On 16 May 2023, two youth rural farmer organisers, Cedric Casano, and Patricia Nicole Cierva, disappeared in the Philippines. Reports mentioned members of the 501st Infantry Brigade captured them. The Environmental Defenders Congress put out a statement saying, “Patricia worked with the Kabataan Partylist-National Capital Region, a legislative partner of our colleagues at the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment. Cedric was a youth whose environmentalist principles led him to join the staunch opposition against the irresponsible open-pit mining at the Didipio gold and copper mine of the OceanaGold Corporation and magnetite mining in the coastal Cagayan Valley. This led him to become a delegate of the International People’s Conference on Mining 2015.”