MANILA – The Talaingod case, convicting humanitarian workers who rescued Lumad students and teachers, sends a glaring signal to the human rights community. Both in social media and the courts, what the people missed is an important context: the rescued Lumad students were survivors of violence perpetrated by paramilitary group Alamara.
“Years passed when the solidarity team rescued us but we still could not move forward,” Angelika Moral, one of the rescued Lumad students, said in Filipino in a recent closed-door meeting. “Instead of going after the Alamara and the military, the government filed charges against the likes of Ka Satur (Ocampo) and Ma’am France (Castro).”
In a decision on November 27, 2025, the 21st Division of the Court of Appeals sustained the conviction of former Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo, former ACT Teachers Party Rep. France Castro, the Lumad school administration, and eight volunteer teachers of the Lumad school Salugpungan. The other two staff of ACT Teachers Party-list that comprised the Talaingod 13 were acquitted for the failure of the State to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
This conviction has been weaponized by the troll armies to generate disinformation campaigns: branding the humanitarian team that form part of the Talaingod 13 as “kidnappers” and “child abusers.”
Moral’s account paints a different picture. For her, Castro, Ocampo, and the members of the national solidarity mission were their second parents. These people took care of them. But it weighs almost nothing in the court decision exploited by disinformation networks.
The joint abuse of military and paramilitary
“The military orders the Alamara to go after us,” Moral noted. She recalled that these paramilitary elements padlocked them in their classrooms, threatened to kill them, and frequently harassed them in their communities.
The 2019 investigation of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) was revisited by the advocates, exposing the militarization committed by the Philippine Army and Alamara within the ancestral lands of the Lumad in certain towns of Talaingod and Kapalong in Davao del Norte.
Read: CHR Haran report revisited amid calls to reverse Talaingod 13 conviction
The human rights investigation exposed that there is clear cooperation between the Philippine Army and the Alamara. The CHR noted, “The expensive firearms of the Alamara establish a reasonable ground to believe they are being supplied by the military.”
Since 2001, Bulatlat has reported the atrocities of Alamara. Back then, the military likened them to the notorious “Alsa Masa,” an anti-communist armed group backed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines known for extrajudicial killings of revolutionaries and civilians they brand as “sympatizers”. But Alamara strategically targeted Lumad communities of Bukidnon, North Cotabato, and Davao del Norte.
In its first years alone, human rights group Karapatan already recorded 87 human rights violations in 2003 victimizing 627 Lumad. The group also recorded at least seven deaths attributed to Alamara in 2018.
Read: Alamara’s atrocities in Mindanao
The children were not spared from the attacks. Alamara was responsible for the killing of a 15-year-old Lumad student Alibando Tingkas in 2016, and 19-year-old Lumad student Obello Bay-ao in 2017. Both of them studied at Salugpungan Ta Tanu Igkanuon Community Learning Center, back when it was still operating.
Former Lumad teacher Julieta Gomez said that these paramilitary groups are like “dogs” of the military. She recalled the deadly rampage of paramilitary intruders on September 1, 2015 – commonly known as the Lianga Massacre – that killed Lumad-Manobo leaders Dionel Campos and Datu Juvello Sinzo, and Alcadev Executive Director Emerito Samarca. It also resulted in the mass displacement of 3,000 Lumads.
Read: Still no arrest made on Lianga massacre, as killings continue
“These paramilitaries killed our leaders, while the 70th Infantry Battalion watched in our communities,” Gomez said in vernacular. “We call them tribal dealers of our ancestral lands. They are Lumads but they think like a military. Our traditional weapons were spear and *kalasag (*a rectangular shield), but theirs were armalites.”
Amirah Lidasan, a Moro indigenous leader of Sandugo, said in a closed-door meeting that this case is emblematic of how the Philippine government pits Lumad peoples against each other – by using their fellow indigenous peoples as auxiliary force under the government’s counterinsurgency program.
Alamara and suspected state agents in civilian clothes broke into the compound of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP), a sanctuary of almost 700 Lumad people– 62 percent were children, on January 25, 2020. The 2019 CHR report stated that the evacuees were staying in the compound because of grave human rights violations committed by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Alamara, ranging from rape, extrajudicial killings, harassment, and forced displacement.
The closure of Lumad schools
“Our right to education and ancestral lands are stripped away from us,” said Moral, emphasizing that more than 10,000 Lumad students were affected by the forced closure of their schools.
Rodrigo Duterte ordered the shutdown of 215 Lumad schools during his administration. The lessons in these schools primarily revolve around the realities of the Lumad indigenous peoples, placing strong importance on their right to self-determination, cultural preservation, and protection of their ancestral lands and environment.
As of this writing, Katribu confirmed that there is no operating Lumad school led by non-government organizations and Indigenous peoples groups themselves.
“When our schools were closed, most of us were subjected to forced marriage, including me. Some of us were left with no choice but to work here in Manila, leaving our homes in Mindanao,” Moral added. “Some of us try to work abroad.”
The Save Our Schools (SOS) Network declared that their Lumad schools were subject to militarization in Talaingod. Government soldiers and Alamara used these schools as temporary military camps, barracks, shelters, outposts, or storage of weapons and belongings, contradicting its nature as “zones of peace” to be protected under the International Humanitarian Law (IHL).
“Lumad schools taught literacy and numeracy alongside agroecology, Indigenous knowledge systems, arts, livelihood skills, and community health. Children learned their history, their relationship to land, and their responsibility to protect ancestral territory,” SOS Network wrote. “This is precisely why they were later treated as threats.”
Despite the long-standing harassment and exclusion, the schools were registered with the Security and Exchange Commission, accredited by local government units, and recognized by the Department of Education under the Indigenous Peoples Education framework.
“For thousands of Lumad children, these schools were not alternatives. They were the only schools they had,” SOS Network added.
In a televised news conference in July 2017, Duterte threatened to bomb the Lumad schools and accused them of teaching students to become rebels.
“I will use the armed forces, the Philippine air force. I’ll really have those bombed because you are operating illegally and you are teaching the children to rebel against the government,” Duterte said.
More than the disruption of their lives, the Lumad people struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Lumad teacher Rose Hayahay testified before the International People’s Tribunal (IPT) in May 2024, recalling that even in the New Year’s Eve celebration, the Lumad children who were staying in Manila would recoil in horror at the sound of exploding firecrackers.
Hayhay said that the attacks intensified since Duterte declared Martial Law in 2017. “When martial law was declared in Mindanao, no less than 75 percent of the regular Armed Forces of the Philippines were deployed there.”
The IPT panel of jurors, composed of legal experts and international human rights personalities, gave Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. a guilty verdict for war crimes against the Filipino people and IHL violations.
Criminalization of solidarity
The Talaingod case stemmed from a November 2018 solidarity mission to bring food and other essentials to Lumad students of the Salugpongan Ta’Tanu Igkanogon Community Learning Center Inc. (STTICLC) and the Community Technical College of Southeastern Mindanao (CTCSM) in the hinterlands of Talaingod, Davao del Norte.
The police claimed that the mission was not coordinated with the authorities and that members of the mission were kidnapping students and teachers they fetched in the night.
But the Talaingod 13 and indigenous peoples rights groups denied the accusations, saying the mission was properly coordinated with the local authorities.
Read: Closing Lumad schools not enough, gov’t targets humanitarian mission activists
Castro, one of the convicted in the Talaingod case, said that she willingly went to the national solidarity mission as a teacher and a lawmaker then.
“I have all the right and the authority then to rescue the children,” said Castro. “These missions are not new to me because I previously joined them even prior to my stint as a Congresswoman.”
Castro has been a key figure targeted by disinformation campaigns and even by incumbent Vice President Sara Duterte. She is instrumental in exposing the alleged misuse of confidential funds under the Office of the Vice President in 2022 amounting to P125 million and P500 million for the Department of Education in 2023 as then-Education secretary.
Due to this case, Castro said that she could no longer go to Mindanao. “I receive numerous threats in social media when the court convicted me, ranging from personal attacks, sexual harassment, rape, and death threats.”
The online harassment also extended to physical harm. While she was campaigning in the 2025 midterm elections, an unidentified man tried to block her to tell her that she is a convict and that she should be in jail.
On January 5 this year, Castro and the rest of Talaingod defenders filed a motion for reconsideration from the decision of the Court of Appeals that affirmed the initial decision of “unjust conviction.” The case remains on appeal.
The rest of the Talaingod defenders were volunteer teachers and indigenous peoples rights defenders. “When teaching must be fought for, it ceases to be an ordinary job. It becomes a vocation,” SOS Network wrote.
Ma. Eugenia Victory Nolasco is an educator and environmental defender. She was the executive director of the Salugpongan Ta’Tanu Igkanogon Community Learning Center (Salugpongan Schools), an educational institution established in 2007 by the indigenous peoples’ group Salugpongan Ta’Tanu Igkanogon (Unity in Defense of our Ancestral Lands), with the support of a religious organization.
Nerfa Awing, then 22, a non-Lumad volunteer teacher who taught while trying to save for college. Marianie Aga, then 21, a Blaan Lumad and education graduate who returned to save the Indigenous communities and trained teachers. Jenevie Sedigo Paraba, then 25, taught in the village of Nasilaban, travelling long distances and preparing lessons for the Lumad schools.
Ma. Concepcion Ibarra served as school registrar. Maricel O. Andagkit is a Manobo agronomist from North Cotabato who coordinated nineteen Salugpongan schools in Talaingod. Nerhaya Flores Talledo, a licensed professional teacher from Compostela Valley served as the Basic Education Head. Satur Ocampo, former Bayan Muna Representative and a martial law survivor.
“The government’s counterinsurgency program is the overarching factor behind the case of Talaingod,” said Ocampo. “I was imprisoned for so long. I do not fear to be detained again. But the basis of the ruling is almost irrelevant and inconsequential.”
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor expressed deep concern about the conviction of the teachers and indigenous peoples rights defenders, fearing that their charges are linked to their work on the protection of indigenous children’s right to education.
“We are concerned that the criminalization of their human rights work might set a dangerous precedent and have a chilling effect on the civic space in the Philippines, resulting in the silencing of defenders of indigenous peoples’ rights and deterring individuals from expressing dissent and exercising the right to defend the rights of others,” Lawlor wrote in an official communications with the Philippine government.
The Philippine government responded by red-tagging the schools, saying that those are “training camps for child combatants.” The government also added that the closure of the schools was “done in accordance with procedures and respect of the human rights of the children.”
The official response of the government devoid of any context about the abuses of the paramilitary group Alamara and the militarization of the Lumad schools, and the human rights violations linked to the state and non-state actors.
“When child-protection laws are stripped out of context, intent, and lived reality, they cease to function as instruments of protection. They become weapons,” SOS Network added. “Instead of safeguarding children, they punish those who step in to care for them when formal systems fail.”
It has been and continues to be a long battle for Moral, who survived the violence of paramilitary elements, and the Talaingod 13 who rescued them. They vow that they will continue to exhaust all means until the truth prevails.
“The continuing struggle of the Lumad for their ancestral lands and self determination is a source of strength,” Castro said in Filipino, “I will not hesitate to help them again if the circumstances call for it.” (RVO)
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