North Cotabato lawmaker says Italian priest’s charge ‘absurd’

DAVAO CITY—North Cotabato Rep. Nancy Catamco on Tuesday said it was “ridiculously absurd” that she was accused of coddling and protecting any of the suspected killers of Italian missionary Fausto Tentorio.

“There is no single shred of evidence that I coddle criminals,” Catamco said in a text message to the Inquirer. She was reacting to a testimony made by Italian priest Peter Geremia during a hearing of the House committee on human rights here last week.

Geremia, who represented the Tentorio family and the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions during the hearing, said under oath that Catamco took custody of some of the suspects in the murder of Tentorio in 2011 and had been protecting them.

He did not give any names, except that of Jan Corbala, an alleged leader of the paramilitary group Bagani. Brig. Gen. Benjamin Madrigal, an Army commander, said Corbala was a member of the Civilian Armed Forces Geographical Unit until his dismissal in 2006 and that the military was also hunting him for some unspecified crimes.

Some suspects still roam freely, while witnesses to the killing are “prisoners in the safe house” of the government’s witness protection program, Geremia said.

Catamco said the priest’s allegations were understandable because “election is forthcoming and this kind of black ops (operations) or propaganda normally sells in the news.”

“The statement of Father Geremia is plainly so, so wrong on so many levels. He should understand that the burden to prove his allegations is incumbent upon him. In the proper forum, I shall make my answer,” she said.

Catamco noted a “seemingly relentless and deliberate attempt of my detractors to spread inaccurate and dishonest allegations against me.”

“This issue was already hurled against me in the 2013 elections and the same group staged a rally few days before the day of elections. I suspect that this group was prodded to rehearse their failed attempt to unseat me,” she said.

She said militant groups could be behind the “issues” against her when she mentioned the incident at Haran House here, where some 700 Manobo people have been staying since May. Last month, the groups lambasted the lawmaker for allegedly instigating a police raid on Haran, a facility run by the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP), that left 18 people injured.

Catamco also said the hearing conducted by the House committee became a venue for “our misguided colleagues in Congress” to veer “wildly off-course the official proceedings of the committee on human rights to make a character assassination against me and to muddle the real issues in UCCP Haran—the anomalous establishment of evacuation for indigenous peoples and the vicious disinformation that created debilitating fear to my fellow lumad.”

“That is not at all debatable,” Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate said. “What Father Geremia pointed out was the injustice where witnesses fear for their lives while the alleged perpetrators are free to roam around and some are even under the influential protection of Catamco, like the Ato brothers.”

Catamco declined to comment on Geremia’s claim that Tentorio’s murder could have been instigated by some politicians.

“It is not appropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation. The [Department of Justice] created a special task force and a panel of investigators to investigate the alleged crime. I do not want to speculate or preempt their findings,” she said. Reports from Allan Nawal and Germelina Lacorte, Inquirer Mindanao