Human rights watchdog Karapatan decried the arrests of Farmers Development Center’s (FARDEC) program coordinator for Bohol Carmilo Tabada and United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) Pastor Nathaniel Vallente in Bohol and in what the group said is “a continuation of the crackdown in Southern Tagalog along with signs that these same dirty tactics are now being replicated for a crackdown on Bol-anon activists and human rights defenders.”

“The arrests of Carmilo Tabada and Pastor Nathaniel Vallente in Bohol and of Dana Marie Marcellana, and Christian Relao in Laguna today continue the alarming patterns we have raised before the Supreme Court — and these patterns in Gestapoesque raids, which have proven to be deadly especially during the ‘Bloody Sunday’ raids in Southern Tagalog, are now being replicated in Bohol. Clearly, their arrests are part of a systemic and desperate crackdown on dissent under the guise of the Duterte government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign,” Karapatan Secretary General Cristina Palabay said.

Tabada, also a barangay councilor, was arrested in his home in Trinidad, Bohol around 1 a.m. today. His family asserted that firearms and explosives were planted by the police and the military during the raid on his home. He is currently detained at the Trinidad Municipal Police Station. Tabada had been previously visited and threatened by intelligence agents to stop working for FARDEC, which was listed by Department of National Defense as a “communist terrorist front organization” along with other humanitarian organizations in a House panel briefing last November 5, 2019.