MWSS must answer for La Mesa mess

It can only be drug-related, Dante Jimenez of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption said as he confirmed the gory news. As reported in a blog-cast, a high school girl was raped, disfigured and murdered in San Jose, Antique, last month. The girl and her boyfriend were motorcycling home in Barangay Dalipe when a man clubbed them from the roadside. The boyfriend fell unconscious, whereupon about nine men dragged the girl to a place adjacent to the police station. There they took turns with her. At some point the girl’s mother called her mobile, and one of the attackers answered. Asked where the daughter was, the molester snickered what they were doing to her. The girl was then knifed and clubbed to death. Reportedly her face was bashed in, and her private parts mutilated.

Jimenez says nine of every ten cases brought to the attention of his anticrime crusaders are drug-related. Methamphetamine dopes users crazy with brutality and lust that they’d hurt their own family. Enough incidents abound to scare the public into avoiding druggies. But greedy cops, judges and prosecutors would willingly take money to dilute cases against narco-traffickers. It’s as if they’re waiting for the scourge of drugs to plague their families before they act against it.

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The Arroyo admin’s reaction to the World Bank report on bid rigging is one of guilt. The WB nudged the admin about the collusion as a friend. It whispered to the right authorities — the finance and public works ministers, and the Ombudsman — that Philippine laws were being violated. From there, it naturally expected positive action. That is, that the officials would prosecute the colluders. As it turned out, the officials not only did nothing, they also treated the WB as a vile accuser when the report hit the headlines.

The WB also interviewed over 50 witnesses over three years. Its aim was two-pronged: to discipline the contractors that had attempted to cheat it, and to help Philippine officials investigate. It served notice that its report must not be used outright to prosecute. That meant the officials should take off from the many testimonies to dig deeper into the mess. But again as it turned out, the officials cried that all the WB gave them was hearsay.

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Of the feedback to my item last week on lax security at La Mesa dam, one merits citing. Reader Proceso de los Reyes wants officials who secretly built the two residential subdivisions inside the state property jailed. And well they should be. For, their narrow-minded, selfish sleaze blinded them to threats of sabotage to the capital’s water supply. They are the best proof that corruption and ineptitude go hand in hand.

For decades La Mesa was off-limits to outsiders, except for EcoPark, a wooded fringe in Fairview, Quezon City, open to strollers. Guards drove poachers out of the 2,700-hectare reservoir and 3,000-hectare forest around it. The filtrations were deemed highest-security facilities. Only waterworks employees were allowed in, and only if on duty. Under martial law in the ’70s Marines patrolled the dam compound. Security was tightened all the more after 9/11. Military agents mobilized soon afterwards when a South Asian was spotted sneaking several times over the perimeter fence. Subdivision dwellers outside the complex cooperated; their own safety depended on the dam’s defense. Suspicious activities promptly were reported to waterworks officials. A neighbor was turned over for punching a hole through the fence and erecting a dog and rooster farm in the woods inside. It was the residents outside who first noticed and kept an eye on the foreign intruder.

It was the residents too who noticed the surge in vehicle traffic to and from the dam five years ago. City hall had spanned a bridge to EcoPark, for tourists and heavy trucks of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System. But jeepneys, taxis, and cars kept rumbling over the aqueduct that was not meant to carry such load for long. Reporting to barangay officers, the residents discovered the twin rackets inside the complex. Policemen to whom the MWSS had turned over the task of securing the reservoir and filtrations were exacting fees for motorists to illicitly shortcut to and from Fairview and Novaliches. Worse, MWSS trustees crookedly had awarded themselves and key managers residential lots in the state land, and then built houses. The aqueduct, actually the dam’s spillover to Tullahan River but asphalted for occasional light vehicles, became their private driveway. A terrorist could rent a trustee’s house, or ride one of the vehicles passing over the aqueduct, and throw poison into the reservoir below. A plain vandal could wreak similar damage to the tap supply of millions of Greater Manilans.

MWSS trustees couldn’t care less. They illegally had parceled state property to themselves and their favorites. Having built homes inside the dam complex, they now gaily treat it as their private preserve and motor even in restricted areas. They can’t tell the cops to stop letting outsiders through the aqueduct. What moral ground would they have if told to mind your own racket while the cops go about theirs? Both are in violation of the Water Code of 1976, the Forestry Code, and the Clean Water Act, though.

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