We must demolish our image of being the Wild, Wild East

Why was nobody surprised when two Caloocan policemen were collared as the suspects in the murder of an RPN-9 television cameraman? Newly-installed Philippine National Police Director General and Chief, Oscar Calderon immediately trotted them out, along with two other suspects, billing their arrests as the first breakthrough in police response to the President’s imposed deadline of 10 weeks to stop the murders of journalists, activists and other citizens.

In the first place, why does the President have to set a deadline before the police act on heinous crimes? If GMA did not announce such an order, does it mean the police would not have acted? This business of declaring deadlines is a deplorable habit of GMA. Why 10 weeks – and not one week? One might ask.

As for our cops, it has been said again and again that we have a rotten police force. Nothing, over the years, has been done to cleanse their ranks of cretins, crooks – and killers. Police chiefs have come and gone, with barely enough time to say "Hello" (not Garci), before retirement catches up with them and they must say "goodbye."

When Senator Fred Lim, a former Police Chief and former Director of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), was first elected Mayor of Manila, he had an eminently sensible idea. He wanted Manila to have its own, separate Police Force, completely apart from the PNP, whose recruits had to be college graduates and did not come from the Philippine Military Academy but were trained in an honest-to-goodness Police Academy. Horrors! The Department of Interior and Local Governments (DILG) immediately shot the idea down – sanamagan, a Manila Mayor with his own police force? they grumbled. However, Lim was on the right track. He did not want his rookie cops to be thrown into the same rotten barrel, to be contaminated by rats already in situ there.

A crooked cop has the best of both worlds. He commits the crime, then, as a policeman "investigates" the crime (absolving himself, and concealing all participation in it) then he’s the one who files the Police Report. This goes for everything from murder, shabu frame-up, to protecting or running major rackets.

This is not confined to the Philippines. There’s a weekly CBS television series hitting the top of the charts in the United States called "PRISON BREAK" in which an innocent man is framed by members of the US Secret Service for the murder of the brother of the Vice-President of the US.

Everything is carefully packaged to get the man damned, including an almost perfect video (sight and sound) of the man "committing" the crime, complete with pistol shots and his face – all presented as evidence to get him condemned to death. Later, following up their own crime, the same two Secret Service gun down the already convicted man’s estranged wife and her new husband when the couple try to save the convict’s teenage son from being murdered, too. The kid gets away, but the agents tape his fingerprints on the automatic which shot down his mother and foster dad – to frame him for that double murder.

Oops! Don’t kill me for giving away part of the plot. It is a great series, a cliff-hanger – don’t miss it. It makes you think about how many innocent go to the gas chamber, the gallows or the firing squad because agents of the law, or people in power manipulate the evidence to damn them to perdition. Or make them Fall Guys to conceal an even graver and more repulsive deed. It makes you think, too: How many of the "suspects" being exhibited on TV are real perpetrators, or were just grabbed for the photo opportunity, or the kudos accompanying the speedy solution of homicides, murders, drug-pushing, or kidnapping?

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Then there are the big shots whose gun-happy actions are not punished. Some of the "powerful" killers are never brought to book.

Are we a country in which people can be gunned down – with impunity?

In the town of Badoc, Ilocos Norte, only three weeks ago the Mayor whipped out a gun during an altercation with another politician and shot down a policeman (who, it turned out, was the bodyguard of the politician who had incurred the mayor’s ire). What happened in the aftermath of that very public shooting?

Badoc is not just an ordinary municipality. Straddling the "border" between Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur, it is the hometown of two of our greats.

They were, in fact, brothers. The first was General Antonio Luna, the fiery and dashing swordsman, and military strategist – perhaps the most brilliant general (but short lived) of our Revolutionary Army.

It was Luna who had urged General Emilio Aguinaldo to attack the Americans, "before more of them landed, and they were too many for us to handle!" He raged that the Yanks had come to conquer us. Aguinaldo, annoyed with Luna’s rantings, shrugged off General Antonio’s warnings, saying that he considered the Americans "allies" who were arriving to fight the Spaniards. Well, Luna proved to be right.

In any event, completely furious with the imperious Luna, it’s said that Aguinaldo sent him a dispatch to come up north for a meeting in Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija. If he had been more cautious and suspicious, Luna could have brought his army along with him. But he arrived on horseback with only a few aides, to be shot down from ambush in the poblacion of Cabanatuan. By whom? Aguinaldo’s assassins? The finger may convincingly point, but up to now the final proof has not surfaced. Methinks the Revolutionary President’s men did Tony in – with extreme prejudice.

Brother Juan Luna’s contribution is more enduring. He was one of our finest painters. His immortal canvas, "The Spoliarium", is a classic. Indeed, he was superb – and, post mortem of course, his canvases so luminous in quality and classic in sweep, fetch millions of dollars. However, with the exception of one celebrated, controversial piece which almost got away by being auctioned off abroad, none of them are on the market.

Like brother Antonio, Juan Luna was a hothead. In a fit of jealous rage, in the midst of an argument in their apartment in Paris, Luna took his pistol and shot his wife dead. The bullet passed through the victim’s body then went through the door, killing his mother-in-law, as well. She had been listening behind the door to the altercation. It was a tragic incident.

Surely, despite being an Ilocano, Luna had not meant to kill two women with a single bullet. He was struck with remorse, of course – but too late.

But what happened to the case? The great Juan Luna never went to jail for the deed, if I’m not mistaken. Forgive me, for I write off the top of my head – and my memory for details may be faulty. On the other hand, the facts are basic.

What’s happening in Ilocos Norte? The Mayor of Laoag, the provincial capital, also shot somebody – but nothing seems to have befallen him in the aftermath.

Then the Mayor of Pagudpud, the town not far from Laoag, famous for its resort and its shining white beach, also shot someone. What occurred later? Susmariosep.

Or, as my late grandfather, Don Agrifino Villaflor, very Hispanic looking though a true Saluyot, used to exclaim, when stifling a curse: "Santander!" Gee whiz, I still remember him from childhood memory waxing apoplectic when angry at something gone wrong – he was morally indignant. So he exclaimed: "Santander!"

I thought that Santander was a Spanish bank.

If we want investors to come to our country, and get ourselves to be recognized as disciplined and civilized, we must do something about the violent anarchy which stalks our land.

Nobody wants to visit an Asian our version of Dodge City in the Wild Wild East, or Tombstone "Caloocan". We’ve got to impose justice – and law and order. This has been said ad infinitum.

Let’s do it now.

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THE ROVING EYE… Things must be getting frenzied for US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and in her shuttle-diplomacy she probably needs all the help she can get. Is this why US Ambassador to the Philippines Kristie Kenney left for Washington DC yesterday, summoned to the home office to assist her former boss, Condi Rice? She will be gone for six weeks, we hear, on that assignment… He must have gotten away to safety by now, but the Ambassador’s younger brother was in Beirut, working there for a multinational firm, when the July 12 "war" erupted. Their mother, who lives in Washington, was worried about her son and asked him to "come home," to which he replied after the first Israeli air strike on the city that he thought it was exciting that he happened to be in a place where "history" is happening. I hope he heeded Mom’s wish, though. Whenever I’m in a combat zone, it’s not the "smart" or laser-guided bombs I’m concerned about. It’s the ones addressed: "To Whom It May Concern."…Let me correct the date of my interview with Israel’s Vice-President Shimon Peres. It was May 1996 (not, as typographical error put it – 1992). When Peres admitted that in retaliation for the depredations of Palestinian suicide-bombers, the IDF would identify the names and addresses of the suicide-bombers (which was easy, because the "martyrs" of the al-Aqcsa and the Hamas would issue videos which bragged of their heroic deed) then send military bulldozers accompanied by tanks to bulldoze the homes of the attackers to rubble. I had asked Peres at the open forum in Jerusalem: "In the case of the Jewish "zealot" who had assassinated your Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, why did you not bulldoze his home, too?" Peres had blandly replied: "That’s another matter."… Yitzhak Rabin was the man who made "peace" with the PLO’s Yasser Arafat – remember the historic handshake at Camp David. He was assassinated in November 1995 in Tel-Aviv, following a big peace rally, by Yigal Amir, a student opposed to peace with the Palestinians. In court, weeks later, Yigal Amir declared he wasn’t sorry and would do it again. His act doomed the prospect of peace with the Palestinians, which the "peace process" never got back on track. Incidentally, my old friend Peres was responsible for launching another punitive invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli Defense Forces calling the operation, "Grapes of Wrath." Today’s operations show it was not successful – the IDF is in Lebanon again!