“American kidnapped in Zamboanga,” it read, and suddenly I was back in a fabled and dangerous region of my past. A place where Muslim terrorists kidnap foreigners whose heads later turn up severed from the bodies that had borne them. A place once known and feared as home to a radical Islamic insurgency threatening to plunge the entire Philippine nation into a permanent state of chaos.
Focusing on the story beneath that headline last month, I clamored over the details. A 26-year-old man from Vermont—a state I once lived in—had been abducted at gunpoint by six black-cloaked men posing as law enforcement officers. It happened in the municipality of Sibuco in western Mindanao’s Zamboanga del Norte. And when Elliot Onil Eastman—who had recently married a local Muslim woman—tried to flee, they’d shot him in the leg and dragged him onto a white speedboat heading south towards Basilan.
Initial conjecture, not surprisingly, centered on the possibility that the kidnappers were Muslim terrorists. “We want to confirm to the public,” the regional police said in a statement, “that we are doing everything in our power to secure the safe recovery of the victim.”
And yet no ransom demands or declarations of responsibility appeared. All of which took me back to my own early meanderings in that very same province beginning in 2003 when, just like Eastman, I’d gone there to meet a young woman.
“You want to go where?” asked the incredulous Filipina checking me in for my Philippine Airlines flight out of Los Angeles International Airport. “Please don’t go to Zamboanga,” she beseeched me, as if addressing a ghost. “The terrorists will cut off your head and cram it onto a stick in the marketplace!”
Years later, after marrying another lovely young woman from Surigao City with whom I planned to move to that northernmost region of Mindanao, I was confronted by a similar rection from an American cousin who’d spent time in the Philippines working for the World Bank.
“I don’t want to hear that you’re moving to Mindanao!” she exclaimed. And so it was the last time she ever heard of it.
Having once interviewed a Zamboanguena living in a house punctured by rebel bullets, in fact, I knew whereof she spoke. And yet we moved to northern Mindanao anyway. And on a subsequent visit to the southern city of Zamboanga earlier this year, saw many more new malls than bullet holes inflicted by rebels.
“Hanging out at the mall,” I began a column in March describing the peace I felt strolling the streets of that 40% Muslim city, is “how thousands of Zamboanguenos spend their weekends these days…”
Ah, but then came that horrid kidnapping, inspiring more of the same old coverage. “For decades, a longstanding conflict between the Muslim population and the majority Roman Catholic population has catalyzed violence in the region,” declared a reporter for WMUR-TV News 9 in New Hampshire. “There is a history of abductions targeting Americans in the Philippines.”
Even the FBI got involved, sending over agents charged with investigating the crime.
When the authorities finally arrested three suspects, however, a different story emerged. Eastman, who had recently converted to Islam, they said, had angered his wife’s former suitor who wanted her back. The victim himself had even hinted as much in earlier video vlogs describing “not being liked” and neighbors wanting “bad things to happen.”
As of this writing, young Eastman has not yet been located. And local authorities are offering 500,000 pesos for information leading to his whereabouts and the arrest of several remaining suspects believed to be holding him.
All of which, for me anyway, has inspired a sigh of relief: not a terrorist kidnapping after all, it seems, but simply a love story gone bad. Its moral: be careful who you marry in Mindanao.
Or, for that matter, anywhere.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
