‘Alipato at Muog’ REVIEW: On the Endless Search for Justice
‘Alipato at Muog’ REVIEW: On the Endless Search for Justice
Protestors hold up images of Jonas Burgos
Alipato at Muog is a film that follows the futile search for truth and justice by the family of Jonas Burgos, a farmer-activist who has been missing since 2007. He was last seen being dragged out of a restaurant in a Quezon City mall and thrown into a van by presumably military agents. Apart from one mysterious phone call and a photograph of him with his blindfold down, there’s been no trace of him. Since his “enforced disappearance,” a euphemism for politically motivated kidnappings, his family has tirelessly fought for more information regarding what exactly happened to Jonas.
This seemingly endless process has been documented over the years by his filmmaker brother, JL, whose first-hand footage makes up most of the film and comprises a mixture of his family’s quest for justice in the months after his disappearance, and speeches by his mother, Edita, at various rallies and conferences. Ever since her son’s abduction, she’s become an outspoken voice for the victims of enforced disappearances. These are the two primary domains of the film: the investigation proper and the echoes of its aftermath.
Due to the film’s structure, which goes back and forth between these two domains, we know very early on that he was never found. We see his daughter celebrating her 19th birthday without a father. Edita goes from event to event describing herself as the mother of the disappeared Jonas. Family and friends interviewed speak of him with melancholy, though often — a sign of hope, perhaps — still in the present tense. In rallies, his face continues to be plastered on the posters of protestors. The search for truth and justice continues.
Jonas’ mother Edita Burgos featured on GMA
Unlike most crime documentaries and films about mysterious disappearances, however, what’s unsettling about the film is the actual lack of mystery present with regards to who is responsible. It’s not a film meant to be vague or open to interpretation. At least from all that we are shown, the consensus is quite clear. Jonas Burgos’ disappearance was almost certainly due to a military operation meant to target him for his leftist activism, with the perpetrators involved protected by higher authorities. Their inability to uncover the truth is shown to not be due to a lack of proof, but that all the evidence offered to the courts have over and over been rejected. Once again, the Philippine justice system has failed to protect, defend, and uphold the rights of citizens most in need.
Even worse implications arise from the fact that Jonas Burgos’ case is already one of the most publicized ones of enforced disappearances. If this is how a well-known case is publicly handled, what more of all the others? In an Amnesty International report on the state of human rights under the Noynoy Aquino administration in 2011, the Burgos case was singled out as one of the only ones that has had any progress, describing how the then Justice Secretary Leila De Lima had ordered a review of the Commission of Human Rights investigation of the case, as well that the Witness Protection Program must work with them.
Apart from this, the report laments that “the Aquino administration has taken no effective steps to address thousands of other cases of serious human rights violations which remain unsolved.” And what happened to this rare instance of progress? Two witnesses who worked at the restaurant Burgos was taken from claimed to have been able to recognize Army Lieutenant Harry Baliaga Jr. as one of the people involved in the kidnapping. They were then admitted to the Witness Protection Program in coordination with the CHR, but as the trial approached, for reasons strange and not totally clear, they unceremoniously refused to testify in the Quezon City court, leading to Lieutenant Baliaga’s full acquittal. Another dead end in a film full of them.
Justice Secretary Leila De Lima being interviewed for the film for her involvement in the case
Although the documentary spends a lot of time going into the specific details of the investigations, its broader message is that this is not an isolated case, but merely one of a decades-long series of enforced disappearances of activists that have never been dutifully resolved by our justice system.
This tradition of criminalizing resistance against the powerful runs deep in Philippine history. Jonas’ father himself, José Burgos Jr., the founder of the influential newspaper Malaya, was jailed during the Ferdinand Marcos administration. The “salvaging” of dissidents was well known throughout the Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino administrations. Our government has proven to have a pattern of kidnapping, torturing, and killing activists, a few of whose cases we learn of in the film. And yet nothing is ever done about it.
Many of the higher officers accused of involvement in these different crimes have not only been allowed to operate without repercussions, but have been rewarded by the system. Administration after administration these perpetrators are promoted, while the trails of blood they’ve left behind over their careers continue to stink up any remaining hope for the possibility of justice in this country.
It’s a powerful message and reminder that more than justifies its existence as a film, even for audiences who are already familiar with the case. But by taking such a painstaking look at all the fine details of what’s already on public record, the film has the tendency to churn out exposition almost like a dry news article. Whenever we do get personal insight about Jonas and his character through the interviews with his friends and family, we get a portrait of someone who was kind, loving, and passionate about helping others. But what feels sorely missing is his actual politics.
Apart from one friend saying that he remembers that he used to complain about society, we don’t really get a strong sense of exactly why he would have been targeted in the first place. The only reference to it is in one brief section of the film, in which some unidentified farmers describe Jonas as having helped them secure the titles to their land. The names of the land grabbers are conspicuously censored in the film. We don’t learn anything more specific in the film about Jonas’ involvement in this field and it’s never brought up again.
Towards the end of the film we are shown leaked military documents that identify Jonas as New People’s Army intelligence officer Ka Ramon, but how this changes our understanding of the case isn’t explored further. We don’t get any direct confirmation or denial of his possible communist affiliations by his family either.
I found this strange because it seemed to me like they were suggesting that his disappearance had something to do with his work helping farmers reclaim their land from powerful interests. And so I would imagine that tracing this violence back to the haciendero-owning families or corporations whose interests were most affected by Jonas’ work would be useful information to pursue in order to uncover the truth about the situation. But we don’t learn anything about this.
Instead, the one example of this that was shown in the film had the powerful interest’s name totally bleeped out, and there’s no other effort in the film to try to draw out the possibility that there may be a connection between the parties who his work most affected and his enforced disappearance.
Jonas Burgos’ mother Edita and their lawyer confronting the military at a base in Bulacan
Also conspicuously missing from the film is any reference to the political climate in the country during its time. His abduction happened during the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo administration, one that was notorious for its terrible record on the extrajudicial killings of journalists and activists, and yet we’re not given any context about it. We don’t learn anything about the government during the time beyond the specific divisions of the military involved. It would be as if telling a story about a Martial Law-era victim without saying anything about Marcos or a Drug War victim without discussing Duterte’s policies. This would especially be important to include because of Arroyo’s continued prominence in Philippine politics up to this day. The military being accused throughout the film was ultimately under her command and responsibility, and yet I don’t recall a single critical mention of her in the film.
Focusing so much on the human stories of the film ends up being both its greatest strength and its weakness. The film shines when we are given glimpses into the inner world of the Burgos family and are allowed to intimately witness their passion for the justice of their beloved. But at the same time, by spending so much of the runtime looking closely at the finer details of his case, one can lose track of the bigger picture that the fact of these enforced disappearances reveal.
A feature of Philippine democracy is the systemic silencing of dissenting voices through the state-sanctioned use of violence. And just as important as it is for us to connect to the humanity of the victims and their families, we must also be able to work to learn and better understand the mechanisms behind this broken system as well. What exactly about the type of dissent these activists express threatens the government so much as to have them murdered? We need to hold those in power, along with the system that keeps things in place, accountable and responsible. Without doing so, it can lead to a perpetual state of frustration and disillusionment that will keep us stuck in this cycle of suffering.
As a portrait of Jonas Burgos, family and friend, the film succeeds in bringing us closer to an understanding of what he meant to those who loved him. But as a portrait of a farmer-activist caught in the broader resistance against forces of government who work to violently silence them, the film partly succeeds by showing just how difficult it is to find justice, but fails to take the extra steps needed to bring ideological coherence to their broader life-projects. Perhaps this is asking too much of one documentary, but it seems essential to their stories to understand exactly why they are being so severely suppressed.
Edita Burgos years later at a political rally
If there’s any semblance of hope to be found in the film, it’s in the relentless spirit of the Burgos family to continue to find answers, both from Edita and JL. Their persistence is genuinely inspiring. Over the past 17 years, they may not have found the answers they have been looking for, but there’s hope that this documentary can still lead the way forward. The film’s credits end with a call for any new information about the case. Ultimately, the fact of the film is proof of a belief in its power to enact change. And that in itself is perhaps the greatest sign of hope.
‘Alipato at Muog’ is among the films under the Full-Length Main Competition category of Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival 2024. You can still catch the film, along with nine other main entries, in select Ayala Malls Cinemas, from August 2-11, 2024.
