Torture

Salvador “Bubby” Dacer was reportedly beaten up before being garroted. The bodies of the publicist and his driver Emmanuel Corbito were then set on fire by their murderers.

The remains were buried in a shallow grave in Cavite, home province of the man accused by Dacer’s daughters of ordering the murders, Sen. Panfilo Lacson.

Dacer supposedly had in his possession documents related to insider trading involving shares of Best World Resources Corp., a firm owned by Dante Tan, a crony of then President Joseph Estrada.

Corbito was driving Dacer to his office at the Manila Hotel on the morning of Nov. 24, 2000 when they were waylaid at the corner of Zobel Roxas street and South Super Highway, at the Manila-Makati boundary, by armed men who were later identified as members of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force. Most of the PAOCTF members were arrested and are on trial for the twin murders.

Former police senior superintendent and PAOCTF member Cezar Mancao II, the man who returned to Manila from the United States yesterday to talk about the murders, may have another change of heart and again disown his statement implicating Lacson and a certain “Bigote” in the grisly crime.

Regardless of the outcome of this case, it should give the nation an idea of how kidnapping, torture and other extrajudicial methods are used ostensibly in the name of public safety.

Those methods did not disappear with the restoration of democracy in 1986. And as the families of murdered or missing militant activists, journalists and legal professionals will tell you, those methods are still very much around.

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The Dacer-Corbito case is not the first time that Lacson has been implicated in a case of summary execution. His path to the highest post in the national police and even to the Senate is littered with the bodies of men and at least one woman whose deaths he is alleged to have either ordered or directly carried out.

As a constabulary officer fresh out of the Philippine Military Academy’s Class of 1971, Lacson cut his teeth in one of the most dreaded units of the Marcos regime, the Metropolitan Command (Metrocom) Intelligence and Security Group or MISG.

Those were the days when torture and summary execution became weapons of state control. The military went after communists and Islamic separatists. The MISG went after political dissidents and members of communist urban hit squads.

When the constabulary was taken out of the military and merged with the civilian police force, the former military officers brought with them their extrajudicial methods of maintaining peace and order.

Philippine lawmen were using “waterboarding” decades before Americans started debating the use of such methods in fighting enemies of the state. There is even a Tagalog term for the water cure: tinutubig. Pinoys spice up the method by lacing with chili the water continuously poured into a piece of cloth draped over the face of a suspect. This type of torture, whose effect is similar to drowning, is favored because it leaves no bruises or other external marks on the victim.

Political dissidents during the martial law regime have recounted stories of being stripped naked, beaten and subjected to electric shocks and cigarette burns in the course of interrogation.

A threat to turn a suspect into a seaman means he could end up at the bottom of Manila Bay, his body encased in a drum filled with concrete.

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Lacson was good at what he did. When Fidel Ramos became president in 1992 and put his VP, Estrada, in charge of fighting crime, Lacson was named to head one of the two task forces of the elite unit that was formed, the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission (PACC).

The other officer was Reynaldo Berroya, now an assistant secretary at the Department of Transportation and Communications.

From 1992 to 1995, Lacson’s Task Force Habagat was accused of summarily executing 40 people, including members and relatives of the Red Scorpion kidnapping group and the Kuratong Baleleng gang. Lacson also sent Berroya to prison for kidnapping.

Despite Lacson’s methods, a public grown weary of rampant kidnapping for ransom and armed robbery hailed his work and gave him support. Lacson worked quickly, decisively, delivering immediate results. No need to wait for Philippine justice to take its leisurely course.

When Estrada was ousted and Mancao and the other PAOCTF officers implicated in the Dacer-Corbito case sought refuge in the US, Lacson stayed in his own country and won a Senate seat on an anti-crime platform.

That kind of support guaranteed the continuation of such short cuts to law enforcement.

Such methods are tolerated by the public as long as those who use them can confine themselves to taking out the bad guys.

As the martial law years showed, however, this is not always the case. Wielding the power of life and death can be habit-forming, and the line between personal and official business can soon be blurred.

At the height of the presidential campaign in 1998, a casino employee passed on to Manuel Morato, at the time the sweepstakes office chief, a videotape showing presidential bet Estrada playing high-stakes poker at the VIP pit of a Manila casino. Morato released the video to the press but it failed to prevent the landslide victory of Erap.

One day the casino employee, Edgar Bentain, disappeared. He has not been seen again. Did someone turn him into a seaman? Are his charred remains buried in a shallow grave?

In the case of Bubby Dacer and Emmanuel Corbito, civilians who prepared the grave led lawmen to it and identified the PAOCTF culprits.

Punishing the murderers won’t put an end to the use of various forms of torture and extrajudicial methods by state forces in this country. But it could make lawmen think twice before committing a similar atrocity. In a land where change moves at glacial pace, that’s progress.