By Joseph B.A. Marzan
The son of a slain Ilonggo activist said Tuesday that the request he sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for a faster investigation of the case was “a family initiative.”
Jory Porquia, Iloilo City coordinator of Bayan Muna, was shot inside his home in Arevalo, Iloilo City on April 30, 2020 by two men wearing face masks.
At the time of his death, Porquia was organizing the group’s relief operations amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the city.
His son, Lean Porquia, described to Daily Guardian that his father’s death was a “very difficult time” for the family, especially for him, because they were subjected to “red-tagging” amid their grief.
“Red-tagging” refers to accusations that persons or groups as being used fronts of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its direct wings.
The Duterte administration has tagged rebels and even legal front organizations as “terrorists.”
Lean and his sister Tsinkai as well as their mother and other activists, had been accused as CPP recruiters.
On April 26, 2021, Lean sent a letter to DOJ Secretary Menardo Guevarra asking that his father’s case be included in extrajudicial killings investigated under Administrative Order (AO) No. 35, series of 2012.
AO No. 35, issued by then-President Benigno Aquino III, created the Inter-Agency Committee on Extra Legal Killings, Enforced Disappearances, Torture, and Other Grave Violations of the Right to Life, Liberty, and Security of Persons. The committee is headed by the DOJ secretary.
Guevarra told ABS-CBN News on Tuesday that “whether previously red-tagged or not, if the killing was directly attributable to some cause, advocacy, or activism of the victim,” cases of red-tagging may be investigated under AO No. 35.
The committee is mandated to investigate cases of extra-legal killings, enforced disappearances, torture, and other grave violations of the right to life, liberty, and security of persons, “perpetrated by State and non-state forces alike”.
In the letter, Lean told the justice chief that the investigation into his father’s death was “going nowhere”.
He explained via phone interview that within a year of his father’s killing, neither police nor any investigating body had approached them to either give updates on investigation or ask for statements.
He said that Philippine National Police (PNP) officers assigned to investigate his father’s case “should at least take diligence” to update the family on the progress of the case.
“We are not privy to police investigations, but basic processes like to update on leads or asking coordination, in the span of one year, nothing happened. The only thing that we have had interactions with the police was that time when me, my sister, and our aunt went to the police station to retrieve his things at the Arevalo police station in May 2020, and they were even hesitant to release our father’s belongings,” Porquia said.
Lean described his father, who had been active with social movements since the Marcos regime, of making big contributions to the country’s progressive movement.
“I think it all boils down to what our father has done historically. He has been very vocal since [the Marcos-era] Martial Law until now. If you look at the social movement of Bayan Muna in Iloilo, he had been very instrumental because of his dedication and passion, and because of that our family, has been a target especially now that the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict has had an intensified campaign against alleged and accused members of the CPP,” he said.
He said that the selflessness that they have learned from his parents continued to motivate them to keep going forward with their activism.
“If there’s one thing that both my parents taught me, it’s the value of being selfless, that at the end of the day, whatever people tell us, I only think about our only intention which is to help the people. If someone approaches us to ask for help, we have to seek helping them with how and what we can. That stuck with me, and I saw that with my parents. We aren’t affluent but my father still reaches out to help people, and I think that proves how his death was motivated by the fear of those in power, because they don’t want him to expose the rottenness of the system,” he said.
Aside from the letter, their family also held on to the commitment of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) in investigating their patriarch’s death, as well as to push to resolve human rights cases in the country.
