I GOT exposed to politically related intimidation early.

It was 1963 and the election campaign in Masbate was, as usual, heated and fraught with violence. My father was the town police chief and, like all police chiefs at that time, was reporting directly to the mayor.

The mayor was a Liberal Party member and was known to be at odds with the justice of the peace (now the municipal judge) who was not only sympathetic with, but openly campaigned for, the candidates of the Nacionalista Party.

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Everybody knew that the judge was supposed to be neutral and his open engagement in partisan politics did not sit well with the mayor’s supporters who stoned his house every now and then. My father assigned a policeman to patrol the area where the judge lived but as soon as the policeman left, the stoning resumed.

Even if the police wanted to, they couldn’t guard the judge’s house on a 24-hour basis. There were only five of them, including my father, each receiving a monthly pay of P20, and their hands were full trying to run after the cattle rustlers who stole from our farmers their carabaos, which were butchered and sold in Tacloban.

One early evening, a truckload of fully armed constabulary soldiers rolled into town. Leading them was a provincial official whose name and position (at that time) I will not mention because he is already dead and cannot defend himself.

We were having dinner when a couple of PC men, accompanied by a henchman of the judge, came to fetch my old man for a meeting with the provincial official at the judge’s house. My father said, no, if there was going to be a meeting it had to be at the police station. The soldiers looked menacing and threatened to bodily carry my father but he stood his ground.

Our town had no electricity so there was usually little activity after dusk but at that particular evening, the neighborhood seemed wrapped in deathly quiet as if everyone was anticipating something to explode. In the house, my mother, an uncle and my sister were wracked with fear and anxiety as we watched my father, who must have been struggling mightily to remain composed, in the impasse.

The soldiers stayed in the house while the judge’s henchman shuttled back and forth carrying messages from the official. After about three or four trips, he told my father that the official had agreed to meet my father at his office. He insisted that he went alone and we pretended to agree for the benefit of the soldiers. In fact, we followed him with me, in a moment of youthful idiocy, tucking a paltik .38 cal. revolver in my 11-year-old waist.

Fortunately, nothing untoward happened during the meeting and the provincial official, his PC goons and the judge, among others, accompanied my father to the house to celebrate the peaceful resolution of the conflict.

It was in the house where I witnessed an incident that, I now think, shaped the course of my life. As soon as stepped inside the bamboo-and-nipa hut we called home, the official told my father: “Aram mo, Paran, maski yana pwede ko sunugin and bahay na ini.” (“You know, Paran, even now I can have this house burned”).

I expected my father to take offense but he simply answered that in that event, he would just build another house in order to shelter his children from the elements. I wept in anger and frustration.

If that scene had occurred a decade later, I would have probably been telling this story from the hills. Someone up there obviously designed for me to become a lawyer instead of a rebel. But lawyer or rebel, I know I have been condemned to continue carrying the pain of that traumatic encounter.

(frank.otherside@yahoo.com)