ILOILO City – Human rights group Panay Alliance Karapatan is skeptical of the police investigation on the killing of Bayan Muna coordinator and long-time activist Jory Porquia.
“We could not entrust to the police the investigation on the murder when it is the policemen themselves who are the suspects,” according to Reylan Vergara, secretary general of Panay Alliance Karapatan, in a statement.
Porquia was shot to death early morning of April 30 in his house/coffee shop in Arevalo district by two men.
“Some two weeks before he was killed, Jory was pursued by uniformed as well as plainclothes police officers,” according to Vergara.
Panay Alliance Karapatan suspected those police officers belonged to the police stations of Molo and Arevalo districts.
The group recalled that the police “disrupted” the community cooking that Bayan Muna volunteers organized in Barangay San Juan, Molo on April 15.
“At around the same time, an intelligence officer went to Barangay Calaparan, Arevalo looking for ‘the one who recruits people to go to rallies,’” according to the human rights alliance.
“He committed no crime. His principles moved him to be consistent in his activism. He helped feed the poor affected by the lockdown during this COVID-19 pandemic. Killing him was a reprehensible and cowardly act,” said Vergara.
In his youth a leader of the militant League of Filipino students, Porquia was a survivor of the martial law of then dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
After Marcos was ousted in 1986 via the People Power Revolution, he served as OIC member of the National Youth Commission under President Corazon Aquino.
He subsequently worked as an overseas Filipino worker in the Middle East and later in China, where he was active in organizing and advocating Filipino migrants’ rights.
Upon his return to the country, Porquia briefly engaged in the construction business and worked as Migrante organizer in Panay Island.
Porquia was an active environmentalist, too. He was among the activists of the Madia-as Ecological Movement, which was instrumental in the banning of destructive commercial mining in Panay Island.
He was one of the founders of Bayan Muna and active in the party-list’s engagement in developing good relations with local political leaders in Panay Island.
Porquia ran as councilor but failed to win, under Mayor Jerry Treñas’ slate in the 2007 elections.
Under the leadership of then National Anti-poverty Commission chief Liza Maza, Porquia assumed the coordination of the agency’s projects in Panay Island from 2017 to 2018./PN
