"The Dead Are Not Your Labels"
It was, to the careful observer of public life, a familiar sequence—one that had unfolded in different forms across decades, under different administrations, and with different names, but always with the same underlying pattern. A death in the countryside. A statement from the military. A classification, swift and categorical. And then, in the uneasy silence that followed, a second struggle: not over territory, but over truth.
The killing of Alyssa Alano, a student leader from University of the Philippines Diliman, in a military operation in Negros Occidental, belongs to this pattern. She was one of nineteen individuals reported killed in what the Armed Forces of the Philippines described as a counter-insurgency operation. The official line was immediate and unambiguous: those who died were members of a “Communist Terrorist Group.” It was a classification that, once issued, sought to close the matter before it could even be opened.
Yet even before the machinery of official narrative had fully settled into place, there were already fractures. Accounts began to emerge—tentative at first, then more insistent—suggesting that among the dead were civilians: individuals who had come not to wage war, but to observe, to document, to understand. Among them, Alyssa Alano, a political science student, and RJ Ledesma, identified as a community journalist. They had reportedly been in Negros for community integration—research, immersion, engagement with agricultural communities whose lives remain largely invisible to the centers of power.
It is here that the story refuses to remain procedural. Because the event did not end with the deaths. It extended, disturbingly, into the reaction that followed.
When the news broke, one might have expected grief. One might have expected the quiet, familiar heaviness that accompanies the loss of young lives—the instinctive turning toward empathy, toward questions, toward the human dimension of tragedy. For a name to travel beyond its immediate circle, it must have mattered. There must have been people who loved her, who knew her not as a headline but as a presence.
Instead, what emerged in the digital public square was something else entirely: not silence, not solemnity, but spectacle. Thousands—tens of thousands—of reactions expressing laughter. Not metaphorical laughter, but literal, measurable, visible reactions that translated death into something approaching entertainment.
To an earlier political vocabulary—one forged in the disciplined seriousness of the 1980s—this would not have been dismissed as mere online behavior. It would have been recognized as a symptom: a coarsening of civic sensibility, a corrosion of moral reflex, a public culture increasingly detached from the weight of human consequence.
For what does it reveal when death becomes an occasion for mockery? What does it say of a political environment when the instinct is not to question, not to mourn, but to dismiss—to reduce a life to a label, and that label to a justification?
The questions are not rhetorical. They are diagnostic of a deeper condition.
Because even as the official position of the Philippine Army stands, it does not stand uncontested. Counter-claims have circulated, including statements attributed to the Communist Party of the Philippines asserting that Alyssa Alano and RJ Ledesma were civilians, not members of the New People’s Army. Independent verification remains essential—indeed, indispensable. But the existence of competing narratives alone demands scrutiny. In a functioning democracy, official declarations do not conclude inquiry; they initiate it.
And yet, beyond the contest of facts lies a more troubling elasticity in the use of language itself.
It may well be true that certain areas of the country are described by authorities as “rebel-infested.” It may be the case that armed insurgents operate within these spaces, and that the state, in its security framework, designates them as terrorists. This is the vocabulary of conflict, and it has long been embedded in the lexicon of governance.
But what follows from this vocabulary has become dangerously expansive.
For when individuals who enter these areas—not with arms, but with notebooks; not with rifles, but with questions—are reflexively treated as extensions of insurgency, the language collapses into absurdity. The student conducting research becomes suspect. The journalist documenting rural conditions becomes a target of insinuation. The citizen engaging with marginalized communities becomes, by proximity alone, a presumed adversary.
What then remains of civic engagement?
If immersion is interpreted as subversion, if research is recast as rebellion, if solidarity is equated with terrorism, then the space for legitimate participation narrows to the point of suffocation. One is compelled to ask, with increasing urgency: what is left for those who seek to understand the conditions that give rise to conflict?
Indeed, such reasoning does not strengthen the credibility of the system—it undermines it. It invites ridicule, not respect. For what follows logically from such a posture? That those engaged in rural reconstruction are to be labeled rebels for contradicting official narratives? That those who fail to “coordinate with authorities”—in contexts where trust is neither neutral nor assured—are automatically suspect?
This is not a sign of institutional confidence. It is a symptom of institutional anxiety.
And in this climate, another layer emerges—one that speaks to the nature of contemporary discourse. There are those who appear to weaponize tragedy itself, engaging in what can only be described as performative provocation. They inflame, distort, and simplify—not in pursuit of truth, but in pursuit of reaction. One might say, bluntly, that they “ragebait”—constructing narratives designed less to inform than to provoke, less to clarify than to entrench.
Within this framework, individuals like Alyssa and RJ are stripped of context and recast as symbols—dismissed with shorthand labels such as “woke,” “radical,” or “sympathizer.” These are not analytical categories. They are rhetorical devices, deployed to collapse nuance into caricature.
This is not discourse. It is theater. And like all theater, it depends on an audience willing to suspend critical judgment in favor of emotional alignment. The thousands of reactions, the repetition of unverified claims, the reflexive dismissal of complexity—these are not passive responses. They are active participation in the construction of a narrative that privileges convenience over truth.
Meanwhile, the countryside—long burdened by structural inequities, by landlordism, by uneven development—becomes not a subject of serious inquiry, but a backdrop for ideological projection. Its realities are flattened, its voices mediated, its complexities reduced to binaries that serve the needs of competing narratives rather than the demands of understanding.
But reality resists simplification. For beneath the language of insurgency lies a history of unresolved questions—land distribution, economic marginalization, the persistent absence of inclusive development. These are not justifications for violence. They are explanations for its endurance. To ignore them is not to resolve conflict, but to perpetuate it under different terms.
Thus, when individuals enter these spaces—when they seek to study, to document, to engage—they are not inherently subversive. They are, in many cases, attempting to bridge a gap that policy alone has failed to close: the distance between center and periphery, between decision-making and lived experience.
To treat such efforts as grounds for suspicion is to close off one of the few remaining avenues for meaningful understanding.
The assertion must therefore be made, clearly and without evasion: if Alyssa Alano and RJ Ledesma were indeed civilians—unarmed, engaged in research or community work—then they were not legitimate targets. If this is the case, then their deaths demand explanation, not rationalization.
And explanation, in a republic, must lead to accountability. But accountability is not solely an institutional obligation. It is also a civic one.
For when citizens accept labels without evidence, when they reproduce narratives without verification, they become participants in the erosion of democratic norms. The label “NPA” becomes, in this context, not merely descriptive but performative—a linguistic shortcut that transforms suspicion into certainty and certainty into justification.
This is not justice. It is convenience masquerading as conviction. And it is precisely this convenience that must be resisted.
Because the cost is cumulative. It does not end with one incident. It establishes a pattern—a reflexive mode of thinking that can be invoked again and again, each time with less resistance, each time with greater consequence.
The reaction to Alyssa’s death—the laughter, the dismissal, the casual invocation of labels—thus reflects not only a moment, but a condition: a political culture in which the demands of conscience are increasingly subordinated to the comforts of alignment.
The questions must therefore be asked—not once, but persistently: Why is it easier to believe than to verify? Why is it easier to condemn than to question? Why is it easier to mock than to mourn?
These are not questions of ideology. They are questions of citizenship.
For a citizenry that ceases to question ceases, in effect, to govern. It relinquishes its role, ceding authority to those who speak with certainty but are not always constrained by accountability.
It is in this context that the call for investigation acquires urgency—not as a procedural formality, but as a democratic imperative. The events in Negros Occidental must be examined thoroughly, independently, and transparently. The identities of the dead must be established with care. The circumstances of the operation must be reconstructed with precision. Responsibility, where it exists, must be assigned.
Beyond this, however, lies a larger task—one that intersects not only with governance, but with the economic and structural dimensions of national life.
For conflict in the countryside is not merely a security issue. It is an economic one. It reflects disparities in land ownership, in access to capital, in the distribution of opportunity. It reflects a development model that has, in many respects, privileged urban growth while leaving rural communities to navigate conditions of persistent vulnerability.
From a business perspective, this is not incidental. It is foundational.
A country that cannot stabilize its rural economy cannot fully unlock its national potential. Investment hesitates in regions marked by conflict. Infrastructure development stalls where insecurity persists. Human capital is constrained when communities remain marginalized. The cost is not only borne in lives lost, but in opportunities foregone.
Thus, the call for peace must be understood not merely as a moral imperative, but as an economic necessity.
Peace, in its fullest sense, is not the absence of armed confrontation. It is the presence of conditions that make conflict unnecessary: equitable growth, inclusive policies, meaningful participation in the economic life of the nation.
To Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the appeal is therefore both political and economic: to exercise restraint in the use of force, to reassess the human and institutional costs of sustained military offensives, and to empower the civilian apparatus of government to pursue negotiations that address not only the manifestations of conflict, but its roots.
This is not a call for capitulation. It is a call for strategy.
Because in the long term, stability cannot be secured through force alone. It must be built through legitimacy, through trust, through policies that address the structural conditions of discontent.
In the final analysis, the story of Alyssa Alano and RJ Ledesma is not only about two individuals. It is about a society confronted with its own reflection—about what it chooses to believe, what it chooses to ignore, and how it chooses to respond when confronted with the irreversible fact of death.
Justice, in this context, is not abstract. It is concrete. It demands evidence, inquiry, accountability.
It also demands memory.
For to forget—or to remember incorrectly—is to allow the cycle to continue. To allow labels to replace lives. To allow laughter to replace lament.
And so the demand must be stated, not as rhetoric, but as obligation:
Justice for Alyssa. Justice for RJ. Not as slogans, but as standards. Not as noise, but as principle. Not as fleeting outrage, but as enduring commitment.
For if there is any minimum owed to the dead, it is this: that they are not misrepresented in death.
And if there is any minimum owed to the living, it is this: that truth—however inconvenient, however contested—is not surrendered to the ease of narrative or the comfort of indifference.