Bobby

ON EASTER Sunday, I woke up to find a text message from history professor Ferdinand Llanes, mentioning that it was the 29th death anniversary of Dr. Bobby de la Paz, a physician and personal friend who was killed in Catbalogan, Samar.

I felt almost ashamed that I had forgotten, especially given all the recent controversies around heroes and heroism.  We think of heroes mainly as soldiers out in battlefields and forget many other types of heroism, including fighting for people’s rights.  Bobby was one of those heroes, choosing to be a physician to the poor, and giving up his life because of that choice.

Remberto Alcantara de la Paz was born in 1952.  His father was a physician and his mother a nurse.  He grew up in Malate and went to UP for medicine, graduating in 1977.  The year he graduated, the dean of the college of medicine, Dr. Florentino Herrera, challenged the medical students to think of serving the poor.  Herrera mentioned the UP Institute of Health Sciences, which had just been set up in Tacloban, and the dreams of more community-based approaches to health care.

Bobby and his girlfriend, Sylvia Ciocon, took up the challenge to work as municipal health officers for six months—he in Zumarraga and she in Daram, both impoverished towns in Samar.  They returned to Manila, married and, within a few weeks, were back to serve Samar.  Bobby went into private practice while Sylvia worked for AKAP, a national non-government organization founded by the late Dr. Mita Pardo de Tavera with a focus on tuberculosis prevention.  I was also working for AKAP at that time, which was how I came to know Bobby and Sylvia.

Word spread about this strange couple working in Samar, serving the poor often for free and taking in patients no matter what the time of day was.  The entire Eastern Visayas was heavily militarized and in Bobby’s time, this included relocation of villagers to cut off support for the New People’s Army.  Surely, the rumors went, this couple must have links with the New People’s Army.  It was hard for people to imagine doctors serving the poor.

Bobby and Sylvia were under surveillance and as Gandara became more militarized, they finally had to move to Catbalogan, but continued to serve the poor in adjoining towns.  The surveillance continued and the head office of AKAP in Manila wanted to pull them out, but they insisted on staying, with their young son Yayo.  They were growing roots in Samar.

On the afternoon of April 23, 1982, at around 4:30, shots rang out from the De la Paz’s clinic.  Moments later Bobby staggered out of the clinic.    Bobby was eventually brought to the hospital where 11 doctors operated on him for seven and a half hours.  He had 22 external wounds, 11 of which were entry points of bullets and the 11 others, points of exit.  The bullets had hit his heart, lungs, liver, stomach and colon, and fractured the radial bone on his right arm.  Outside the hospital, people came from all over, including Gandara, to keep vigil, offering money, offering blood donations. In total, Bobby received eight liters of blood transfusion, blood donated by the people he had served.

Bobby died on April 24, shortly after midnight.  At around 4 a.m., a man, packing a pistol, swaggered into the hospital asking if he was dead, and where his wife was.  A few hours later, a military spokesman went on air and declared he was assassinated by the NPA.

I will spare you the terrible details of how the military stalled on the investigations around Bobby’s death, until the family decided to drop the case, knowing nothing would come out of it.  Bobby’s killer was never found, despite several consistent descriptions by witnesses.  Bobby himself had whispered a description to Sylvia, as he was dying: “stocky, mustachioed, wavy hair.”

Shortly after Bobby died, at around 4 a.m., a man in T-shirt and shorts walked into the hospital asking if Dr. de la Paz was dead, and where the widow was.  Witnesses said the man was armed and spoke Tagalog without a local accent.  He was stocky, he had a moustache, and he had wavy hair.

Jo-ann Maglipon wrote about Sylvia’s speculations that Bobby’s killer “is a professional—trained, hired, legitimized by uniform and organization, a minion long shuttled off to safety, to kill elsewhere, or himself made obsolete by the powers that own him.”

Bobby and Sylvia chose to serve in Samar after their assignment there as rural doctors.  Then, as now, the Eastern Visayas region had one of the highest poverty incidences—today still the fifth highest among the country’s 16 regions, with almost half of the population living below the poverty line. Bobby and Sylvia knew how this translated into hunger and illness, into death rates for infants and children, and for infectious diseases like tuberculosis that were much higher than the national average.

At Bobby’s funeral, Sylvia talked about how she and Bobby had seen the poverty amid Samar’s wealth in terms of natural resources: “We saw all these things and it was difficult to close our eyes. . .”

I thought of how the 29 years have passed so quickly, but how so many of the problems have persisted. Over the weekend I received a report on the funeral of botanist Leonard Co, killed a few months ago in Leyte while conducting scientific work for a Lopez company.  The military blamed his death on the New People’s Army, this time in a mistaken encounter.  The report I got through e-mail was about how his friends had scattered some of his ashes in remote Palanan. Leonard was involved with community-based health programs in younger years, researching on medicinal plants.

It was also during Holy Week when I got a report about Ericson Acosta, former editor of the Philippine Collegian at the University of the Philippines, an artist, and a human rights activist.  Last Feb. 13, he was arrested in San Jorge, Samar, while on a human rights investigation mission.  He was unarmed, and was with a barangay official but the military claims he had explosives.  He was held for three days before the military filed charges, claiming he had explosives.  Acosta is still detained in a Calbayog jail.

Resources:

I went into the Internet to get details around Bobby’s assassination and stumbled on arkibongbayan.org, which had scanned copies of news clippings from years back.  I was in the United States doing graduate studies when he was killed and my news came mainly from letters and phone calls.  Seeing the newspaper clippings only now, with photographs of Bobby and his family, became an emotional read for me.

Three articles were particularly useful: one by Jo-Ann Maglipon mainly focusing on Bobby’s widow Sylvia, another by Ellen Dionisio looking into Bobby’s medical practice as a “country doctor,” and a third one from the Collegian consisting of memories from Lydia de la Paz, Bobby’s mother.

Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph