IP elder beheaded in Maguindanao Sur
COTABATO CITY—An elder of the Teduray-Lambangian tribe in Maguindanao del Sur who went missing on Feb. 17 was found dead on Thursday in Datu Hoffer town.
The body of Fernando Promboy, 65, was found by residents of Sitio Bagurot of Barangay Tuayan Mother, said Timuay Letecio Datuwata, supreme chieftain of Timuay Justice and Governance (TJG), the political structure of the Teduray-Lambangian tribe.
Datuwata said Promboy was decapitated and his body was already decomposing, and was immediately buried in an area in his farm.
Datuwata added that when found, the farmer’s hands were tied with a rope. He was dumped near his farm’s water reservoir.
The killing of Promboy proved that the attacks against non-Moro indigenous peoples (IP) in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) continued unabated, Datuwata lamented.
With the killing of Promboy, the Inquirer has counted 88 tribe members, mostly leaders and elders, killed since 2019, when Congress enacted the Bangsamoro Organic Law.
As many as 3,000 Teduray folks have temporarily left their communities for fear of being killed, Datuwata told a congressional hearing early this month.
The attack against Promboy came as the BARMM government celebrated the enactment by the interim parliament of the Indigenous Peoples Code recognizing the rights of non-Moro IPs in the Bangsamoro.
Forced to flee
But Promboy and his family had been forced to leave their home, evacuating to Datu Hofer’s Limpongo village last December, amid threats to his life due to a dispute over ownership of a five-hectare land he was tilling. He just goes to the farm in the daytime.
“Before his cruel murder, some armed men were found to be roaming around Promboy’s territory, claiming ownership of it, but he insisted to these men that he was the rightful owner of his land which is part of the ancestral domain,” Datuwata said.
Promboy failed to return to the evacuation center after visiting his farm on Feb. 17, he said.
On April 29 last year, Promboy’s cousin, Juanito, the IP mandatory representative in the Tuayan Mother barangay council, was killed, also due to a land dispute.
The Promboy family only decided to evacuate after Baywan Angan, a tribal leader in Barangay Mantao, was killed last Dec. 8 by alleged gunmen of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, the military arm of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Two weeks later, Angan’s wife Cita was also killed, along with another tribe member, after she stood as witness to her husband’s killing.
The landholdings of the Promboys are within the vast ancestral domain claim of the tribe that stretches 208,258 ha spanning eight towns in Maguindanao del Sur, a part of Maguindanao del Norte, and six villages in Lebak, Sultan Kudarat.
TJG had wanted this to be delineated by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples before the tribe falls under the authority of the BARMM’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples Affairs.
