CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – The militant fisherfolk alliance Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (Pamalakaya) has urged newly appointed Philippine National Police (PNP) Director General Nicanor Bartolome to sack Obando police chief Lorenzo Paynor for allegedly harassing Fr. Vince Hizon, Obando parish priest for opposing the Obando landfill.
“We challenge Director General Bartolome to enforce his one strike policy by sending the Obando police chief out of police service. The town chief’s inspector is acting like a town-level dictator to please the commercial operator of Obando landfill,” said Pamalakaya national chair Fernando Hicap.
Hizon himself said he was harassed when Obando policemen dismantled over the weekend a makeshift stage at the patio of the town church where he was supposed to hold a concert denouncing the construction of a sanitary landfill in that town.
The commercial landfill is being put up in abandoned fishponds on the island village of Binuangan in Obando.
Hicap noted that Hizon has been campaigning against the project amid prospects that Binuangan fishermen, who rely on the town’s rivers for livelihood and food, would be adversely affected by pollution that could result from the landfill.
Hizon as well as others involved in the concert, was threatened with arrest by the cops, prompting organizers to hold the concert inside the church.
Pamalakaya described Paynor as a “self-proclaimed super cop of Obando who should be given his walking papers for creating terror among the anti-landfill folk.”
The Obando police said Hizon and members of the church choir did not have a permit for the concert at the church patio.
Hicap said his group and the umbrella alliance Network Opposed to Obando Landfill or the No to Obando Landfill had supported the anti-landfill fight since 2005.
He recalled that the government had even threatened to file criminal charges against 13 leaders of his group in 2007 when they led the community blocking of a barge used to ferry Metro Manila garbage to the Obando landfill.
Hicap recalled that sometime in September 2005, the 13 Pamalakaya leaders blocked the barge used by contractor PHILECO when it tried to pass the Binuangan River on its way to Navotas Controlled Disposal Facility also known as Obando landfill.
He recalled that fishermen and local residents then used 20 motorized boats to block the barge from passing through the Binuangan River and succeeded in forcing the garbage contractor to go back to Manila.
The militant group likewise asked the influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to protest the harassment of Hizon by Obando police and conduct its own investigation on the incident.
“We appeal to the `117 archbishops and bishops of the CBCP to come to the picture and unleash divine intervention to stop bad people like the Obando chief of police from terrorizing anti-landfill folks.
The Obando top cop is undeniably working for the commercial profiteers behind the dumpsite,” said Pamalakaya.
Pamalakaya said the Obando landfill is one of the controversial yet most protected landfills in the country.
The group noted that in 2006, Orlando de Vera, a local Pamalakaya leader who had opposed the landfill, was gunned down by alleged members of the military inside his house.
