” designed to mask civilian casualties under the guise of a military victory.

In a statement, AGC-NPA spokesperson Ka Maoche Legislador paid tribute to those killed, describing them as martyrs whose names are now inscribed in the island’s long struggle for land and justice.

“The Negrosanon people will remember them as patriots and revolutionaries,” Legislador said, rejecting the military’s portrayal of the victims as armed combatants.

According to the AGC-NPA, only a small squad led by Roger “Ka Jhong” Fabillar were fighters. The majority of those slain were civilians — farmers, journalists, and human rights advocates — who carried notebooks and cameras rather than rifles. Among them were Roel Sabillo, a Toboso farmer, and RJ Nichole Ledesma, a writer and editor of Paghimutad‑Negros and regional coordinator of Altermidya in Negros Island.

The group Human Rights Advocates of Negros said Ledesma was in Sitio Plaringding, three kilometers away from the original encounter site, but was later reported by government troops as among NPA fighters killed.

The University of the Philippines-Diliman University Student Council also confirmed that its councilor Alyssa Alano was among those killed.

The Council said Alano was in the area for an immersion tour with peasant communities and denied she was an NPA combatant.

The military claimed 19 rebels were killed and 19 firearms recovered, a tally the AGC-NPA dismissed as “mathematically convenient but logically bankrupt.”

The group accused the 79th IB of recycling its “standard operating procedure” of planted evidence and fabricated encounters, citing precedents such as the Sagay 9 and Negros 14 massacres where civilians were posthumously branded as rebels.

“What the military labels a battlefield success was, in reality, a cold-blooded assault,” the statement read, underscoring that the victims’ only weapons were their convictions and commitment to the rural poor.

The AGC-NPA vowed that the blood spilled in Salamanca would only strengthen the revolutionary movement. “The fascist state sees only a body count, but the people see a reason to keep fighting,” Legislador declared. # (RRN)