Every Spy-Tagging Killing Is a Warning Shot Aimed at All of Negros

On July 10, two men were found shot dead in Victorias City — Jerome Seballos, 59, and Alex Cunanan, 58. Two days later, the NPA's Roselyn Jean Pelle Command claimed responsibility, saying its "Special Partisan Unit" had carried out a "death penalty" against both, accusing Seballos of working as a military informant.

Two men were executed in their own barangay, and the killers announced it publicly as a warning to everyone else. That is what spy-tagging is for. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a military tactic, but a performance for the civilian audience. An insurgency that can no longer contest the Armed Forces of the Philippines in the field increasingly reaches instead for the residents of Negros: farmers, tricycle drivers, barangay officials, and former rebels. People who cannot shoot back. The government's own count puts the great majority of the country's documented spy-tagging killings on this one island, concentrated overwhelmingly in the past year and a half.

The damage caused by these killings goes far beyond the number of people who died. When the NPA can shoot someone on a barangay road and simply release a statement days later claiming the victim was "guilty," without presenting evidence or giving the accused any chance to defend themselves, fear spreads throughout the community.

Ordinary residents begin to wonder who might be accused next. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another. Former rebels who surrendered in the hope of rebuilding their lives realize that no promise of safety means anything if they can still be sentenced to death by the NPA's self-appointed "people's courts" without ever being heard.

This is happening while Negros is still struggling to come to terms with the controversial armed encounter in Toboso. The military maintains that 19 NPA fighters were killed, while the NPA and some human rights groups argue that some of those who died were unarmed civilians and activists. The NPA now points to Toboso to justify killings like those of Jerome Seballos and Alex Cunanan. Negros deserves protection, truth, and accountability for the NPA's summary executions.

But whatever happened in Toboso does not turn Jerome Seballos or Alex Cunanan into legitimate military targets. It does not make an armed "Special Partisan Unit" a court of law. And it does not change the reality now confronting the people of Victorias and other communities across Negros: fear is spreading because an armed movement that once claimed to defend the people is now killing the very civilians it says it represents.