Despite the demise ofits top leaders, the Pentagon Gangs remain a live threat to peace and security in Mindanao.

by Luz Rimban

UNTIL FEBRUARY when its members shot it out with the military in North Cotabato and Maguindanao, the authorities had considered the Pentagon kidnap-for-ransom gang dead. After all, in a high-profile operation just last August, the government had sent out a small army to annihilate Faisal Marohombsar, the group's leader.

	The Pentagon gang was formed by former members of the Moro National Liberation Front, whose guerrillas are shown above. [photo by Alex Baluyut]

Marohombsar's death in the hands of at least three anti-crime units from the police and the military was a big deal. He and his close allies and former comrades in the Moro rebel movements were blamed for successive waves of kidnappings that hit Southern Philippines starting in 1990, long before the Abu Sayyaf was born. They were also believed responsible for bombings, mostly in Central Mindanao. At one point, Pentagon was reported to be on the U.S. State Department list of international terrorist organizations.

That August afternoon, no less than President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo drove all the way to Cavite to view Marohombsar's bloodied corpse sprawled on a wooden farm cart — a picture that made the front pages in almost all Metro Manila newspapers the next morning. Arroyo's presence was intended to signal the end of the Pentagon gang, one of Mindanao's deadliest crime syndicates.

But killing Marohombsar did not stop the terror. A month later, two kidnappings were attributed to the Pentagon. One of them was the abduction of a Filipino-American teenager in Cagayan de Oro City, who was released after the family paid a P1.25-million ransom. In November 2002, the gang launched an unsuccessful attack on the Dole Philippines plantation in Polomolok, South Cotabato, a repeat of a strike it had staged earlier that year, when it reportedly tried but failed to abduct Dole regional director Christopher Hubbard.

The Pentagon gang is not just one of the many groups in the country that have made an industry out of kidnapping-for-ransom. What sets it apart is that it is made up of former MNLF and MILF rebels trained in the art of warfare, a group that has spawned copycat gangs all over the country, not the least of which is the dreaded Abu Sayyaf. Some Pentagon leaders have also managed to escape repeated arrest and detention, raising the suspicion that local government officials, the police, the military, or even Muslim rebels have either been protecting or abetting its kidnapping activities. Most of all, the gang has managed to put Mindanao in a state of recurring terror, for whatever purposes this may serve.

Not knowing who is behind or protecting the Pentagon, what it is really up to, or what exactly the gang is doing, makes it very tricky to deal with. In fact, eliminating the Pentagon gang is almost impossible. Defining the gang's composition is equally difficult. When police and military authorities talk of "the Pentagon gang," they have in the past referred to as many as five bandit groups led by former MNLF rebels, said to command hundreds of followers. At the helm of this battalion of kidnappers are ringleaders that have gone by such names as Commander Mubarak, Mubarak II, Tigre, Tropical, Aguila, and even a Commander Wonderful. Pentagon subgroups or splinters bear names like Abu Sofia, Suicide Bombers, Diamond, and Dragon. Catching them means laying a wide and unwieldy dragnet over Central Mindanao and adjacent provinces, the groups' base of operations, the same place where both a Muslim rebellion and a communist insurgency continue to simmer.

Over the past dozen or so years, these bandit groups have reaped a bonanza from kidnapping activities. They have taken hostage scores, if not hundreds, of people — foreigners, Filipinos, or Filipino-Chinese — and earned hundreds of million of pesos in the process. A few of their victims have died by their hands, even after ransom had been paid, while others were killed in the crossfire of police or military operations.

In Mindanao, their victims include Italian priests Luciano Benedetti and Giuseppe Pierantoni, Canadian Pierre Belanger, Chinese engineers working on a Japanese-funded irrigation project in North Cotabato, as well as a number of local doctors, traders, and businesspeople.

Unable to rely on the police to keep them safe from syndicates like the Pentagon gang, multinational companies operating in Mindanao have called in reinforcements, employing private security groups.

A news report published in Ottawa cites as an example Grayworks Security, a Filipino company that has employed Canadian advisers to deal with the various armed groups in Mindanao engaged not only in kidnapping but drug trafficking as well. Grayworks is said to have trained the North Cotabato provincial police and was hired by a number of big companies. Grayworks's contracts include providing security to the Dole Philippines banana plantation in North Cotabato, which has fallen prey to communist rebel attacks. Last November however the Pentagon gang attacked not the banana plantation in the north, but the company's pineapple plantation in South Cotabato.

Multinational agribusinesses like Dole are also a favorite target of extortion by Pentagon gang members. Transport companies are another. The Cotabato City-based Werma Bus Company has been a victim of Pentagon bombings, supposedly because owners refuse to turn over enough protection money. Religious groups are also on the list; missionaries from various religious sects have been kidnap targets through the years. Even reclusive orders like the Trappists in Polomolok have reported receiving extortion letters and been threatened with abduction if they refuse to pay.

Pentagon members, however, have reached as far as Manila, where they cue believed to have kidnapped and killed a Greek national in 200 1. When Marohobsar was cornered in Cavite, the Pentagon was supposedly holding hostage four-year-old Patricia Lopez Chong, a member of the influential Lopez clan in Manila, from whom the gang had demanded a ransom of P100 million.