On October 18th 2012, soldiers from an Xstrata-funded paramilitary unit shoot Juvy Capion and her two children Jordan (aged 13) and Jan-Jan (aged 8) dead in their home.1 The Capion family are influential members of the B’laan community, one of the indigenous peoples of the South Cotabato region of Mindanao, in the Philippines, and vocal opponents of Xstrata’s plans to build a multibillion-dollar copper and gold mine on the community’s land.
The proposed Tampakan project, which was managed at the time by Xstrata subsidiary Sagittarius Mines Inc. (SMI), never received the consent of the B’laan, who organised against it through legal challenges, civil resistance and eventually declared tribal war (pangayaw). Their protest was violently suppressed by Xstrata-SMI: senior figures in the Philipine Army have attested under oath that the paramilitary group Task Force KITACO, responsible for the massacre of the Capion family and harassment of the B’laan, was set up and funded by the company.2
This incident occurs exactly one year after Fr. Fausto Tentorio, an Italian missionary, indigenous rights activist, and Tampakan critic, was shot dead inside a convent.3
Read more: Blood and gold: Tampakan and the B’laan resistance
1 Ina Alleco Silverio, “Politicians, military blamed for Tampakan massacre,” Bulatlat, October 30, 2012,
https://www.bulatlat.com/2012/10/30/politicians-military-blamed-for-tampakan-massacre/
2 Global Witness, Defending the Philippines: How broken promises are leaving land and environmental defenders at the mercy of business at all costs, September 2019, p. 28, available from https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/defending-philippines/
3 Carolyn O. Arguillas, Italian priest gunned down in North Cotabato,” MindaNews, October 17, 2011, https://www.mindanews.com/top-stories/2011/10/italian-priest-gunned-down-in-north-cotabato/