A Movie analysis on…“Echo of Bullets”

By Virgil B. Vallecera

The Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), last 1998, signed the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), which would “continue to assume separate duties and responsibilities for upholding, protecting, and promoting human rights and the principles and constitutions until both parties would reach final resolution of their conflict.” This pronouncement was due to the high number of cases of abduction and disappearance, frustrated murder, illegal detention and various forms of harassment done in the years of strongman Marcos, widow Aquino, Vietnam hero Ramos, action star Estrada, and Harvard grad Arroyo. However, the government justifies the act as their concerted campaign against terrorism and “national security problem solution”- yah, against the unarmed, non-combatant civilians that is!

On the contrary, these names came out of the midst during the years of the signed treaty: Eduardo Millanes, Lary Travalles, Milagros Belga, Virgilio Alcantara, Bong Termida, Erwin Bacarra, Nicanor delos Santos, Randy Bueno, Edilberto Napoles, Myrna de Castro, and Eman Floredo. These are just but a few of the long list of the 967 human rights violation and of the 2,893 victims of the relentless militarization in an attempt to clear -or perhaps annihilate- all resistance against those who dominates. Indeed, how ironic it is to think that everything agreed were just on papers and stopped after the final stroke of the signatures.

What alarms me most is that, the high percentages of the horrid militarization victims are civilians, mostly plain folks and peasants that are slain due to speculations of leftist link. The question is, what will then happen to the lives deserted by those killed due to the narrow thoughts of “protecting national security”? What will be its effect to the living condition and the minds of those left behind? Just delete the lives of those innocent and a dynamo-effect will occur. What will happen to their families? Obviously, it will be doom, decimation, and more lives that are miserable.

These are some realizations that the GRP should answer and that they be challenged to that grim fact of social injustice, repression, harassment, and decimation. This is their task; for they had laid their hands on an international agreement -if, they have forgotten- on the respect of the constitutionality of the enumerable rights of the innocent. It is indeed an insult to them if they do not comply with that. And if they will not, it will then serve as a fuel on the people’s revolutionary resistance. Moreover, when that happens, expect social unrest and national civil war- the final arbiter of the dispute.