While the Butuan City police is still investigating her death, the reports I got seem to indicate that Jemarie was invited to a drinking session by a female friend of dubious character in a hotel. At around 3 a.m., as she was headed home, four men in a van waited for her. As she tried to board a tricycle, they grabbed and dragged her to the van. Her naked body with mutilated breasts and at least 14 stab wounds was found a few hours later in a field in Barangay Doongan near City Hall.
Poor young Jemarie was apparently kidnapped, raped, and brutally murdered and I understand that the Butuan police has already arrested a suspect, while three other suspects have reportedly fled to Cebu, including her female friend. This means that three suspected kidnappers, rapists and murderers are now in Cebu, thinking that Cebu is a good place to hide. Let us hope that my good friend, Cebu City police chief Melvin Gayotin, is coordinating with the Butuan police as to the whereabouts of these three suspects, so we can launch a manhunt right here in Cebu.
I e-mailed Dr. Dacudao regarding what stories his group could piece together on this murder case, which they could give to the police. He gave me his suspicions or theories… "It looks like that Jem was sold without her knowledge by her female friend to the murderers. They probably are rich people, able to obtain a van. Jem was pretty and charming, had many suitors, but she was not a girl-for-hire. The men could have assumed she was a prostitute, and so when she resisted, they raped and stabbed her in their rage. Especially if they had already paid for her.
"It is also possible that they purposely wanted a girl who was not a prostitute, and thought that having just ended a drinking session, she would not resist. It is also possible that her ‘friend’ was trying to recruit her into the prostitution business, and decided that a crash course would hurry things up. As a pimp dealing a pretty girl around, her ‘friend’ would have made lots of money. I am severely distressed with what had happened. Jem was stabbed 17 times. Her throat was slashed and her breasts were mutilated. Autopsy showed stab wounds in the abdomen, back, flanks, arms, neck, chest. Yet none was apparently fatal, except one which penetrated three inches into the heart."
More often than not, the poor in this country never gets justice not even a news report of their brutal murder, especially because they are from faraway Butuan. Jemarie came from a poor family, but this didn’t stop her from joining something she truly believed in… saving her native Butuanon language, which Dr. Dacudao has sworn to revive. I understand that Butuan City Councilor Dr. Rene Vargas (he is the president of the Butuan Ivory Charities) will sponsor a resolution today to help the victim’s family.
Jemarie believed in what we believe, as articulated by Prof. Kenneth Hale, a linguistics professor at MIT, who said, "When you lose a language you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art." Solfed lost Jemarie to the hands of brutal murderers; we demand that she get justice!
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House Minority Leader Francis Escudero came up with an expected revelation, which was headlined last Friday in The Philippine STAR that the opposition was preparing a new impeachment complaint against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) using the recent Supreme Court decisions declaring Executive Order 464 and Proclamation 1017 unconstitutional. I have always thought that Escudero and his ilk would use anything to have another chance to try another impeachment against the President. I’ve no doubt that Escudero hates the President with a passion to a point that he would do anything to shorten her term in Malacañang.
But even now, Escudero knows too well that he doesn’t even have the numbers in Congress to launch another impeachment complaint… this is why he is the head of the "minority" in Congress! So why bother at all if his efforts would merely go to naught? Ah… but there are many other reasons why our politicians would be interested in this new impeachment complaint and it would fall under what we call "impeachment in aid of elections"!
Just imagine… we can expect the news media (in aid of selling newspapers or airtime) to turn this into another circus and thus… every single day until election day, the principal players of this drama would be given star billing in our front pages… free of charge! Even the local news media like what we have in Cebu, Davao or Panay would certainly ask for comments from their respective legislators on what is going on with the impeachment and that’s enough to have their faces on the local TV, radio or newspapers. Who wouldn’t want to be starring in this impeachment drama… both from the administration and opposition parties? Call this the advantage of the incumbent!
But does this sick country, made even sicker by mindless politicians, need another impeachment complaint? No sir! What Congress ought to do or focus on is to fix whatever is wrong with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) because as we’ve said so many times before… Congress is also to blame for whatever ails the Comelec because they created the law that gives the Comelec its powers. Therefore, only Congress can fix the Comelec.
But the whole trouble here is that politicians like Escudero seem to have a one-track mind in getting rid of the President only, instead of getting rid of the problems of this nation. In fact, if Congress wouldn’t lift a finger to fix the Comelec, we can already predict what would happen after the elections, which by the way, happens to us in every election, that no one loses the elections… because everyone claims to have been cheated!
First on the agenda is… whether the Comelec would finally be computerized? Given the time that we’ve all lost because of the earlier impeachment complaint, I’m sure that the Comelec still cannot come up with a fail-safe or fool-proof plan to assure the public that no one will cheat in the next elections. I’m saying that we are now pressed for time, but if by a small miracle Congress can fix whatever is wrong with the Comelec, then we can look forward to better-run elections in 2007. But how can we do that when our politicians are out of focus? Give us a break! Let us fix this country first!
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For e-mail responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mozcom.com. Bobit Avila’s columns in The Freeman can also be accessed through The Philippine STAR website. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.