25 August 2020

[...] [U]nidentified assailants slipped past the Philippine capital’s strict quarantine measures and approached the home of Randall Echanis, a left-wing party leader and longtime activist. When they left on the morning of 10 August, Echanis and his flatmate were dead, marked with stab wounds and alleged signs of torture.

City and national police launched into a cycle of denial and contradiction all too familiar to the families of slain activists in Mindanao, Negros and the provinces far from the capital where environmental and land defenders have been killed at alarming rates since President Rodrigo Duterte took power in 2016.

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[...] As killings of activists continued to rise in rural areas – the Philippines was Asia’s deadliest country for environmental defenders last year, according to  Global Witness – Duterte’s critics in Manila wondered when the bloodshed would enter the capital city. The death of Echanis, at the height of a strict lockdown and in the wake of a controversial anti-terrorism law, has thus signaled a turning point in the wider campaign to eliminate dissent. Any pretense that the killings resulted from local conflicts over rural land struggles, out of sight and mind from Manila, is now gone.

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[...] Echanis, like many slain activists, had been named on a government terrorist list, although his name was later removed. Being named on a terrorist list or on one of the various bulletins and releases falsely labeling legal activists as communist rebels (a practice known as “red-tagging”) is often fatal – and most people in Manila’s legal activist network have, at some point during Duterte’s rule, been red-tagged.

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