QUEZON CITY (MindaNews / 2 June 2026) — On May 27, 2026, the PNP Cateel Municipal Police Station in Davao Oriental posted what it called a list of “Active Wanted Persons.” Among the 14 individuals arbitrarily named were youth organizers, environmental advocates, and community workers from Gabriela, Kabataan Partylist, and UP Mindanao.
The post was eventually deleted, and Police Major Michael Celecio issued a public apology for what he characterized as an “error.” But let us be honest: this was no clerical mistake. It was the latest episode in a long, deliberate plague — the plague of red-tagging.
That this incident must be condemned without reservation is beyond argument. That it must also be situated within a broader pattern of state-sponsored intimidation is a moral and journalistic obligation.
A Plague by Another Name
Red-tagging — the practice of publicly labeling activists, lawyers, journalists, church workers, and community organizers as communist terrorists or sympathizers — is not a new phenomenon in the Philippines.
From Marcos Sr. to Duterte to the present administration, it has been a recurring instrument of political control. What is relatively new is its institutionalization,
The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) transformed red-tagging from a shadowy tactic into overt state policy, equipping it with government resources, social media megaphones, and the full force of anti-terror laws.
The Supreme Court itself has already recognized red-tagging as a threat to life, liberty, and security. The Commission on Human Rights concluded a public inquiry into the practice in March 2025. Congress has been called upon to criminalize it. Yet the AFP and PNP continue with complete impunity — as the Cateel incident so vividly proves.
The consequences are not abstract.
Between 2012 and 2023, at least 134 environmental defenders were killed among 298 documented victims of extrajudicial killings in Mindanao alone.
Ali Macalintal, a trans woman journalist and environmental defender who was red-tagged for her participation in fact-finding missions and human rights advocacy for IP-Moro communities, died in 2025 — a casualty of the very climate of fear that red-tagging manufactures.
Dr. Natividad “Nati” Castro, a community doctor and human rights worker in Mindanao, was red-tagged, falsely accused of terrorism and rebellion, and arbitrarily detained.
These are not isolated incidents. They are a system.
The Talaingod 13: When Rescue Becomes a Crime
Nowhere is the weaponization of law against compassion more starkly illustrated than in the case of the Talaingod 13.
In November 2018, a national solidarity mission traveled to Talaingod, Davao del Norte, to assist Lumad teachers and students of the Salugpongan Ta’tano Igkanugon Community Learning Center who were being driven from their school by military operations.
The mission evacuated children to safety. For this act — for rescuing children from a militarized zone with the consent of their parents — thirteen individuals were charged with child abuse under Republic Act 7610.
On December 16, 2025, the Court of Appeals upheld the Tagum City Regional Trial Court’s conviction of the group. The ruling sent a chilling message: in the Philippines, protecting indigenous children from military harassment can land you in prison.
Among those convicted is Satur Ocampo, former Bayan Muna representative and one of this country’s most storied advocates for the rights of the poor and dispossessed. His decades of public service — as activist, political detainee, congressman, and peacemaker — were reduced by the court to a criminal act of endangerment. The absurdity would be laughable if not for the gravity of what it means.
Also convicted is France Castro, former ACT Teachers Partylist Representative, a woman who devoted her political career to fighting for teachers’ rights and quality public education. That she should face imprisonment for accompanying a humanitarian mission to protect Lumad children is a grotesque inversion of justice.
Meggie Nolasco, executive director of the Salugpongan school, has been one of the most steadfast defenders of Lumad education. As head of a community learning center that gave indigenous children access to schooling in their own language and culture, she has faced vilification campaigns going back years.
The Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, where she was a fellow, has called the charges against her baseless and called for an independent investigation. She has dedicated her professional life to children’s education — and been convicted of child abuse for it.
I have personally worked with Satur, France, and Meggie and they are best of the best Filipinos I have ever met. The Philippines and Mindanao, and especially the Lumad, is grateful to them.
The other 10 members of the Talaingod 13 — Lumad volunteer teachers, church workers, and staff — are ordinary Filipinos who did an extraordinary thing: they showed up when children needed them. They too face the same sentence.
As of this writing, a motion for reconsideration remains pending before the Court of Appeals. The legal battle is not over — and neither is the moral one.
Katribu, Karapatan, the Save Our Schools Network, and dozens of allied organizations have rightly called the conviction a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — a SLAPP suit designed not to achieve justice but to silence, intimidate, and punish. We must stand with the Talaingod 13 and demand their acquittal.
Gabriela in the Crosshairs: Jean Lindo and Rose Hayahay
Among those named in the PNP Cateel “wanted” post was Dr. Jean Lindo, Gabriela Women’s Party’s third nominee, a physician and community health advocate. Anyone who has followed her work knows what kind of threat she poses to the state: the kind that speaks truth about unreported violence against women, about the public health crisis hiding behind official statistics, about the women who never make it into the data because they cannot afford to come forward.
Dr. Lindo is a healer. That she would be listed alongside wanted criminals is an indictment not of her, but of the security forces who made the list.
Rose Hayahay, secretary general of Gabriela-Southern Mindanao and a close personal colleague, has spent years working with survivors of violence against women in Davao City, assisting abuse victims when the government either could not or would not. She has spoken at rallies about how corruption and feudal patriarchy compound each other in the lives of poor women. She has named politicians by name. She has made powerful people uncomfortable.
And that, it seems, is why she is targeted.
Gabriela as an organization has itself been red-tagged at the national level — listed by the government alongside the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines, Karapatan, and ACT as alleged “fronts” of the CPP-NPA, and subjected to government lobbying to cut its foreign funding.
The pattern is consistent: organizations that serve the poorest and most vulnerable Filipinos are the ones most aggressively labeled as enemies of the state. That tells you everything about whose interests the state is actually protecting.
Aldeem Yañez and RMP-NMR: Faith Under Siege
The plague of red-tagging does not spare the Church.
Aldeem Yañez, a deacon and volunteer of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI), has now been arrested three times — in 2018, 2020, and again on Palm Sunday, April 10, 2022, when military and police raided his home in Barangay Iponan, Cagayan de Oro, and claimed to have found a gun and explosives. His family said items were planted. Courts threw out previous charges twice.
The third time, the Department of Justice filed additional charges of terrorism financing. He has been detained since 2022, and as of this writing faces a court-ordered transfer from Cagayan de Oro to a facility in Taguig — a move that would sever him from his family, his community, and his legal counsel. More than 200 church leaders have called for his immediate release.
Deacon Aldeem served as a volunteer for the IFI’s Visayas-Mindanao Regional Office for Development, as former national youth president of his church, and as former vice-chairperson of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines. He is, as IFI Supreme Bishop Rhee Timbang described him, “armed with a guitar, not a pistol.”
His crime is that he advocated for peace and served marginalized communities in places where the government has failed to go.
The Rural Missionaries of the Philippines – Northern Mindanao Region (RMP-NMR) has faced the same machinery. An inter-diocesan and inter-congregational organization of women and men religious, priests, and lay workers, RMP-NMR has served the rural poor — farmers, fisherfolk, and indigenous peoples — for decades. It monitors indigenous peoples’ rights through its Katungod Lumad Monitor network.
For this work, the government froze the organization’s bank accounts in 2019 on terrorism financing allegations, red-tagged its members, had leaflets distributed naming its workers as NPA members, and in August 2022, had 16 individuals — including four women religious of RMP-NMR — indicted in Iligan City.
The Conference of Major Superiors of the Philippines condemned these charges as a grave endangerment to the safety of missionaries and to the Church’s ministry to the poor.
That nuns, deacons, and lay missionaries face terrorism charges for feeding the hungry and documenting rights violations is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed — to protect extractive industries and political power from the scrutiny of organized, morally serious people.
Cateel and the Context of Plunder
The Cateel incident did not happen in a vacuum. Davao and Mindanao are regions where communities continue to resist destructive mining projects, land-use conversions, and development aggression that displaces entire peoples.
Between 2017 and 2022, 4.4 million people were displaced due to conflict and development aggression in the region. At one point, 75 percent of the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ strength was concentrated in Mindanao — not to protect communities, but to protect the conditions under which those communities could be dispossessed.
The Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment is right to situate the Cateel red-tagging within this broader environmental and political context.
When activists like Dr. Jean Lindo, Rose Hayahay, and their colleagues in Gabriela, Kabataan, and UP Mindanao are put on a wanted list, it is not because they threaten the safety of citizens. It is because they threaten the impunity of those who profit from Mindanao’s resources while its people remain poor.
The state’s tools for suppressing this resistance have a familiar list: the Anti-Terrorism Law, the NTF-ELCAC, the National Action Plan for Unity, Peace, and Development (NAP-UPD), and the AMLC’s terrorism financing provisions. These instruments have one function in common — to criminalize the act of standing with the poor.
Redtagging Mindanao’s Future
The youth and student dimension of the Cateel red-tagging is particularly alarming. Of the approximately 14 individuals named in the post, nine were youth leaders and three were student leaders from the University of the Philippines Mindanao. Among those named were Lara Felescoso, incumbent chairperson of the UP Mindanao University Student Council; Emman Pamaylaon of UP Salida; and Genesis Catalan of Anakbayan-UP Mindanao.
These are not shadowy figures — they are elected student officials and registered party-list leaders exercising rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
The UP Mindanao University Student Council condemned the incident as a baseless and dangerous act of red-tagging and called for accountability from the Cateel Municipal Police Station, while also urging the UP Mindanao administration to officially condemn the incident.
That student councils now have to issue statements defending their officers from being listed as wanted criminals tells us how far this plague has spread.
What We Must Do
The Court of Appeals must grant the motion for reconsideration and acquit the Talaingod 13. Their conviction is a moral stain on Philippine jurisprudence. It criminalizes compassion, punishes solidarity, and tells every Filipino who might consider helping a displaced child: do so at your peril.
Congress must pass legislation criminalizing red-tagging, as the UPLM and countless organizations have demanded. The Commission on Human Rights must be empowered — and funded — to pursue accountability for the security forces who continue these practices with impunity.
Deacon Aldeem Yañez must be released immediately, and all charges against him dropped. The four RMP-NMR sisters and their co-accused must be acquitted. Dr. Jean Lindo and Rose Hayahay must be protected, not persecuted.
The apology of Police Major Michael Celecio is not enough, and the framing of this incident as a mere “error” must be rejected outright. Red-tagging that endangers lives is not a clerical slip — it is a human rights violation with documented consequences: illegal arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings. Celecio and the responsible Cateel PNP officials must face administrative charges before the National Police Commission for conduct unbecoming and grave abuse of authority.
Criminally, they must be investigated under Republic Act 9745 (Anti-Torture Act) and the Anti-Terror Law’s own provisions against abuse — because the deliberate use of state platforms to terrorize civilians is itself a form of terror.
Civil liability must follow as well: the named individuals have suffered real harm to their reputation, safety, and freedom of movement, and they are entitled to damages under the Civil Code.
Politically, the NTF-ELCAC — which Kabataan Partylist and Karapatan have rightly identified as the architect of this systemic vilification campaign — must be abolished. It is a body that has consumed billions in public funds not to end armed conflict but to wage war on unarmed activists, students, nuns, and community health workers.
The Commission on Human Rights must open a formal investigation, and Congress must use its oversight powers to hold both the Cateel officials and the NTF-ELCAC accountable. An apology posted online erases nothing.
Accountability demands consequences.
And to Satur Ocampo, France Castro, Meggie Nolasco, and their co-accused: the people of Mindanao and this nation’s conscience are with you. History has a way of vindicating those who stood on the right side. You stood with children. The state stood against them.
That is all we need to know. And that Activism is not terrorism.
[Dean Antonio Gabriel La Viña is from Cagayan de Oro and is a professor of law, philosophy, politics and governance in several universities, including in Mindanao. He has been a human rights lawyer for 36 years. He is currently the managing partner of La Viña Zarate and Associates, a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and Chair of the Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy Department of the Philippine Judicial Academy. Dean Tony is founding president of the Movement Against Disinformation and the founding chair of the Mindanao Climate Justice Resource Facility and the Mindanao Center for Scholarships, Sports, and Spirituality.]
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