Stock photo / INQUIRER
ILOILO CITY –– Unidentified assailants shot and wounded two agrarian reform beneficiaries in Capiz on Monday evening, two weeks after being installed on land awarded to them by the government 24 years ago.
Jose Sony Billonid and Bernard Amistoso, members of the Montecarlo Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Organization (Montecarba) were taken to the Capiz Doctors’ Hospital in Roxas City after the attack in Barangay Dulungan in Pilar town.
Billonid, 49, was hit in the side of his stomach, while Amistoso, 51, was wounded in the arm.
Billonid underwent surgery and was still at the intensive care unit as of 3:15 p.m. Tuesday.
His wife Teresita, spokesperson of Montecarba, told the Inquirer that her husband was out of danger.
The victims were in their houses shortly before 9 p.m., when an object was thrown at Amistoso’s house.
They went out to check on their surroundings but were shot by unknown individuals, according to an initial report of the Pilar police station.
Investigators recovered an empty shell of a 12-gauge shotgun.
No one saw who fired at the two victims because there was a brownout during the time, said Remia Locsin, also a member of Montecarba, in a statement issued by the farmers federation Task Force Mapalad.
Locsin said she heard four gunshots and later saw the bloodied victims.
She said the two men and their neighbors found a pineapple that was thrown on the roof of Amistoso’s house before the shooting.
“We still don’t know who did this to them. They have no known enemies. What they and all of us have is a longstanding dispute with the camp of the former landowner of the hacienda,” Locsin said in the statement.
On May 11, the Department of Agrarian Reform, backed by policemen and soldiers, installed 175 farmers belonging to Montercarba on land totaling 188 awarded to them by the government 24 years ago.
The installation capped a prolonged struggle of the land beneficiaries amid the resistance of the now-deceased landowner Nemesio Tan and his heirs, who sought the cancelation of the certificates of land ownership issued to the farmers, and stop the property from being subjected to agrarian reform.
On Feb. 11, 2017, one of the land beneficiaries, Orlando Eslana, died when armed men fired at 68 beneficiaries, who occupied part of the property in Pilar due to the failure of the government to install them.
Four other farmers were wounded, including Eslana’s sister Melinda Eslana-Arroyo, who remains paralyzed with a bullet still embedded in her head.