Thursday, July 19, 2007 So: Don’t miss the sign By Michelle P. So Caught in the Net
KEEP off my city.
But a five-year policeman missed the sign despite it being seen and felt everywhere in the city.. He missed it when he had been drinking and eating balbacua with men suspected of being involved in kidnapping in central and southern Mindanao.
Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, a fearsome man in Davao City, showed PO2 Michael Froilan Sanz what he had missed to see and observe.
When Sanz and five of his balbacua buddies were arrested and presented to the media, Duterte was there. He memorized their faces, taking note of the acnes and the warts and how they styled their hair.
He knew who they were hanging out with, their families and girlfriends, and their personal basics.
To their faces, he said: “Pag hindi makakuha ng hustisya ang mga biktima, ako ang kukuha ng hustisya para sa kanila. Do not shit with me. Patay gyud mo sa ako.”
This wasn’t even a veiled threat. The mayor is known to execute what he says. Davao City wouldn’t be as crime-free as it was six to seven years ago if Digong wasn’t keeping his word.
Duterte vowed to get justice for the kidnapping victims and their families on his own terms if they won’t get it through legal means. At least that’s how I understood his statements, as quoted by Sun.Star Davao.
Duterte knows how to shame and embarrass people he doesn’t like. (Cebuanos know one mayor in their midst who can do what Duterte does.)
So when Sanz tried to cover his face from the cameras, Duterte furiously stopped him, gripped his face and lifted it for the cameras to capture. And so it was that Sanz’s face launched a thousand clicks. It wasn’t exactly the kind of pose Sanz wanted media to capture.
That’s some mayor. And what the 61-year-old Duterte did wasn’t for show, I was told by friends in Davao. He did it out of genuine anger about the breach of public trust Sanz had committed by getting involved in kidnapping.
Did Duterte violate Sanz’s human right not to be embarrassed in public? Maybe, but then the mayor is a lawyer.
In Cebu, some decorum is observed when suspected criminals are presented. Cebu City policemen have stopped hanging on arrested suspects’ necks name tags and the corresponding crime they had supposedly committed during media presentations after some group decried that the act violated the human right of the suspects. (For news photographers and editors, the hanging of name tags was convenient because it made the captions easier to write.)
By associating with men of dubious character, Sanz got himself labeled as a member of Balbacua Gang that was behind the kidnapping-for-ransom of a gasoline station owner last July 8 in Davao. Sanz, the mayor said, was the point man of the kidnapping and had participated in the planning.
Sanz may have banked on the mayor being sick and may have thought that Duterte was attending to his health more than the affairs of the city. The mayor’s surgery is still two months away and he is not incapacitated yet.
“Criminality is for the idiots,” Duterte said. That’s why he agrees with the intent of the Human Security Act of 2007 that allows the police and the military, upon the court’s consent, to tap, monitor and record phone calls of a person suspected to be a terrorist.
The HSA is nothing compared to the Duterte Law, he said in jest. The Duterte Law has no implementing rules and guidelines. It’s simple to carry out: Don’t mess with Davao City or else.
“Or else” has left a trail of 120 bodies of men who had messed with Davao City. And the count is only for 13 months ending in January 2007.
So for the criminal-minded folks about to go to Davao City, don’t miss the sign. It’s for your own good. But don’t miss the sign either if you’re in Cebu City.
