Kapatid-Negros announced the release on February 27 of a National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW) veteran organizer after five years of incarceration at Negros Occidental District Jail (NODJ). Gaspar Davao, 60, a resident of Barangay Pinapugasan, Escalante City, have been in prison since 2020 on charges of illegal possession of explosives.

Davao was on his way home from a meeting the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) convened in Bacolod City when soldiers arrested him at a checkpoint on the night of June 9, 2020 in Barangay Caduhaan, Cadiz City. Earlier reports said the van transporting Davao was stopped at a checkpoint and passengers’ IDs were inspected. The military and police sent the other passengers home and arrested Davao for allegedly not wearing a face mask amid the pandemic.

Davao only learned in detention that police “found” a grenade, money, eight cellphones, and “subversive documents” in his bag. This led to charges of illegal possession of explosives, which human rights groups called fabricated.

The Cadiz City Regional Trial Court acquitted Davao of this charge on February 26. However, it dismissed his case of not wearing a face mask only in March 2024.

“This is Davao’s second unjust imprisonment,” according to Kapatid-Negros. The state first arrested and imprisoned him in November 1991 for more than two years, charging him then with illegal possession of firearms.

Kapatid maintains that Davao’s five-year imprisonment is the state’s harassment of activists and organizers like him among the poor. In the years before he was imprisoned, Davao served as an organizer in the North Negros district and performed duties in the Land Cultivation Areas (LCA) program. In these decades-long struggles, the farmers won no less than 3,000 hectares of farmland.

With Davao’s release, 111 political prisoners remain across the Negros Island region according to Kapatid. This large number of political prisoners primarily resulted from the implementation of the former US-Duterte regime’s Memorandum Order 32 which unleashed state terrorism and conducted a crackdown on activists and progressives.