The late political prisoner Eduardo Serrano waving a clenched fist after a hearing at the Quezon City regional trial court.
A political prisoner who was expected to finally walk free early this year after more than 11 years in jail died Friday morning.
"As of 8:10am today, political prisoner Eduardo Serrano passed away at the Philippine Heart Center," said a message from Dr. Geneve Rivera-Reyes of the Health Alliance for Democracy that was posted on social media by Renato Reyes Jr., secretary general of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan.
Serrano, 62, who was a consultant of the National Democratic Front peace negotiating panel, was admitted to the Heart Center last month after suffering a heart attack on December 16. He had undergone angioplasty during his confinement.
He was arrested in 2004 and accused, as alleged Mindoro New People’s Army commander Rogelio Villanueva, of crimes supposedly committed during a March 2003 ambush.
After more than a decade behind bars, things started looking up for Serrano last year when two branches of the Quezon City regional trial court cleared him in quick succession of what he and human rights organizations have maintained were trumped up charges.
In late October, Branch 98 ordered Serrano’s “immediate release” after ruling that he was not who the Army accused him of being.
That ruling, by Judge Marilou Runes-Tamang, described as "pathetic" the "outright mockery of the basic human rights on due process of law which is enshrined in our Constitution" by the authorities who arrested Serrano and insisted he was the rebel commander Villanueva.
A month later, Branch 100 said Serrano had been “wrongly charged, falsely accused and erroneously imprisoned” and called prosecution witnesses’ testimonies "replete with irreconcilable inconsistencies on material points, (and) is also inherently implausible as it is contrary to human experience" and were “either imagined or trumped up.”
However, he was also facing charges of multiple frustrated murder before Branch 215 and kidnapping before Branch 97, although the human rights group Karapatan earlier said it was confident these, too, would be dropped following the earlier decisions and Serrano would be released.
A 1976 agriculture graduate of the University of the Philippines Los Banos, Serrano, just three days before his heart attack, wrote students at his alma mater, which he said he last visited in February 1983, in which he shared his expectations of freedom: "Kapag natapos ko ang 2 pang kaso sa sunod na taon, magkikita-kita tayo sa (Once I finish my remaining two cases next year, let's see each other at) UPLB!"
Before his death, he was one of the 561 political prisoners -- 19 of them NDF consultants who the rebels and human rights groups say are protected by the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees -- in the country.
The continued detention of NDF consultants has been the major reason cited for why peace negotiations between the government and communist rebels have been stalled for years.
Serrano had two daughters.
His case has been compared to that of Rolly Panesa, a security guard from Negros Occidental who was arrested in Quezon City in October 2012, severely tortured and then presented by the military as alleged Southern Luzon rebel leader “Benjamin Mendoza,” in a case that was extensively followed by InterAksyon.com.
Although Panesa was ordered released almost a year later by the Court of Appeals, who ruled his case one of “mistaken identity,” the military attempted to again file charges against him and even handed out the P5.6-million bounty for “Mendoza.”
http://www.interaksyon.com/article/122429/political-prisoner-jailed-for-11-years-dies-on-brink-of-expected-freedom
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