Lina: hijacks recur outside airports

There was a hijacking of Manila airport arrivals earlier than reported last Friday (Gotcha, 28 May 2004). It involved a couple from Batangas who landed late one April night on a flight from Japan. Airport accomplices apparently spotted them tired and groggy but loaded with valuables, thus prime and easy prey for the armed gang waiting outside for the tip.

A driver picked up the couple in their luxury van. A car trailed them as they sped home along the South Luzon Expressway. They had to stop at a filling station at the exit to relieve themselves. There the hijackers, boldly carrying M-16 rifles, waylaid them. One of the men chortled: "Good thing you stopped; we were having a hard time catching up because our stolen getaway car is rundown." The victims were ordered to drive back north to Malabon in Metro Manila, where van and luggage were taken from them. The couple pleaded for their passports back; the hijackers kindly obliged. Weeks later the van’s license plate popped up in a police bulletin as that used for another car in a bank robbery. The couple are the favorite aunt and uncle of a police colonel.

And as reported, the victims are not only airport arrivals. A Land Bank employee, accompanied by a maid, dropped off her husband at the domestic airport before dawn of Apr. 20. On the drive home, the hijackers blocked her car at the Magallanes interchange in Makati. The gang forced her to withdraw cash from the ATM, then sped off with her car.

Interior Sec. Jose Lina told The STAR that the police had busted in the past three years several hijack syndicates preying on airport arrivals. In one shootout, a dismissed cop was killed with the gangsters. "But as soon as we bust one gang, another one is born," Lina sighs. "Some manage to post bail or escape from prison to resume the racket. Such is the malady of our system that feeds on greed and godlessness."

The crime wave scares away foreign tourists and investors. This, at a time when government is scrounging for foreign currency to repay a P4.2-trillion public debt through tourism and investment promotion.

First impressions last. If foreign visitors are greeted at airports not by warm Filipino smiles but stinky toilets, busted air conditioners, swindling cabbies and, worse, armed hijackers, the image sticks in the mind. And they’ll tell their friends, relatives and e-groups about it.

To be sure, airport woes are not the only visitor turnoffs. Two public agencies have of late become fronts for extortion from foreigners.

The Leisure and Retirement Authority is supposed to make it easy for visitors, lured by sun, sea and sand, to stay in the Philippines for good. But it turns them off with red tape and under-the-table facilitation fees. It’s no different from the airport hijakcings – except that the authority employs twisted rules, not rifles, to pull off the heist. Now who would want to stay in a land where one has to pay grease money every step of the way?

The Bureau of Immigration and Deportation is worse. Presidential appointees can no longer break up the age-old rackets of so-called career officers. Foreigners, even spouses of Filipinos, are arrested with no court warrant, but mere investigation orders from the section chief. It’s legalized kidnapping. They are thrown to the dungeons, and no amount of pleading of local and international laws can get them out. Only lawyers who bring ransom are entertained.

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Contrary to apologia, a monopoly is never efficient. With no competitor to keep it on its toes, a monopoly will pass shoddy products or services at atrocious prices. Regulators temper a monopoly’s greed only to a limited extent.

Such is the story of Meralco, the exclusive distributor of electricity in Greater Manila. It holds customers hostage to its rules. If a housewife has a complaint about her bills, she must pay first, or else face connection cutoff. Building owners must provide space for Meralco transformers, which they too must pay at P800,000 apiece. But what if the transformer is defective? Here’s what can happen:

A fire broke out at mid-afternoon of May 14 in a seven-story hotel in Quiapo. Sixteen rooms, and an adjacent building, were burned in the hour-and-a-half blaze. Investigators initially placed the damage to furnishings at P1.5 million. But the owner computes structural wreck and opportunity losses at P150 million.

Arson investigators talked to witnesses. Two security guards swore the new Meralco transformer, wired up only that morning, had exploded and set the building afire. Two street vendors also attested that they were sitting on the sidewalk below when the transformer burst, spewing hot fluids and quickly spreading fire.

The owner naturally wants Meralco to pay damages. The monopoly refuses, claiming that investigators had traced the fire to a short circuit in the building’s electrical wirings.

No such finding was made, to be sure. On the contrary, the signed arson reports all point to the transformer as the fire source. Even Manila’s city engineer says in his technical report that, based on the burn marks and the flammable liquid that spilled out, it couldn’t have been short circuit. Most likely, it was due to "mishandling in shipment, carelessness, loose connections or poor workmanship" of the transformer. The owner noted that Meralco delivered it the day before, leaving it to energize overnight. Linemen returned the next afternoon to switch it on; hours later it burst.

Building utility men noted that the unit has the marking "LRT2", and wondered if it was a reject from the light railway transit project. But Meralco is not talking. It has told its installing and examining electricians to not talk to arson investigators, and the latter to deal with its lawyers.

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