It was back in September 2021 when Jazmin “Minet” Aguisanda-Jerusalem received a phone call from some farmers that her NGO was helping outside the eastern Philippine city of Tacloban. “They said, ‘the Army is telling us to come and stage a rally outside your office,’” recalls Minet, the executive director of the Leyte Center for Development (LCDE), which provides humanitarian relief to the region’s poorest. “The Army even said they will provide transportation and food.”
As beneficiaries of the LCDE, the farmers were reluctant to attend. But then Minet began receiving more phone calls from friendly journalists saying they had been “invited” to cover the protest. Sure enough, that Sept. 21 around 20 bewildered people turned up and fastened placards to her office gates that had all clearly been written by the same hand that accused the NGO of supporting local communist rebels. “Apparently, some people were forced to attend,” Minet tells TIME.
It wasn’t the first sign of brewing trouble for the LCDE, which provides livelihood emergency aid, including rain gauges, sleeping mats, blankets, solar lamps, and other equipment to better prepare for typhoons or floods, to around 3,000 families comprising 21,000 people annually.
By highlighting lapses in public services, the LCDE had occasionally rubbed up against officialdom, and Minet had received regular intimidation and occasional death threats. The fact that the LCDE works in arcane mountainous regions of the Philippines where rebel groups also operate had periodically been used as a cudgel by security forces looking for a scapegoat. “Maybe the state armed forces put us in the same basket as the community whom they believe are supporting the rebels,” says Minet.
But overall, their relations with the government were robust as evidenced by several high-profile awards. But what had been a periodic annoyance became crippling last May when five bank accounts of the LCDE and related…
