Mercado: Three Cebuanos

Saturday, January 14, 2012

OMBUDSMAN Conchita Carpio-Morales ordered the filing of murder charges against 10 Navy officers for killing 24-year-old Ensign Philip Pestaño, Sun.Star reported Friday. She directed their dismissal from the service.

“It was on Oct. 6, 1995 when the ensign’s father first sought the help of Sun.Star Cebu to secure justice for his son.” That was a month after the blood-stained body of the “RPS Bacolod” cargo master was found in his cabin.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

Parents Felipe and Evelyn had no way of knowing it’d be a 17-year journey battling evasion and hand-washing. Now, the new ombudsman, handpicked by President Benigno Aquino III six months ago, is shattering entrenched impunity.

Philip Pestaño studied at the Sacred Heart School (Jesuits) along Mango Ave., then went to Ateneo de Manila. He joined the Philippine Navy after graduating from the Philippine Military Academy in 1993.

His murder linked three Cebuanos, in starkly varying roles.

The first Cebuano was the victim. In 1995, the ensign refused to load 14,000 board feet of illegal logs and guns, plus shabu. He got threatening phone threats.
“Kawawa ang bayan,” Pestaño told anxious parents, who pleaded with him to resign from the Navy, Father Jim Reuter, SJ recalled in his column, “At Three A.M.”
RPS Bacolod docked in Manila on Sept 27, 1995. The trip from Sangley normally took 45 minutes. This one took two hours since it sailed along what Carpio-Morales called an “unusual dogleg route.” Pestaño had been shot to death by then.

“Suicide,” ruled the Navy within 24 hours, sans investigation. Pages of RPS Bacolod’s logbook, covering the trip, were ripped out. Witnesses vanished.

PO2 Fidel Tagaytay agreed to brief the Provost Marshall about people who sneaked aboard. He is “missing.” PO2 Zosimo Villanueva tipped Pestaño on illicit cargo. Villanueva is dead.

The second Cebuano is former ombudsman Aniano Desierto. His record as military prosecutor was so tainted the late senator Lorenzo Tañada refused to address him directly. Ateneo’s Joaquin Bernas felt Desierto would spend his term defending himself from accusations.

Fr. Bernas didn’t foresee Desierto would notch a record in refusing to look into gross human rights cases. Archive the Pestaño case, Desierto directed the Military Ombudsman.

The third Cebuano is Marcelo Fernan, late Senate president and former Supreme Court chief justice. He led a Senate committee on Armed Forces probe. Senate Report No. 800 debunked the Navy’s suicide claim. It found systematic tampering of evidence and evasions.

Pestaño’s case moldered under Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez---until the UN Commission on Human Rights protested. “Close to 15 years elapsed…and (Philippine) authorities have yet to initiate an independent investigation.

“The Ombudsman deemed it necessary to conduct further proceedings in (August 2007). No suspect was prosecuted, tried (or) convicted…The (Philippines is in) breach of its obligation…to properly investigate, prosecute and ensure redress….”

Gutierrez added “sting to injury,” UP’s Raul Pangalanan noted. She dismissed the complaint after Pestaño’s parents signed the impeachment complaint against her. Gutierrez since then has quit.

Under Ombudsman Carpio-Morales, justice now seems within reach of others denied, like missing activists Jonas Burgos, UP students Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan and others.

The end of impunity is not here yet. But the Pestaños feel the overdue dismissals and trial signal the “end of a beginning.”