An eerie chill gripped Charlie Cudiamat the moment he came close to the remains. Instantly, the 26-year-old thought those were Ama’s—his 62-year-old grandfather, Alfredo Bucal.
“We already went to see about 15 corpses but we never felt the same as we did (with this one),” Cudiamat said.
His mother’s knees shook as the family’s hunch grew stronger. Like Bucal, the body had only one upper front tooth and no underwear.
“Ama, too, never wore briefs,” Cudiamat said.
Missing
Bucal, a tricyle driver from Barangay (village) Pantalan in Nasugbu, Batangas, went missing on Nov. 10, 2010.
Citing accounts of witnesses, Bucal’s family said soldiers arrested him at a checkpoint in Barangay Luntal in the adjacent town of Tuy, right after an encounter between Army soldiers and communist rebels.
The family never heard of the old man’s whereabouts again until August 17 when farmers found a decomposing body in the mountainous village of Calayo in Nasugbu. It was only wearing brown denim pants and bore a bullet wound in the right leg. The ribs were broken.
About two meters away was a sack containing a green striped polo shirt, a pair of white rubber slippers, a lighter, and a black leather wallet with a used mobile phone card, a P20 bill, a few coins, and a faded ID photo, Cudiamat said.
DNA test
The family believed that all these things belonged to Bucal, but the police insisted on waiting for the results of a DNA test before they could release the body to them.
“We have somehow accepted that Ama is gone. But we want to claim the body so we can give him a decent funeral,” Cudiamat said.
On Tuesday, coincidentally the International Day of the Disappeared, Bucal’s family and members of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) in Batangas held a rally at the Nasugbu town proper to seek justice for Bucal, also called “Tatay Fred” by town mates.
“He was just a tricycle driver (whose) only affiliation was being the president of the Toda (Tricycle Drivers’ and Operators’ Association),” Juna Arante, Bayan-Batangas secretary-general, said in a phone interview.
According to Cudiamat, his grandfather had been hired to drive for some people from Tuy to Nasugbu. The family did not know who his passengers were.
Encounter angle
But Lieutenant Vincent Incognito, commander of the 730th Combat Group of the Philippine Air Force in Nasugbu, said Bucal “was never in that area during the encounter.”
Two New People’s Army (NPA) rebels were killed while one escaped during the gun battle, Incognito said. Authorities recovered two rifles, several explosives and Bucal’s tricycle from the scene.
“We do not know exactly how the NPA rebels got hold of the tricycle,” Incognito said.
The vehicle was turned over to the municipal government and the family claimed it back days after the incident.
“Nanay (Bucal’s wife Paulina, 56) has only been eating a little and always stares blankly since Ama was gone,” Cudiamat said.
He said his mother, Perlie, a solo parent working in a factory, raised him and his two other siblings with their grandparents always around.
“Whenever Ama arrived home and there was no food, he would drive his tricycle back to the town proper to make sure we had something to eat,” Cudiamat said.