Baquerfo seeks police, DILG help in unseating Granada

CEBU - The lawyer of proclaimed Tudela Mayor Rogelio Baquerfo Sr. is seeking the assistance of the police and the Department of Interior and Local Government-7 to remove Demetrio Granada from the Office of the Mayor.

“Because he has no right to occupy the same in the first place,” Baquerfo’s lawyer Noel Archival said in his letter yesterday addressed to Cebu Provincial Police Office director Carmelo Valmoria and DILG regional director Pedro Noval Jr.

Archival said that the municipality of Tudela has been encountering chaos and turmoil starting from the time Granada illegally assumed office as the town’s mayor.

“Boldly representing himself as municipal Mayor of the Municipality of Tudela, Cebu, Demetrio Granada is now threatening violence that would certainly result to bloodshed should his position be disturbed,” Archival said in his letter.

Archival added that Granada deliberately forgot the fact that he merely relied on the order issued by the Regional Trial Court Branch 25 in Danao City that was later overturned by the Commission on Election in Manila.

Despite the Comelec decision, Achival said that Granada, up to the present still occupies the position on the pretext that he really was the duly elected mayor of the town to the effect of depriving Baquerfo the said office.

“His continued occupancy of the Office of the Mayor and his threatening remarks like ‘over my dead body I will renounce office as mayor’ has greatly affected not just the Municipality of Tudela but mainly its constituents,” Archival letter further read.

Jorge John Cane, one of the legal counsels of Granada, said that they are advising their client to continue holding office until the finality of the Comelec order as they are still going to file a motion for reconsideration of the said order. — Mitchelle L. Palaubsanon/BRP (THE FREEMAN)