2 barred party listers slam Davao City Council harassment

Two party-list congressmen who have been declared persona non grata by the Davao City Council recently cried political harassment from Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte while at the same time they accused him of coddling communists and communist supporters and even supporting their candidacies.

“We are candidates and have the right to campaign, and stand by our advocacies,” said Banat Party-list Rep. Jovito Palparan and Anad Party List Rep. Jun Alcover. “We have been elected nationwide by our constituents because they

believe in our advocacies. By declaring us persona non grata in Davao City, City Hall officials, starting from Mayor Duterte, is not only disrespecting our mandate, but also politically persecuting us,” they stressed.

Palparan is running for a seat in the Senate while Alcover is running for a partylist seat in the House of Representatives.

“The stupid part of it all is the fact that while the Council, through its resolution, declared us persona non grata, but we were in fact in Davao City and held a press conference, which also means that the resolution cannot be enforced,” they said.

Alcover pointed out that the primary reason the City Council came up with that “resolution declaring us persona non grata is that they prefer to welcome with open arms communists, three of whom are running as councilors and are being supported by Mayor Duterte.

Alcover, a former New People’s Army commander in the Visayas Region but has since denounced communism and its leaders and members’ way of achieving “state power through the barrel of the gun” said the three councilor candidates of Duterte are members of the National Democratic Front, the CPP propaganda arm.

Palparan, branded by the left as “The butcher” said this coddling by Duterte of the communists and the NPAs proves his alliance with the CCP-NPA. “This is what we are exposing to the people of Davao City. And this resolution declaring us persona non grata is Duterte and his communist allies’s reason they want to ban us from coming to Davao City. They don’t want us to let the people know of of his ‘dastardly’ alliance with the enemies of the state..”

The former military general said, “we have a situation where Duterte is actually coddling these communists. Doesn’t he know that the CCP-NPA has been extorting money on its claimed “revolutionary taxes” and even doubled these taxes, which are illegal?”

The CCP-NPA has doubled its extortion, through the collection of so-called revolutionary taxes, in 2009 compared to the previous year, documents from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) showed.

Military documents showed that in 2009, the CPP-NPA extorted P136 million from local and multi-national companies operating in the country and even government officials. The figure was much higher than the P61 million supposedly extorted by the communist group in 2008.

Since 1996, the military estimated that the CPP-NPA has collected P1.433 billion through collection of revolutionary taxes. The amount was in addition to the P93.877 million generated by the communist group from its permits to campaign and permits to win scheme to politicians during the years 2001 ( (P9.49 million), 2004 (P56.71 million), and 2007 (P27.67 million) elections, military documents revealed.

Of the P136 million collected in 2009, P28.7 million came from logging concessionaires, P12.5 million from moneyed private individuals and P9 million each from mining companies and agri-business and fishpond owners.

Last year’s rebel collections included P1 million from Internal Revenue Allotment from Visayas although it did not identify the government officials or government units where the rebels got the money.

“The worst part about it is the fact that while they (leftists and communists) want to spread their ideology, they want to bar us from spreading our advocacies. And Mayor Duterte is proving himself to be aligned with the communists as he and his councilors want us barred and unwelcome in Davao City,” said the two congressmen. –Charlie V. Manalo  with Mario J. Mallari