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Saturday, June 25, 2005
Editorials: After Torres, it’s Nodalo
In a matter of weeks, two noted personalities have fallen, one in a legitimate police operation and another in what appears to be a vigilante-style hit.
Even if policemen were indeed not the ones who pumped bullets into the body of Joel “Tongol” Nodalo in Buenavista, Bohol the other day, those Cebuanos who favor the killing of suspected criminals may still consider it a law enforcement success.
This is because the police have so succeeded in demonizing Nodalo many people asked for his scalp many months before he was actually killed.
In the process, only a few noted that Nodalo, unlike robbery suspect Rey Torres, was not a fugitive of the law, was granted bail by the court although in a controversial decision, and, until his death, was attending religiously his court hearings.
Anyway, Nodalo’s killing, taken with the recent arrest of Torres and the subsequent amputation of one of his legs, should provide a sense of satisfaction to sectors that have been urging the police to nail the big names in Cebu’s rogues’ gallery.
And for the police, these would ease the pressure put to bear on them by a public dissatisfied with its failures, notably in arresting suspects of major crimes.
Still, that would not erase that nagging feeling among some concerned people that all of these may have been achieved partly through the sorry means of jettisoning traditional and more civilized ways of combating criminality.
‘Lagi na lang ako’
Here we go again.
A few hours after Joel Nodalo was killed in Buenavista, Bohol, his wife immediately found reason—supposedly based partly on testimonies of some of those who were at the crime—that the controversial SPO1 Adonis Dumpit was one of the gunmen.
Expect Dumpit to be predictable also, probably using again that line from a detergent commercial that says, “Ako, ako, lagi na lang ako.”
Of course, it is easy to dismiss the claims of Nodalo’s wife simply because it comes from possibly polluted sources, or those who have been dealing with somebody widely believed to have committed criminal acts.
But there are those who insist that, with Dumpit’s reputation, it is not also farfetched to think he may have been among those who did Nodalo in, or among those who killed suspected criminals in Cebu City.
So until the truth unravels, expect to hear Dumpit utter the “Lagi na lang ako” line several times more in the coming days.
(June 25, 2005 issue)
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