WHAT is happening to the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC)? I heard this question being raised not a few times as the anti-crime group has become visible under the Duterte administration, filing one impeachment case after another against high-profile personalities in government that incidentally have also been the target of President Rodrigo Duterte’s tirades. The group celebrated its 19th founding anniversary recently, and not surprisingly the President graced it.
The controversy that seemed to expose the character of the personalities behind the group was the one that was the subject of Sen. Risa Hontiveros’s privilege speech. It turned out that during a Senate hearing that had Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre as one of the resource speakers, he texted VACC’s Jacinto Paras, a former congressman, and the message was about speeding up the filing of a case against Hontiveros for keeping under her watch the witnesses to the slaying of minor Kian delos Santos by some Caloocan policemen.
I won’t go to the extent of calling the VACC a mercenary group like what some of its vociferous critics, like Sen. Leila de Lima did. But it does look like the character of some of its officials and volunteer lawyers is suspect. Paras, for example, was once tagged in a 2001 Newsbreak article as among those who questionably sought to delay a congressional inquiry into the alleged collusion between Smart and Globe to reduce free text messages.
Paras has already failed twice in his bid to return to the House of Representatives, something that shows his current standing with his constituents in the first district in Negros Oriental. He is in the same boat with VACC founding member Dante Jimenez, who ran for senator in last year’s elections. And didn’t then VACC chair Martin Diño filed his certificate of candidacy (COC) for president last year supposedly as a fill-in for Duterte, who did not file his COC before the deadline set by the Commission on Elections?
I actually was tempted to ask about what local anti-crime crusader Thelma Chiong would say about this until I realized that she belongs to another group, the Crusade Against Violence (CAV), from which VACC was born. Unfortunately, CAV seems to have become moribund as an organization. But it was this group that made noble the anti-crime efforts of relatives of those who were victimized by crime. Chiong is the mother of sisters Jacqueline and Marijoy Chiong, who were abducted and killed in 1997.
It would have been interesting to find out how CAV sees VACC’s style of anti-crime crusading nowadays. By simply adding the word corruption to the name of his anti-crime group, Jimenez, whose brother was killed in 1990, and the group’s officers could already conveniently do what it is doing now--involving themselves in what is obviously political acts.
I don’t know how big an organization VACC is now, but is the rank-and-file supportive of its current activities? By the way, I hope CAV would resurface and stake a claim as a genuine anti-crime group with no other agenda aside from helping strengthen the resolve of the relatives of the victims of crime to seek justice and helping them ease the trauma of their victimization.