Her protector raped her

That was swift. Upon reading the internal investigation report last Saturday, Justice Secretary Hernando Perez replaced the Pasig prosecutor who did nothing to oppose the grant of bail to five Chinese chemists arrested with six kilos of shabu. He leafed through the files for the name of a state prosecutor noted for exacting convictions of drug lords, and assigned the case to him.

Anticrime crusader Dante Jimenez wishes that Perez would act as swiftly on mounting complaints against the justice department’s Witness Protection Program. His Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption had written Perez about witnesses unceremoniously being kicked out of their safehouses or unable to collect monthly stipends. Perez has not replied. Meantime, another witness has run to the VACC for help. Evangeline, a 29-year-old mother from Calasiao, Pangasinan, fled her safehouse on April 2. With her security guard-husband and four-year-old daughter, she went to the VACC office with a harrowing tale. Evangeline had witnessed the killing of her father by five neighbors on March 28, 2000. She knew the five with whom her father had a dispute over land. Her family charged them with murder. At dusk one day in early January 2001, Evangeline was waiting for a ride home at the Dagupan cathedral when a red car skidded to a stop in front of her. Two armed men alighted and forced her into the car. A funny-smelling rag was placed on Evangeline’s face and she lost consciousness. When she came to, she noticed they were on a highway in Tarlac. Only one man was left in the car, the driver, who instructed her to lose herself in Manila and forget the murder case, or else they would kill her too. The man dropped her off near a mall. An aunt from Manila picked up Evangeline in Pampanga and took her to then-Interior Secretary Fred Lim. Lim in turn enrolled her in the WPP.

Evangeline was assigned to a safehouse with another family who had witnessed another heinous crime. She had her daughter brought to her. A WPP guard, Gerry, was to look after their safety. Last March 26, while Evangeline was washing her child’s feeding bottle, Gerry grabbed her from behind and hugged her. When she resisted, he punched her, dragged her to his room and threw her on the couch. He smothered her with a pillow and, between threats and more punches, raped her. Looking back, Evangeline concludes that Gerry must have planned the misdeed. He had padlocked the house doors and turned the television volume extra loud.

Evangeline was still in a daze two days later, the anniversary of her father’s death. Upon exiting from the bathroom, Gerry grabbed her again. She fought harder this time and grabbed a kitchen knife. Gerry backed off.

Evangeline reported the misdeed to WPP Director Leo Dacera. All she got was a sneer, "I don’t know whom to believe between the two of you." When Dacera suggested that she forget the matter, Evangeline fled the safehouse and went to the Commission on Human Rights to file a case for rape. She also complained that the WPP has since withheld her P5,000-stipend. The WPP replied that she went out of the program, that’s why. But who wouldn’t, when your own protector threatens, hurts and rapes you.

Jimenez wrote to Perez last January about the plight of Police Officer Jonathan Morales. The latter had confessed months earlier that he had acted as courier in 2000 for narcotrafficking by the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force quartered in Camp Crame. He was living proof of involvement of high-ranking PNP officers in the multibillion-peso illicit trade. Yet two WPP officers, who claimed to be acting on orders of higher-ups, kept pestering Morales to change his sworn statements to not implicate certain police generals. When Morales refused, the WPP officers found ways to discredit him as a witness. Twice, they prevented him from seeing the NBI agents assigned to follow up his case, to make it look like he was uninterested.

In the end, the WPP kicked Morales out of the program. Days after, it also removed two female witnesses who had executed affidavits about the sale of shabu by PNP officers through convicted, imprisoned drug lords.

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He really doesn’t know when to stop, does he? Joseph Estrada is trying to rouse a crowd for the commemoration of his loyalists’ May 1 assault on Malacañang by decrying supposed police brutality ordered by higher officials. In a newspaper ad, he said policemen overstepped their their authority when they used barbed-wire barricades to prevent eight busloads of loyalists from visiting him at his hospital detention suite on his birthday last Friday.

That is how Estrada mesmerizes his loyalists. He makes them believe that, in the name of the poor airing their grievances, they have the right to force their way into a military hospital and block all roads leading to it. He conveniently makes no mention of their duty to seek a permit to hold demonstrations, and to remain peaceful and mindful of the rights of others to use public roadways.

The new head of his People’s Movement Against Poverty mimics Estrada’s way of fooling their followers. Without batting an eyelash, the agitator said on TV that unlike last May 1, they won’t allow riot policemen this time around to plant pillbox bombs, molotov cocktails, knives, rocks and iron pipes on them so they’d look like a violent mob. He wanted viewers to believe that they were set up, not egged on by opposition pols, to march to Malacañang after defacing EDSA Shrine last year. Perhaps he thinks all Filipinos are uneducated fools.

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