The Curious Case of Rebelyn Pitao

Rebelyn Pitao was a substitute teacher teaching grade school students at a local school in Southern Philippines. Last Wednesday, she was abducted by unidentified men on her way home. When she was reported missing, authorities pooh-poohed the incident and assumed she eloped with her boyfriend. But she didn’t. The following day her half-naked body was found in an irrigation canal. It showed signs that she was tortured, raped, and stabbed to death. She would have celebrated her 21st birthday on March 20.

Rebelyn was the daughter of the popular Commander Parago of the new People’s Army who proves to be a thorn and an embarrassment to the Philippine military. For two decades, he has led successful campaigns against government forces including the capture of a general and his assistant in 1999. They vowed to neutralize him by end of last year and failed. Small wonder that the military are starting to lose their cool. In their desperation, they seem to be willing to do whatever it takes to kill or capture the elusive commander.

Rebelyn’s mother doesn’t hesitate to blame the murder of her daughter to the military intelligence group. “If they are angry because they can’t get my husband,” she said in an interview with Mindanews, “they should go up the mountains and look for my husband there.”

If government forces were indeed responsible for Rebelyn’s murder, it could be assumed that it was done in the hope that it would transform the commander into an avenging angel and force him out of his hiding place and meet the full force of the military head on.

Major General Raymundo Ferrer, a regional military commander of the army, however, denied its soldiers were involved in the kidnapping and killing. He reiterated that it is not the policy of the military to involve the family or children of the rebels into the fight.

If it’s not the elements in the military, then who would have the capacity and motivation to kidnap and murder a young woman whose only “crime” was being the daughter of a rebel leader? Human Rights Watch reported last year that the number of extra-judicial killings in the Philippines have increased significantly after President Gloria Arroyo declared an “all-out war” against the New People’s Army in 2006.

President Gloria Arroyo has ordered a probe into the killing so that the murderers can be punished. Judging from the results of previous investigations of this nature, however, nothing much can be expected from an administration perceived to be the most corrupt in Philippine History.

Rebelyn was a rebel’s daughter. Her father made sure of that. Didn’t he name her “Rebelyn” after all? She might have been her father’s daughter, but she didn’t follow in his footsteps. Rightly or wrongly, though, this conflation of being a rebel’s daughter and being a rebel herself could have led to her untimely death.