The last crusader

Late last year the anti-crime crusader Dante Jimenez quietly published a sort of autobiography, detailing how he eventually found his niche as a fighter against the various faces of injustice. As public figure, Jimenez has been nothing short of controversial. His group Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC) is quick to the draw when releasing statements concerning varied misdemeanors.

He is of course well remembered as being the guy who was with the two ladies of, how shall we call it, civil society when they were "thrown out" of the Senate impeachment trial of former President Joseph Estrada. Jimenez, Bettina Aboitiz and Rosanna Fores raised the hackles of former Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago in one of the blistering scenes in that historic trial, for what the senator perceived as rather discreet heckling on their part.

But that could hardly make a worthy backdrop to Profile of a Crusader, a slim self-published volume that traces the beginnings of the Crusade Against Violence which Jimenez used to head before branching out to the VACC, leaving the widow Carina Agarao to preside over CAV.

The two organizations are often inter-changeable, because they are like two peas out of the same pod, both patently vociferous when a hint of injustice or wrongdoing is in the air. While CAV seems more concerned with violent crimes against particular persons, VACC has a larger scope to even encompass graft in high places.

Now that senators are calling for the repeal of the death penalty, the raison d’être of these two organizations may be tested to the hilt, as both have consistently come out for capital punishment; gleaned from the statements issued by Jimenez and Agarao, it would indeed seem that the lethal injection chamber is not being put to good enough use.

Profile of a Crusader may then give us an inkling of what exactly drives Jimenez and similar crusaders, whose experience (the violent, senseless death of a loved one) we would not wish on our worst enemies.

The book is replete with photographs of the Jimenez family, as well as anecdotes of Dante about his father and the circumstances surrounding the murder of his younger brother Boboy in 1990, one of the crimes that led to the founding of CAV.

Jimenez’s narration of how he drove his mortally wounded brother to the hospital at breakneck speed is as riveting as a potboiler, but that observation may be trivializing a personal tragedy.

The Jimenez family itself is proud of its comparatively humble beginnings, for the most part running a maritime school in Bicol and helping graduates find jobs in international ships.

Dante relates his early education at the Malate Catholic School and the Don Bosco Technical Institute in Mandaluyong, near the NAMEI Technological School where his father taught courses and in which compound the family once lived.

Located on an unassuming sidestreet off Boni Ave., the NAMEI building is designed like a ship. Even grade schoolers there have uniforms resembling that of sailors. In this milieu a future crusader cut his teeth, though he did not know it at that time.

There’s one anecdote that stands out, bearing in mind Jimenez’s present stand on the death penalty. He tells of how his father, during the Pacific War, spared the life of a Japanese soldier by deflecting his aim at the fleeing enemy, choosing instead to shoot at a nearby chicken.

The Jimenez patriarch, whose photograph was taken shortly before succumbing to a heart attack at commencement exercises in his maritime school, was said to have told this war story to his impressionable young son to emphasize the sacredness of life.

Reading it now in the context of the anti-crime crusader’s seeming "bloodlust" for justice would make us wonder a bit on the change of outlook of the younger Jimenez, until we read the blow-by-blow account of Boboy’s murder that would apparently explain his about-face.

To his credit, Jimenez has of late not been as vocal as the virago-like Agarao regarding the Senate motion to scrap the death penalty. Whether publication of the book has provided some form of closure in the events in Jimenez’s life, we can only speculate.

The shadow of tragedy will however always hover around victims of injustice, a philosophical and existential issue that will forever beg the question on the efficacy of capital punishment to deter crime.