Espina: Wake-up call

THE ambush -- thankfully unsuccessful -- on Councilor Ricardo “Cano” Tan and his wife Nita should give not only the city government but all residents of Bacolod and, yes, Negros Occidental, a rude wakeup call.

And it isn’t just because Cano is a high ranking city official, if I am not mistaken, to be targeted for assassination in Bacolod’s recent history – or that he is a friend as well (Full disclosure: Nita is godmother to my daughter), even if we haven’t seen or spoken to each other for years, except briefly when he visited the wake of our late father, Rollie Espina, December 2017.

But let us zoom out a bit and look at Friday’s ambush as part of a larger picture.

Before this, there was the murder of Barangay 16 captain Nelson “Junjun” Ligaya and, before this, of lawyer Rafael Atotubo. Three high profile killings since August – and that is just in Bacolod.

In the province, what did we have lately? Of course, the massacre of the Sagay Nine on October 20 and on November 6, the assassination of human rights lawyer Ben Ramos in Kabankalan City, and before these, the June murder in San Carlos city of Julius Barellano, a former radio reporter who continued to file reports as correspondent of a local station even after he assumed the chairmanship of a chapter of the National Federation of Sugar Workers.

This is not to say that all these incidents – and, in fact, more – are part of a single pattern, although one could say the Sagay, Kabankalan and San Carlos killings do form part of the decades-old pattern of repression by the state and ruling elites of people and organizations working for social change.

Now let us look back at the past two and a half years since this administration came to power.

What do we see?

There is a pattern there that would be hard to miss unless one chooses not to see it, a pattern that could explain why and how murders are committed with impunity, why so many are either left unsolved or not even investigated at all, and why killers are emboldened to take lives even in the most brazen manner without fear of consequences.

It is a pattern that can be traced back to the foul mouth of the 16th President of the Republic, Rodrigo Roa Duterte, whose incantation of “kill, kill, kill” has set the tone for the most horrific government-inspired bloodbath this benighted land has ever seen.

It is a pattern that explains why statistics show the crime rate going down but murders going up.

And it is a pattern that has spread beyond the accursed “war on drugs” and its thousands upon thousands of victims sacrificed for a madman’s warped visions, and has now woven into its gory web the strife birthed and fed by the unjust power structures and relations of our society, and yes, your everyday variety homicide and murder as well.

Remember when a body wrapped in packing tape or the ubiquitous cardboard placard proclaiming a corpse a “pusher” or “adik” was enough for most everyone – except, of course, for the hapless kin and the then very, very small minority who railed against the abomination of taking life without due process – to conclude the victim probably deserved it.

In fact, didn’t the police even proudly include what it had taken to calling “deaths under investigation” to counter what human rights groups lightly labeled “extrajudicial killings,” as proof of the brutal anti-drug campaign’s success, only to drop these off their statistics and eventually naming these HCUIs, or the convoluted “homicide cases under investigation,” to differentiate these from DPOs (“died during police operations” or the now familiar, if often doubted, “nanlaban”)?

But how many, pray, of these accursed HCUIs have actually been solved? Or does anyone really even care to solve them?

Haven't you noticed how police invariably tack on “possibly drug-related” to most every homicide or murder as if this might be reason enough if they fail to solve the crime?

And, of course, we do have a President who is in the habit of openly accusing - without ever offering any concrete proof - this or that official of involvement in the drug trade or, worse, hinting that a city or town or province is home to supposed drug-dealing politicians, his claims liberally spiced with curses and death threats, thus opening up everyone to suspicion or worse.

And if you’ve been following the news, the killings have continued to spread across the country and now they don’t even bother with the packing and the placards anymore, it seems. Or the killers even to disguise themselves, going by the increasing accounts of police personnel linked to the murders, including that recent massacre in Cebu.

Sadly, we now see this mentality increasingly applied to political killings as well.

Which is why we had police and military officials – yes, foremost of them Western Visayas police director John Bulalacao – brazenly lying and claiming the New People’s Army was responsible for the Sagay Nine massacre or that Ben Ramos could have been gunned down because of debts from gambling, never mind that he didn’t.

It doesn’t help when some members of media swallow the lies – heck, even someone with below average intelligence would greet such statements with a healthy dose of skepticism at least – and, worse, echo them back without context, not bothering, for example, to wrap quotation marks around the military’s unproven assertions against “bogus” human rights groups supposedly affiliated with the NPA. Yes, sometimes the news is written in the blood of innocents.

This mind conditioning – yes, for this is what it is, an effort to get us to accept that these atrocities are an acceptable part of daily life – and the growing number of unsolved, ignored even, killings are what nurture the culture of impunity that has long gripped our land.

There are, of course, those who have actually accepted this barbaric mindset, though their numbers are not really as great as some quarters would have it appear.

Sadly, however, fear continues to keep the vast majority who abhor what is happening from openly speaking and acting to end it. And the people they invariably look to for leadership in times like these, the local government officials, either do not care about these matters or, like them, are too scared to act.

Outraged as I am by the ambush on Cano and Nita, I also choose to see it – and urge everyone to do the same – as a challenge for our local officials to act to ensure that we, the people of Bacolod, their constituents, are safe. Otherwise, what use are they?

Trending

No stories found.

Just in

No stories found.

Branded Content

No stories found.
SunStar Publishing Inc.
www.sunstar.com.ph