📷Labor and peasant rights advocate Jude Rimando
Human rights alliance Karapatan announced the death from liver cancer of political prisoner Ernesto Jude Rimando Jr. at 5:30 a.m. today.
Rimando, a long-time labor and peasants rights advocate, was arrested on January 6, 2021 while seeking treatment in Metro Manila for liver cirrhosis and sepsis. Despite his physical condition, he was blindfolded, tortured and interrogated on the spot by a six-man arresting team in plain clothes who refused to identify themselves and failed to present a warrant. The arresting team also planted firearms and a grenade in his bag and prepared a hastily revised arrest warrant prior to his inquest. Fortunately, the court saw through the falsity of the charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives and dismissed the case.
Rimando had been confined at the Philippine General Hospital since May 17, 2024. Tests conducted by his doctors determined that his liver cirrhosis had progressed to liver cancer after three years in detention, and that he was concurrently suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, pulmonary embolism and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Rimando succumbed to his illness while awaiting the resolution of a pending motion by his lawyer to have him released on recognizance. The motion, which had gone through one hearing last July 16, would have had its final hearing date on July 30. The results of the first hearing already indicated that the prosecution’s case was weak. Rimando had been inching closer to freedom, but death overtook him.
Rimando’s death is reminiscent of that of Antonio Molina, a peasant leader from Southern Tagalog who died of complications from stomach cancer on November 18, 2021 after a Palawan court denied his motion for compassionate release and suggested that Molina turn to herbal medicine instead to relieve his pain.
Before Rimando, 74-year old Antonio Legaspi died of a heart attack at the San Jose del Monte Male Dormitory where his already fragile health condition deteriorated after he had been held in solitary confinement in violation of the UN Minimum Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners. Reports say he was no longer breathing and was cyanotic by the time jail authorities brought him to hospital.
Rimando is the eighth political prisoner to die in detention in just two years of the Marcos regime. This is already two-thirds of Duterte’s record of 12 political prisoner deaths throughout his six-year term.
The death of political prisoners while in detention, especially the elderly and ailing, is always cause for indignation as they do not deserve to stay a minute longer in jail and are victims of one injustice after another.
It is doubly a cause for anger when we see the moneyed and the influential like Juan Ponce Enrile and Imelda Marcos invoking their advanced age and infirmities in buying time away from detention.
Karapatan takes this occasion to reiterate its urgent call for the release of all elderly and ailing political prisoners on just and humanitarian grounds. Let Ernesto Jude Rimando be the last victim of a deeply flawed and unresponsive justice system and a repressive regime that would put political activists and other dissenters behind bars rather than work for the genuine resolution of the armed conflict.
