The pastor was taken at gunpoint and dragged into a van. His hands were hogtied. A plastic bag pulled over his head nearly suffocated Guerrero and made him pass out twice, so the abductors beat him to wake him up. Guerrero was abducted and tortured to force him to admit membership in the clandestine Communist Party of the Philippines.
"They [the abductors] even told my husband that they would rape me and my daughter in front of him if he would not name leaders of supposedly underground organisations," recalls Guerrero's wife Mylene.
Guerrero's abduction took place on 27 May 2006. Luckily, his life was spared, unlike the lives of more than 800 activists, church workers and journalists who died in extrajudicial killings since 2001.
But Guerrero has since been jailed over what his wife says are trumped up charges of murder, which he supposedly committed 17 years ago. With the support of church and human rights groups, the family is still fighting for the resolution of the case.
The Guerreros' ordeal was one of the testimonies heard by a World Council of Churches (WCC) delegation on the very first day of a 18-21 November visit to this insular south-east Asian country.
Headed by WCC general secretary Rev Dr Samuel Kobia, the delegation included Sophia Adinyira, a justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana and a member of the (Anglican) Church of the Province of West Africa; Rev Dr Sandy Yule, the national secretary for Christian Unity of the Uniting Church in Australia; and WCC programme executive for Asia Dr Mathews George Chunakara.
The ecumenical delegation also heard the continuing plea of former journalist-educator Editha Borguz for the military to bring back her son Jonas, an advocate for farmers' rights who was abducted by armed men on 28 April 2007.
Borguz recalled how she went to all the government agencies - from the military and the police to the Commission on Human Rights to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo - to no avail. "It has been 206 days since my son disappeared and I'm still hoping that he is alive because we don't have yet evidence of his death", she said.
There was also the story of Jonathan Sta. Rosa, whose brother Isaias, a pastor of the United Methodist Church, was forcibly taken from their house on 3 August 2006 and later summarily executed. Jonathan himself was tortured. Both brothers were suspected of being members of the New People's Army (NPA), the armed wing of the clandestine Communist Party of the Philippines (Maoist), which has been waging a guerrilla warfare for over 38 years.
Four other survivors and victims of human rights violations also told their stories during the encounter organised by the National Council of Churches of the Philippines. They gave human faces to the statistics and reports of state violence and abuses.
