LGBTQIA organization Bahaghari marked the death of transgender woman Jennifer Laude with a pledge to “remain committed and steadfast in forwarding the national democratic aspirations of the Filipino LGBTQ+ community, including bringing true justice for the murder of Jennifer Laude.”
Laude was murdered by former US Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton after discovering her gender identity. And for Bahaghari, this crime that occurred in 2014 “emphasized the need to abolish Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), defense agreements between the Philippines and the US that paved the way for the presence of American soldiers in the country, resulting in rights violations against Filipino women and LGBTQ+ persons.”
The court found Pemberton guilty of only homicide, and that in court’s view, he acted out of “passion and obfuscation”, as he evoked trans panic defense as his argument. In addition, because he was an American soldier based here due to VFA, he was only detained in a special cell in Camp Aguinaldo, not in regular jail.
In 2020, despite its anti-US remarks, then-President Rodrigo Duterte granted absolute pardon to Pemberton, citing good conduct time allowance (GCTA).
A decade after her death, Bahaghari remained firm in exposing the rottenness of the “ironclad” relationship between the Philippines and US, claiming that “in our view, there is an apparent, unequal, and master-puppet relationship between the two nations.”
On the occasion of its ninth anniversary, Bahaghari doubled down on its calls to give Laude true justice by 1) abolishing VFA-EDCA-Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), 2) adopting an anti-imperialist, pro-Filipino independent foreign policy, and 3) institutionalizing a national anti-discrimination law to protect the Filipino LGBTQ+ community from harassment and worse, death.
“So long as the Philippines remains a neocolony of the United States, so long as our economy, politics, culture, and military are beholden to the US, so long as craven leaders like Marcos Jr. refuse to stand up for a truly sovereign Philippines, all of us are Jennifer Laude,” Bahaghari chairperson Reyna Valmores ended.
