Dacer-Corbito case still awaiting justice

The removal of the prime indictee in the Dacer-Corbito case does not dim the glaring fact: two humans were kidnapped and garroted here. Families still are crying for justice. Big sins still need correcting.

Panfilo Lacson’s quiet homecoming Saturday after a year of hiding abroad is but the latest newsy twist in the decade-long case. He has been taken off the Interpol’s wanted list. The Court of Appeals found no prima facie link to justify prosecution for the heinous events of November 2000. Lacson can now return to work as senator of the Republic. Lawmen will just have to guess how and where, in this age of instant telecoms, someone so famous could stay incognito for so long.

Earlier twists were as sensational. Noted publicist Salvador Dacer and driver Emmanuel Corbito were abducted in broad daylight in Manila. No less than past President Fidel Ramos reported the disappearance, for he and Dacer were supposed to have met at noon, and it was unlike the latter to be suddenly absent without explanation. At the time President Joseph Estrada, impeached for Chavit Singson’s jueteng exposé, was on trial at the Senate. Reportedly Dacer possessed documents to nail him. Lacson was head of the national police and Estrada’s elite anti-crime task force, which swiftly were dispatched to the crime scene. Eyewitnesses had pointed to uniformed men as the abductors. The leader’s name floated: a police colonel and chief of the task force in the Visayas region, Teofilo Viña, years later to be killed at a cocktail party. It was all odd, for Dacer was known to be friends with famous persons like Estrada and Lacson.

Days later the kidnappers’ getaway van, then Dacer’s SUV were found in Vina’s — and Lacson’s — Cavite home province, south of Manila. The charred remains of Dacer and Corbito too were unearthed from a riverside. Arrested tormentors confessed to being “assets” of the police and the task force. They had strangled the two to death for failing to yield some papers they were after.

The following year Lacson ran and won for senator. Two more of his subs in the defunct task force, police colonels Michael Ray Aquino and Cezar Mancao, were tied to the kidnapping-murders. The duo fled to America. The Dacer-Corbito case stalled. Lacson became the severest critic of succeeding President Gloria Arroyo and ran against her in 2004; he won senatorial reelection in 2007. Years later Aquino and a US Marine sergeant of Filipino descent would be imprisoned in New York for espionage, including leaking White House files allegedly to Estrada and Lacson. Mancao thrived in real estate brokering in Florida, until the US housing bubble burst in 2008-2009. It was then that Arroyo’s presidential security chief, Gen. Romeo Prestoza, a military academy classmate, offered to resettle Mancao in Manila. Purportedly the deal included helping Mancao run for public office in 2010 (which he did but lost) and to implicate Lacson in the Dacer-Corbito murders.

Mancao’s affidavit recounted a verbal order in October 2000 by Lacson to Aquino to silence Dacer forever. Supposedly it was the wish of “Bigote”, their codename for the mustachioed Estrada. Aquino denied everything from behind bars in America. Still another task force officer, police major Glenn Dumlao, corroborated Aquino. At first admitting criminal participation, Dumlao said that, on orders of Mancao, he had interrogated the hogtied, blindfolded Dacer inside the SUV about the incriminating documents. Then he recanted such role, claiming that Lacson’s archenemy in the police, Gen. Reynaldo Berroya, had made him sign the story. Estrada blamed Lacson for dragging him into the case; Lacson reciprocated with a scathing privilege speech on Estrada’s alleged abetting as President of rice and chicken smuggling. In the midst of these, the court ordered Lacson’s arrest, prompting him to flee to Hong Kong while accusing Arroyo of legal bullying.

While Lacson was in hiding, the Presidency shifted to Noynoy Aquino. The foreign office cancelled the fugitive’s passport, the Senate shut down his office, and the justice department got the Interpol to hunt him down. Ironically, another former task force officer and police general led the posse, as new head of the National Bureau of Investigation. The appellate court at first rejected Lacson’s pleas to cancel his arrest warrant and stop his trial in absentia. Three months later, in February 2011, the court reversed itself, paving the way for Lacson to resurface.

Expectedly the five daughters of Dacer will exhaust legal means to reinstate Lacson in the charge sheet. Having been cleared of culpability, on the other hand, Lacson might sue Mancao. Prestoza, and even present justice department officials, for unjust prosecution. The court has yet to resolve several items, starting with the supposed complicity of Estrada, Mancao, Michael Aquino, and Dumlao.

One wonders, from the strange twists and turns, if the mastermind of the horrible Dacer-Corbito torture-killings will ever be convicted. Or will the story end like that other big double-murder — of Ninoy Aquino and Rolando Galman in 1983, with no instigator sentenced either?

*    *    *

Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ, (882-AM).

E-mail: [email protected]