EDITORIAL - Impunity

What is it in Maguindanao that seems to bring out the worst in human beings? It must be the belief, reinforced for many years by previous events, that one can get away with the worst atrocities. That belief led to the massacre of 57 people in November last year by the very men who were supposed to keep the public safe. Will the victims ever get justice? The litigation, as a senator has warned, could take 200 years.

The same impunity was again manifested in the recent gang-rape of a 21-year-old nurse who was working as a volunteer in South Upi, Maguindanao. The rapists were either too cheap to spare a bullet to quickly put their victim out of her misery, or were sadists and wanted her to suffer a slow death, smashing her head with a rock and a piece of wood. Left for dead, the victim survived, but is now partly paralyzed from her head injuries.

Six men are under interrogation for the crime, but reports said the six are fall guys and the true perpetrators are young members of influential families in Maguindanao, including a son of a mayor in the province. Since the mayor controls the local police, the Department of the Interior and Local Government should send another team of investigators to South Upi to handle this case. Or else the National Bureau of Investigation should take over the probe.

The victim is a volunteer of the Nurses Assigned in Rural Areas. Her decision to work in one of the country’s poorest provinces, where there is an acute dearth of health professionals, deserves commendation, and makes her rape even more deplorable. Security concerns in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao have scared away people tasked to deliver basic services, from teachers to doctors and engineers. The tragedy that befell the volunteer nurse can only aggravate the fear.

As in extrajudicial killings, the only way to stop the impunity is to arrest the rapists, prosecute them and send them to prison for the brutal crime. Those who shield them from arrest should also be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Allowing these sadists and their coddlers to go unpunished is tantamount to planting the seeds of another atrocity on the scale of the Maguindanao massacre.