Ledesma: Of DDS, Vigilantes and Human Rights

Thursday, February 23, 2012

THE recent spate of burglaries and killings of innocent civilians by criminal elements has angered not only Vice Mayor Rodrigo Duterte but the citizenry of the city that has been used to and comfortable with the culture of peace that they enjoy. We have been used to the peace and quiet that pervade in the city since the dismantling and neutralization of drug syndicates that any symptom or rising incidence of criminality can really incense Davaowenyos.

Of late, however, criminal elements have been testing the waters, so to speak, burglars using kids in the short pants to carry out their plot and then bag snatchers getting bolder victimizing their quarry in broad daylight. Authorities could only whine and pine since they can only catch up with the juvenile and have to release them anyway otherwise they will come in conflict with the law. How ironic. But what broke the camel’s back is the high noon killing of a nurse who was shot by suspects who were riding in tandem in a motorcycle. What curdles the blood is that they were only out to snatch the bag of the ill-starred nurse but shot her anyway not once but four times. As I have said before, the bestial act is smack of the gun wielder high on drugs.

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Davao City is definitely not an arena for the lawless elements and trigger-happy freaks like Leynard Allan Bigcas. This is not the place where suitors and lovers settle their differences in gun duel. Neither is it the extension of fiefdoms where feuding clans settle their feuds in by the barrel of the guns and RPGs. That is why, I am dismayed that despite the alert and warning issued by Mayor Duterte, Bigcas who used a pick-up as get-away and visibly mestizo, can escape the dragnet. If Bigcas can elude arrest as he eluded the FBI and US and Phil customs authorities in his smuggling enterprise, he ought not escape police and task force dragnet in Davao City following the mayor’s directive. He is visible and high profile, he must have passed through police checkpoints that I had expected the law enforcers had set up following the call for alert initiated by city authorities.

This inexcusable failure of police forces to arrest the suspects in the brutal killing of the nurse and capture Bigcas could be the reason why in the survey done by ABS-CBN where respondents were ask their choice on how to address the growing crime, those (67) who favors the increase of policemen paled in comparison to those (593) who favors the return of vigilantes. But while the survey is being done, I will not be surprise if Vice Mayor Duterte had taken a more intensive and extensive crusade and revived the network of tripping points which he had meticulously set-up to trap criminals in the past.

The tripping points had paid off and already an armed snatcher who victimized an Ateneo student Tuesday, became the first casualty when he fought it out with policemen. The bag which the victim snatched was personally returned to the owner by the Vice Mayor Duterte himself.

This still is legitimate police operation but observe that Digong himself has to be involved in the operations. The mayor is a night owl who sacrifices sleep to prowl in all the nooks and corners of the city to keep us safe while we are in slumber.

If the lawless elements persist in their trade and toy with the law and law enforcers then we may not be able to suppress the rebirth of vigilantes to challenge the villains in the lawless arena where they operate and perpetuate their crime to live by. Remember that two can play in that arena. In fact, peculiar to Davao City, is the citizens’ distaste and detestation for crime. This was brought about by many events. The city went through the era of communist insurgency when the New People’s Army (NPA) Sparrows had heydays executing their prey in broad daylight . Then came the purge within the NPA organization dubbed as ‘Operation Ahos and Zombies’ which was followed by the people’s uprising against the CPP/NPA more popularly known as ‘Alsa Masa’ led by a number of NPA leaders themselves supported by police operatives. And then the drug menace.

All these transitions and events happened in Davao City in the late 1970’s all the way to 1985 and waned into a denouement after the Peoples Revolution. It was during the intervening period from 1982 to 1985 that the so-called “Davao Death Squad” emerged. So much speculations and attributions of the so-called extra-judicial killings involved DDS. But DDS actually never existed as it was a concept created by then Police Regional Commander Brig. Gen. Dionisio Tangatue Jr. who drafted the intrepid and acerbic radio commentator Jun Pala to carry out a counter propaganda versus the Red ideologues. DDS was a phantom, so to speak, to counter the dreaded Sparrows. It was not only DDS that was created in abstract. When the communist took control and influence over Agdao and part of Buhangin the PNP general also conceptualized the so-called ‘Christian Soldiers for Democracy’ to draw a line between the Christian community and the Godless CPP/NPAs which were perceived to be. Jun Pala, who became an institution, was later ‘installed’ as commander of yet another abstract organization called “Contra Force”. But even before Alsa Masa came into being, there emerged a group of about 15 vigilantes in Agdao to protect their enclave from the stalking Sparrows and to avenge the death of their kin in the hands of the communist hitmen.

The people’s uprising against the NPAs, which preceded the first Edsa Revolution against the dictatorship, brought peace to Davao City. Agdao, which was known as Nicaragdao at the height of the communist regime redeemed itself from the affliction for it was also in the heart of Agdao that the people’s uprising against the Reds started.

But then were the times. Davao City quickly recovered from the nightmarish past. Nightlife returned and so were the scared capitalists. As the city develops, drug syndicates crept like thieves in the night victimizing students and making pushers of the out-of-school youths. The drug lords and members of their syndicates became bolder each day they penetrated school campuses and openly sell their wares. Victims were not killed as they are the clients of the multi-million-peso drug market. Illicit drug trade was so lucrative, one syndicate even set up a shabu laboratory and they were so daring they constructed it by the roadside. Many who were hooked either resorted to crime to sustain their need for drugs or became pushers themselves to assure their own supply. Others became living dead - a spectacle, which their parents kept in secret from the public but, stirred the yearning for revenge.

In the late 1990’s onward, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, the local government and civic organizations conducted massive information campaign against the menace of drugs. This did not give a dent on the operations of the flourishing drug syndicates. But sometime between 2003 and 2005, then PDEA Head Col. Efren Alquzar came out with a list of suspects involved in the drug syndicates. What followed was reminiscent of what happened in Thailand when the police authority came up with the list of suspects of those into drug cartel. Several drug pushers and sub-dealers were killed in Davao City to include aliens who operated the shabu laboratory in Dumoy. Human rights watch claimed over 400 died in what they described as extra-judicial killings all in the span of 10 years and three months. Evidently, they included those who were victims of the NPA purge. The tolerated human rights activists who were and still are perceived to be leftists have, according to Mayor Duterte, extrapolated their statistics for the purpose of fund-raising. They have gone to the extent of putting face into killing of drug pushers by ascribing the crime to DDS and proceeded to charge that it was government sponsored. That of course is funny. In Thailand, over 3,000 died in just a period of two months. Time Magazine described it as “killing for silence”. Which means the big lords of the drug cartels systematically eliminated those who will likely squeal on them.

Will the vigilantes take shape again amidst the renewed threats to Davao’s enviable peace? Maybe. As Mayor Inday Sara Duterte warned the criminal and other adventurists this week: “Your life ends here.”

The calmly lady mayor is back on her feisty form. I heard that she actually can shoot from the hip.

Elsewhere, in the middle of the night ‘til late dawn, Vice Mayor Digong Duterte is out there hunting for rats. Is he not afraid of the Human Rights Watch? He told me this: “I will leave the Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Watch to their concerns for the rights of the criminals. I have to protect the rights of those who wants to live in peace in Davao City.”