EDITORIAL - VIP suspect

What is it about a small-town mayor that makes him warrant VIP treatment from top government officials? Three days after the Maguindanao massacre, the person tagged by the victims’ camp as the mastermind was finally taken into custody and held without bail for multiple murder. Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr. was flown to Manila after a meeting with Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, and then escorted by no less than the secretary of justice, who like Malacañang officials sounded like the lawyer for Ampatuan.

The mayor has been mollycoddled from the start, when the victims’ relatives started screaming his name after Genalyn Mangudadatu told her husband in a cell phone call the identities of the men who were about to butcher her. Top officials of the Philippine National Police, whose members routinely gun down suspects even before formal charges are filed, and sometimes even before a crime is committed, scrambled to find excuses not to arrest a man accused of murdering 57 people as of the latest count. The PNP chief cheerfully told the press that cops were in “hot pursuit” of Ampatuan but were waiting for him to surrender.

Then again, why should this government response be surprising, when police officials themselves have been implicated, directly as alleged participants in the massacre, and indirectly for refusing to provide security to the Mangudadatu convoy? Genalyn’s widower, Buluan Vice Mayor Esmael Mangudadatu, said he was refused security by both the police and Army commanders with jurisdiction over the massacre site.

How many of the monsters responsible for this mayhem have been disarmed? Where are the members of the Ampatuans’ private army, most of them belonging to the paramilitary Citizens Armed Force Geographical Units? Who wielded the chainsaw that chopped the victims to pieces, the better, it was alleged, to fit them all snugly into the vehicles before the entire convoy was buried? And where is the operator of the backhoe, marked as property of the Maguindanao government, with the name of the governor, Ampatuan’s father and namesake, imprinted on it? Who sent the backhoe to that remote area?

The usually voluble secretary of the interior and local government and the secretary of defense cum national security adviser have been uncharacteristically low-key. Both of them politicians, they could be taking their cue from their boss the President, who must be pondering the political fallout of going after the Ampatuan clan. There’s a special place in hell for mass murderers, and their coddlers. The world is watching the government’s response to this atrocity, and the response so far has been disappointing.