Flyers naming Ifugao activists ‘terrorists’ litter capital town’s streets

PHOTO show samples of the flyers found scattered on Saturday (April 21) in Lagawe town in Ifugao province.

BAGUIO CITY—Flyers labelling activist groups in Ifugao province as creations of the “terrorist communist rebels” were found scattered in the streets of the capital town, Lagawe, on Saturday morning (April 21).

Lagawe residents out for their morning walk found the flyers at 5:45 a.m., according to Brandon Lee of the Ifugao Peasant Movement (IPM).

Some flyers were signed by a group called Kaagapay ng Maralitang Ifugao and list Ifugao women’s groups and farmer’s associations as “organized by the terrorist New People’s Army.”

Another flyer bearing the acronym Makamasa says, “The Ifugao Resource and Development Center (IRDC) in Poblacion South, Lagawe is housing the terrorist NPA! Obliterate it!”

A third type of flyer names Lee and five other Ifugao residents as “accomplices of the terrorist NPA in Ifugao,” signed simply as “Para sa Masang Ifugao.”

PHOTO show samples of the flyers found scattered on Saturday (April 21) in Lagawe town in Ifugao province.

In 2015, Lee was among the Ifugao activists who received flyers bearing a photograph of the “gamong,” the Ifugao fabric used for the dead, with the words “Gray-May, June-Gloom, No Sky-July.”

On March 2, Ricardo Mayumi, an IPM member and vocal objector to the Quad River hydro project in Tinoc town, also in Ifugao, was murdered in Kiangan town. He also received the death cloth flyer.

On March 25, 2014, IPM member and IRDC leader William Bugatti was gunned down along the provincial road in Kiangan.