Thursday, September 28, 2006 Editorial: Tolentino’s predicament
INTEGRATED Bar of the Philippines (IBP) Cebu City chapter president Alex Tolentino has become the whipping boy of people defending the actions of so-called vigilantes believed to be behind the killing of suspected criminals in Cebu City.
And for a reason.
Tolentino’s earlier pronouncement about knowing the identity of the suspected vigilantes was good enough to titillate the public, but titillation often turns into impatience if nothing substantial comes after it.
Follow through
The lack of follow through raises questions about the information that was actually gathered, or the possibility that the lawyer’s roar is more intimidating than his bite, prompting some people to be suspicious of his motive.
Also, it leaves Tolentino unable to parry the verbal assaults of his critics because the only good response to these is to finally make public whatever information he has, which he apparently is not prepared to do at the moment.
And this situation is rather risky for him, as the hatred conjured by the relentless verbal assault could make him ripe as a target for “silencing.”
Assistance
One way of easing the pressure put to bear on Tolentino is to spread the target, meaning for his colleagues in the IBP and the other sectors condemning the vigilante killings, like the Archdiocese of Cebu, to link arms with him.
What Tolentino, or if we believe his claim, the IBP Cebu City chapter has can be considered the needed breakthrough in pushing to its desired conclusion the effort to stop the killings especially as the holding of the Asean summit nears.
Thus, it would be wrong for those noisily protesting the extra-judicial executions to abandon one of its own at a time when the effort has reached a sensitive and therefore dangerous phase.
Opening
Of course, that presupposes that what Tolentino has is what he claims to have and that he is not harboring selfish motives in what he is doing.
Even then, with the seeming impossibility of identifying the vigilantes and halting the killings, those who are honestly for a civilized way of fighting criminality should make use of any opening, no matter how slight.
They should not, therefore, leave Tolentino alone.
