Forty years ago on July 11, 1985, Fr. Rudy Romano was abducted by armed men in Labangon of this city. He is numbered among the over 700 other political activists that disappeared during and after Martial Law. The world knows them as the “desaparecidos,” Spanish for the “disappeared.”
Until now no government agency has ever lifted a finger to find them much less identify the persons responsible for their disappearance and, most probably, death in the hands of their captors. Fr. Romano’s Redemptorist confreres eventually declared him dead in 2000. The rest of the desaparecidos are all presumed killed by their abductors or else why the deathly silence.
Between April 2021 and January 2022, 34 online cockfighting aficionados, known as e-sabungeros, disappeared. Authorities suspect they were killed and their bodies dumped somewhere in Taal Lake. As of now, the Philippine Coast Guard and the Philippine National Police have dug up in Taal some burnt human bones believed to belong to the missing e-sabungeros.
Both disappearances are violations of the right to life of all human beings. Both are crimes against humanity. But why is the disappearance of 34 e-sabungeros being officially investigated by the Department of Justice whereas no government agency has lifted a finger to seek the truth about the desaparecidos? Why investigate the disappearance of 34 e-sabungeros but never then and now that of some 700 desaparecidos?
From the glaring disparity, one is led to conclude this country runs on the principles of political expediency. It is supposed to be the only Christian country in this part of the world; yet it lives by political expediency and not by the Christian values of truth and justice. Powerful people in our midst find it politically expedient not to seek the truth about the desaparecidos. The same political expediency must be behind their attempts to seek it of the missing e-sabungeros.
This is injustice of the highest order, an injustice that, nevertheless, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines seems to have shrugged it off as a forgettable fact of life in this country. They, who should have the courage to live by Christian moral principles, also seem to find it politically expedient to relegate the desaparecidos to a forgotten world.
That makes Filipino Christianity a pretense, a big lie. We are all living the lies of political expediency. We are complicit when we accept our civil leaders’ politically expedient denials of truth and justice.
I am not beating a dead horse. At no time is the search for truth and justice irrelevant in the life of any society. To paraphrase Pope Leo XIV, we do not find God only in Churches but also in the “cries of the forgotten.”
P.S. I can’t forget as I myself was abducted in 1973 and stared at certain death in the horrifying secrecy of a military safe house. Only later did I find out I owed my second lease on life to the late Archbishop Mabutas of Davao who did not rest until the military produced me to him.