SAN PABLO, Laguna — A coordinator for progressive party-list Bayan Muna has been reported missing since April 26.

Pauline Joy Banjawan is a volunteer campaign coordinator for Bayan Muna in Batangas province. During the 2025 midterm election campaign period, she and other Bayan Muna volunteers have been visiting urban poor communities around Batangas to organize new chapters.

According to BM Southern Tagalog, Banjawan reported that she was being followed by a “number of suspicious individuals” while campaigning in urban poor communities in the province’s third district.

Banjawan was last contacted on April 26, 3 p.m. Her last whereabouts were in Sto. Tomas, Batangas, which has a sizeable urban poor population. According to the fact-finding team organized by Bayan Muna ST, military presence in Sto. Tomas increased shortly after all contact was lost with Banjawan.

The group also noted that the Philippine National Police’s Regional Mobile Force Battalion (PNP RMFB4A) categorically denied having Banjawan in their custody. According to them, the officer the team spoke to in the RMFB4A’s headquarters refused to provide identification.

Bayan Muna ST has called Banjawan’s disappearance an “attack on progressive organizations and party-lists” and part of a worsening trend of attacks under the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. administration. Bayan Muna, and the other partylists under the Makabayan Coalition, are no strangers to state harassment and worse.

Most recently, representatives from Makabayan filed a red-tagging complaint against the government’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac), urging the Commission on Elections to investigate the agency’s “disinformation, fake news peddling, and fraud against the public.”

Aside from being a campaign coordinator, Banjawan is an organizer for the urban poor rights group Kadamay Southern Tagalog. She first became an activist during the latter part of the 2000’s, having grown up in the Southville resettlement projects in Laguna. 

Her younger sister, Fatima, is a women’s rights organizer under Gabriela Southern Tagalog. Last August 2024, she was arrested by elements of the military on trumped-up charges while investigating the conditions of peasant communities in Camarines Sur.

The fact-finding team, which is composed of Banjawan’s relatives and their paralegals, are currently searching for her whereabouts. (RVO)