RIVERMAN’S VISTA | When Presence Becomes a Crime: Toboso and Mindanao

MindaNews / 02 May – Nineteen people died in Toboso, Negros Occidental on April 19, 2026. Ten were acknowledged fighters of the New People’s Army. Nine were not. Among the nine were a 22-year-old student from the University of the Philippines, a journalist and poet, a community researcher, two American activists, a 19-year-old farmer, and two minors. Their deaths are not disputed. Their identities are not disputed.

What is disputed is how they died. The military says they were combatants. Their families, colleagues, and organizations say they were civilians. The Commission on Human Rights has opened an investigation. The ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights has condemned the operation. Lawyers from the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers say the principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law were visibly, blatantly violated.

The Movement Against Disinformation, in its Statement No. 68 issued April 26, 2026, named what followed the killings precisely: not clarity, but “an avalanche of claims, counterclaims, and rushed conclusions that now threaten to bury the truth.” Official narratives were released with alarming speed, branding all the dead as combatants even as credible, documented accounts immediately raised serious doubts. Disinformation thrives when claims are amplified faster than facts and when scrutiny is framed as hostility. MAD said it plainly: “Red-tagging is not rhetoric; it is a precursor to violence.”

The debate will continue. The investigation will proceed. But I write from Mindanao, and I cannot wait for verdicts before speaking. What Toboso represents is not new. It mirrors things we have seen here for decades. It echoes everything we know about what happens when going into a community becomes a crime.

Lianga, ALCADEV, and the Long History of Blood

To understand Toboso, you must first understand Lianga. On September 1, 2015, in Sitio Han-ayan, Barangay Diatagon, Lianga, Surigao del Sur, paramilitary elements of the Magahat-Bagani group, operating under the cover of the Philippine Army’s 36th Infantry Battalion, entered the compound of the Alternative Learning Center for Agricultural and Livelihood Development. They ordered teachers and students out. Then they killed Emerito Samarca, ALCADEV’s executive director, inside one of the school’s classrooms. Outside, at Kilometer 16, they shot down Lumad leaders Dionel Campos and Datu Bello Sinzo before hundreds of witnesses from six sitios.

ALCADEV was not a rebel camp. It was a secondary school for Lumad children in Surigao del Sur, founded in 2004, offering education rooted in the indigenous community’s own land and livelihood. Emerito Samarca had devoted over a decade to building it. He was killed inside a classroom. The Magahat-Bagani’s justification was identical to what we hear today in Toboso: these people were NPA. That claim was made before a crowd of hundreds. It was a lie told to witnesses.

The Lianga massacre sparked the nationwide “Stop Lumad Killings” movement and the Manilakbayan caravans of 2015, 2016, and 2017, which brought thousands of Lumad and their allies to Manila to demand protection. Ten years after the massacre, the perpetrators remain at large. Last September 2025, the Mindanao Climate Justice Resource Facility co-organized the 10th anniversary commemoration at Adamson University. We gathered to remember. We gathered because no one has been held to account.

Chad Booc knew Lianga. He was inspired by the Lumad during the Manilakbayan and became a volunteer mathematics teacher at ALCADEV, the same school where Samarca was killed. He was a cum laude graduate in Computer Science from UP Diliman who chose to teach in an ancestral domain instead of building a career in the city. On February 24, 2022, he and four companions, including fellow volunteer teacher Gelejurain Ngujo II, were killed in New Bataan, Davao de Oro. I was legal counsel for Save Our Schools Network and for Chad. I know what the forensic evidence showed: multiple gunshot wounds, internal hemorrhages, a severed spinal cord. The forensic pathologist said there was “intent to kill.” The military said it was an encounter. Locals said there was no encounter. The pattern was Lianga again.

Toboso Mirrors Mindanao

I say Toboso mirrors Mindanao because the logic is identical. A student goes into a rural community to understand poverty. A teacher goes into an ancestral domain to educate children. A researcher goes into a conflict zone to document conditions. Then the military arrives, labels them all enemies, and fires. The bodies are counted. The narrative is controlled. The survivors grieve without justice.

By 2020, all 215 Lumad community schools in Mindanao had been forcibly closed. Teachers were harassed, threatened, and prosecuted. The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict institutionalized red-tagging as policy. Children lost their classrooms. The Talaingod 13, a solidarity mission that evacuated children from a school under paramilitary attack in 2018, was convicted by the Court of Appeals in December 2025. Among the convicted: former lawmakers Satur Ocampo and France Castro, school administrator Meggie Nolasco, and eight volunteer teachers. Their crime was protecting children. The Court called it child abuse.

The common thread linking Lianga, New Bataan, Talaingod, and Toboso is this: when the State cannot tolerate a community’s conditions being witnessed, it criminalizes the witnesses. Alyssa Alano, the 22-year-old UP political science student killed in Toboso, was remembered by her own faculty as someone who “committed herself to the marginalized as an act of genuine service to the Filipino people.” She was doing what students are supposed to do. RJ Nichole Ledesma was a journalist documenting the impacts of large-scale renewable energy projects on farming communities. He had been red-tagged since 2022. Filipino-American Lyle Prijoles returned to the Philippines to live with communities and understand conditions firsthand. He came because immersion is how you understand what data cannot tell you. He died for that choice.

The Right to Know, the Right to Be Present

I want to be direct because the moment demands directness. Some will use Toboso to argue against immersion and integration programs. They will say students should not go to conflict zones. They will say the line between solidarity work and armed struggle is too blurry to cross safely.

I reject that argument. I reject it on legal grounds. I reject it on moral grounds. I reject it on the grounds of what Mindanao has taught me across a lifetime of work here. I would not be what I am if I did not immerse myself with the masses of Mindanao in the 1980s.

I would not be what I am if I did not integrate with indigenous peoples – the Aetas in Central Luzon, the Mangyans in Mindoro, the Dumagat of the Sierra Madre, the peoples of the Cordillera, the Tagbanwa of the Calamianes, and the Lumad of Mindanao – to become the human rights and climate justice lawyer that I have become.

I would not be able to teach and practice what I teach about environmental law, sustainable development policy, and indigenous peoples’ rights if not for these immersion experiences.

Today, I make sure to go on field, in the frontlines of climate, environmental, and social injustice at least once a month. I also require that of my colleagues in the Klima Center of Manila Observatory and La Viña Zarate and Associates, the developmental and social change law firm that I founded and lead with former Bayan Muna Representative Kaloi Zarate.

The UP Diliman Committee on the Protection of Academic Freedom and Human Rights said it plainly in its statement of April 29, 2026. Fieldwork, it declared, “generates data and integrates knowledge.” It is not extracurricular. It is “integral” to what a university is and does. The Committee further warned that red-tagging and harassment “place the lives of students and faculty in immediate danger” and create “a chilling effect based on unfounded accusations.” That chilling effect is precisely what the State intends.

Immersion programs exist precisely because communities at the margins are invisible to power. When Lumad teachers went into ancestral domains and taught children in their own language, they filled a vacuum the State created. The schools did not arise because NGOs wanted to recruit for the NPA. They arose because children had no schools. That is documented. That is undeniable. Chad Booc chose ALCADEV over a city career. Emerito Samarca built a school in a forest. They were educators. The State killed them for it.

When researchers go to Negros to document why land-related violence persists despite decades of agrarian reform law, they are not aiding insurgency. They are performing the foundational act of democratic society: making the invisible visible. I have sent students into communities. I have encouraged immersion. I will continue to do so. Not carelessly. Not without preparation for the risks. But I will not capitulate to a doctrine that says knowing is dangerous and ignorance is safe.

What Mindanao Knows

The Commission on Human Rights must be allowed to complete its investigation without interference. The Armed Forces of the Philippines must account for every one of the nineteen deaths. The principle of distinction under international humanitarian law is not optional. Civilians do not lose protection because they hold cameras or notebooks or carry research papers.

Congress must proceed with its inquiry. House Resolution 968 and the resolutions of the Makabayan bloc deserve serious, independent proceedings. The hearing should call military commanders, hear from the families, and examine how the operation was authorized and why it lasted nearly twelve hours. MAD Statement No. 68 was explicit: accountability must reach “beyond individual actors to include command responsibility.” That is not a political demand. It is a legal one, rooted in international humanitarian law.

We have lived this longer than Negros. We know what it means when an educator is killed inside a school he built. We know what it means when teachers are convicted for protecting children. We know what it means when 10,000 Lumad students lose classrooms because the State cannot distinguish education from subversion. Lianga was 2015. New Bataan was 2022. Toboso is 2026. The perpetrators of Lianga are still free. No one was ever held to account for Chad Booc.

We also know something else. Peace in Mindanao did not come from eliminating civil society. It came from dialogue, from recognizing communities as partners rather than threats, from building institutions that serve people rather than surveil them. The BARMM exists not because the State killed enough people but because it eventually sat down and talked.

Toboso is a warning. It warns us that the lessons of Mindanao have not been learned nationally. It warns us that counterinsurgency without distinction destroys the very civilian infrastructure that makes peace possible. It warns us that a State which criminalizes presence has already declared war on its own people.

The State should also be warned. Killing activists will not contribute to ending the revolution. In fact, it is a truism but something I have seen – from every death, new revolutionaries will rise up. I know that personally because when Chad Booc, who I was close to, died, I thought seriously of joining the armed struggle again, revisiting a dilemma I grappled with in the 1980s. In the end, having been diagnosed with cancer and realizing that I was better as a lawyer and mentor for activists, I decided to stay where I was.

The UP Department of Political Science faculty said of Alyssa that “the most profound political act is to commit one’s life in the pursuit of honor, excellence, service, and social justice.” That is what she did. That is what Chad Booc did. That is what Emerito Samarca did. They deserved protection, not bullets. Their work deserved respect, not red-tags.

From Mindanao, we mourn them all. We demand accountability. And we insist: the right to know, the right to be present, the right to educate and document and research without fear of military fire, these are not communist rights. They are human rights. They are constitutional rights. They are ours to defend.

Note on author: Dean Antonio Gabriel La Viña is a professor of law, philosophy, politics and governance in several universities, including in Mindanao. He has been a human rights lawyer for 36 years. He is managing partner of La Viña Zarate and Associates, a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Chair of the Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy Department of the Philippine Judicial Academy, founding president of the Movement Against Disinformation, and founding chair of the Mindanao Climate Justice Resource Facility and the Mindanao Center for Scholarships, Sports, and Spirituality.