Karapatan slams killing in Navotas City, decries absence of justice in killings of Zara Alvarez and Randy Echanis

Photo by Lucky Dela Rosa/Philippine Collegian

August 16, 2023

Human rights alliance Karapatan condemned the killing by policemen in Navotas City of a minor two weeks ago even as it decried the absence of justice in the killings of its human rights worker Zara Alvarez and peace consultant Randall Echanis. 

Seventeen-year-old Jemboy Baltazar was shot dead by Navotas policemen while he and a friend were on a boat, getting ready to fish. The policemen who were pursuing a murder suspect shot and killed Jemboy in a supposed case of mistaken identity, and left him submerged in the water where he later succumbed to drowning and a gunshot wound to the head. 

“Contrary to regulations,” said Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay, “the body-worn camera the policemen were carrying was not functional. This scenario is disturbingly familiar. One would think that it comes straight out of the Duterte era, yet we are seeing it more than a year under the Marcos Jr. regime.”

Karapatan is likewise marking the third anniversaries of the killings of Karapatan-Negros paralegal Zara Alvarez as well as Anakpawis chair and NDFP peace consultant Randall Echanis who were both brutally murdered a week apart. Echanis was stabbed multiple times in his rented house in Novaliches, Quezon City in the early morning of August 10, 2020 while Alvarez was gunned down near her home in Bacolod City on August 17, 2020. 

“News of Zara’s killing reached us on the day we buried Ka Randall,” said Palabay. “It was a grisly pattern that human rights defenders had become all too familiar with,” she added. Both Echanis and Alvarez were included in a list of more than 600 individuals that the Department of Justice (DOJ) claimed were members of the CPP-NPA-NDF. “Their delisting months later from this red-tag list did not erase the danger they were facing,” said Palabay. 

Karapatan denounced the lack of accountability of suspected State actors as perpetrators in the killings of Alvarez and Echanis. “The supposed investigations of the Task Force on Administrative Order No. 35 on their cases have not yielded any substantial results, as in most of the extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other human rights violations purportedly being investigated by the said body,” Palabay said. 

“Jemboy, Ka Randall and Zara’s killings are three deaths that continue to cry out for justice,” Palabay stressed. “We in the human rights community as well as other concerned Filipinos will not relent until justice is attained for them and for all other victims of extrajudicial killings.”