On the night of November 20, 2009, Fr. Alberto Alejo, SJ, of the Ateneo de Davao University received an unexpected visitor. He had just finished reciting one of his poems at the opening night of the Conference and Festival on Culture and Arts for Peace, and he went back to his office because he was told someone was waiting for him.
“I was surprised because there were a lot bodyguards,” Fr. Alejo told me at Freedom Park this morning right after a simple candle-lighting ceremony (pictured; Fr. Alejo is at left, Toto Mangudadatu is at center in this photo by Bing Gonzales of the Mindanao Daily Mirror) to commemorate the first month of the November 23, 2009 Maguindanao massacre. “It was Toy who was waiting for me.”
Toy would be ARMM Assemblyman Toy Khadafeeh Mangudadatu, younger brother of Buluan, Maguindanao Vice Mayor Esmael “Toto” Mangudadatu. Fr. Alejo said that was the first time he met a member of the Mangudadatu family.
What did Toy want, I asked, and Fr. Alejo said Toy — and later Toto himself by cell phone — told him the vice mayor was going to go ahead and file his certificate of candidacy at the Commission on Election in Sharif Aguak, Maguindanao. “They said they knew they were going to be killed by the Ampatuans, but they had decided and they were determined. They would not back down.”
Fr. Alejo said this was the backdrop against which Toto’s wife Genalin, his two sisters, and 55 others — 30 of them journalists — made their journey from Buluan to Sharif Aguak just three days later. “It was a conscious decision,” he said, “calculated to avoid violence.” They knew of the threat but they went on anyway, and the supreme irony was that the trip intended to prevent bloodshed ended in one of the worst acts of violence the world had ever seen.
“They were martyrs for peace and democracy,” he said. “All 58 of them. They were doing something that was ordinary in a democracy, the filing of a certificate of candidacy.” But they paid the ultimate price for it.
This is how Fr. Alejo wants all of us to remember the event of November 23. It wasn’t just a massacre but the creation of 58 martyrs, people who made a decision for peace and democracy and paid for it with their lives. May we all be worthy of their sacrifice.
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Great article…one for the history books. thanks for writing this and posting it for all to read.
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