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ILOILO CITY, Iloilo, Philippines — Unidentified gunmen shot and wounded two agrarian reform beneficiaries in Capiz province on Monday night, two weeks after they were installed on land awarded to them by the government 24 years ago.
Jose Sony Billonid and Bernard Amistoso, both members of Montecarlo Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Organization (Montecarba), were taken to Capiz Doctors’ Hospital in Roxas City after the attack at Barangay Dulungan in Pilar town.
Billonid, 49, was hit in his belly while Amistoso, 51, had a bullet wound in the arm.
Billonid underwent surgery and was still at the intensive care unit as of 3 p.m. Tuesday. His wife, Teresita, also spokesperson for 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 first thrown at the house of Amistoso.They went outside to check their surroundings but were shot by unidentified gunmen, according to an initial report of the Pilar police.
Investigators recovered an empty shotgun shell.No one saw who shot Billonid and Amistoso because there was a power outage during the incident, said Remia Locsin, also a member of Montecarba, in a statement issued by the farmers’ federation, Task Force Mapalad.
No enemies
Locsin said she heard four gunshots and later saw the bloodied victims.
She said the two men and their neighbors found a pineapple that hit 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 installed 175 farmers belonging to Montercarba on a 188-hectare land awarded to them by the government in 1997.
The installation capped a prolonged struggle of land reform beneficiaries amid the resistance of the now-deceased landowner and his heirs who sought the cancellation of the certificates of land ownership issued to farmers and stop the property from being subjected to agrarian reform.