The College Editors’ Guild of the Philippines slammed state security forces in the Bicol region who have allegedly been harassing and conducting surveillance on the campus press organization’s officers and member-publications there.
A statement from CEGP national president Jose Mari Callueng and Jan Joseph Goingo, vice president for Luzon and one of the victims, said the police targeted the Ateneo de Naga University and the Baao Community College for their operations this month.
On March 17, the statement said, policemen went to the home of Giongo, who was out at the time but was later informed that the lawmen were seeking information about his family.
Then on March 23, Jhoan Villanueva, CEGP Bicol chair, received a call from the Baao Community College informing her that policemen were asking about Liyab, the organization’s annual regional convention held in February, and also if BCC students were joining Lunduyan, the Luzon-wide student press convention.
Later the same day, the Ateneo de Naga Office of Student Affairs told Goingo that a police officer had gone to the campus asking about the school’s official publication, The Pillars. The school said the officer questioned an unnamed staff of the school on Giongo’s whereabouts.
Both schools were also shown a memorandum supposedly from the Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines. Neither school disclosed the contents of the document and would only say that it was for the “security” of the students.
Bothered by the incidents, Terry Pitagan, adviser of BCC’s The Nexus, went to the police station in Baao to confront them and was told to tell the student journalists to stop attending CEGP activities because rallies were always part of the group’s program. But Pitagan refuted this even as he stressed that holding rallies is not illegal.
The CEGP statement called the Bicol incidents “a calibrated attack of the state under President Rodrigo Duterte’s counterinsurgency program Oplan Kapayapaan” and indicated that “student journalists are now targets of neutralization.”
The organization accused the current administration of “maintaining and intensifying the culture of impunity in the country” but said it “will not be cowed by these fascist attacks by the state to intimidate and sow fear.”
http://interaksyon.com/article/138014/cegp-decries-harassment-surveillance-of-bicol-campus-journos-by-security-forces
The College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) is a suspected Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) front organization focused on gaining editorial control over university/college campus publications in order to exert influence over journalistic content/ideological orientation.
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