ANICETO “Abbey” Canturias is a friend. He was news editor of The Freeman when I was Metro Editor of the said paper. He was still with The Freeman when I left for SunStar Cebu in 1997. He later left the paper, too, and joined the campaign of then mayoral bet Michael Rama. When Rama won, Abbey served as director of Cebu city’s Economic Enterprise and Investment Management.
Partisan politics eventually did him in. Abbey got swept into the intense political rivalry in the city between the camps of Michael Rama and Tomas Osmeña. The latter ended up suing him for five counts of libel for a Facebook post in 2015 wherein he alleged that Osmeña used a Dodge Charger car donated to the City and ran over a girl in Mactan.
Judge Alexander Acosta convicted him for libel and when Abbey filed a motion for reconsideration the judge denied it. Canturias has been detained in the Cebu City Jail since his arrest last July 16 pending the resolution of his motion to post bail. That’s almost a month already, a long time for one who I say never thought he would see the insides of a jail.
Abbey’s incarceration has not been talked about. One apparent reason for this is that he was no longer connected with any media outlet when he was arrested. Rather, he was with Rama’s camp. He was therefore essentially already a partisan even if the case he was convicted with is also a concern of media people: libel.
I don’t know whether Abbey had work after his stint with Cebu City Hall (the top gun there is no longer Rama but Osmeña. If he was connected with any establishment, that surely has been severed already considering his incarceration. Which is unfortunate. I therefore hope he would be allowed to grant bail, after all he did not commit a heinous crime. Libel should have even been decriminalized.
I know what life is inside the jail because I was once incarcerated in the old Bagong Buhay Rehabilitation Center (BBRC) for rebellion. That was in 1987 and, if I remember it right, for around three months. It feels like an adventure in the first few weeks but soon the feeling of adventure peels off and loneliness sets in even if you are with other prisoners.
I haven’t been to the Cebu City Jail in Kalunasan (the old BBRC was in Barangay Apas near the old Lahug airport and Camp Lapulapu). I don’t know what it looks like and how big each cell is. When I think of a jail the setup that would visit my mind is the old BBRC, an overcrowded facility with cells euphemistically referred to as “brigada.”
I was in Brigada 5, a cell with more than 50 inmates. The cells, though, weren’t locked; only the secondary and main doors were. So we could loiter into other cells and the insides of the facility. Every cell had a toilet that, because of the number of inmates, was busy 24-7. The hours of the day were mostly spent talking or sitting on the cement floor with your back against the wall and doing nothing. There’s a Cebuano term for those who lost their minds in such a setup: “naburyong.”
Abbey is strong-willed and religious. I know he will survive like I did when I was incarcerated. Still, I hope he would already be allowed to post bail.