EDITORIAL - Theatrics

Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte said he will gladly kill Davidson Bangayan if he catches him smuggling rice in his territory. Most everybody at the Senate laughed when Duterte said this. The notable exception was Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, who scowled during the episode.

Actually, Duterte already said the same thing in Davao. But the long trip from Davao would be a terrible waste if he did not stir things up and make it to the headlines, hence the reiteration of his threat. But will Duterte really kill Bangayan? It is doubtful if he will, at least not personally.

Under his watch, Davao gained notoriety -- and grudging praise -- as a no man's land for criminals, whose bodies invariably turned up anywhere for all to see. But while the success in ridding Davao of criminals is attributed largely to Duterte, we still have to hear of a case where he personally did any killing.

The threat to kill Bangayan during the Senate hearing was therefore more for effect, the sound bytes great to stress a point. Still de Lima scowled, and to a certain degree she is right. Making threats, whether for effect or for real, is something that should not be added to the already foul verbiage in the Senate.

But de Lima ought to have kept her displeasure to herself, instead of venting it out openly through the media. After all, de Lima is not exactly a paragon of great virtue and how she handled Bangayan is a good case in point.

At the Senate hearing, de Lima cannot be denied her own theatrics. She announced that Bangayan would be arrested after the hearing, with a warrant issued against a David Tan. Everyone believes Bangayan and Tan are one and the same. But there is no official determination of that yet. Still, what de Lima wants, de Lima gets.

We say theatrics because Bangayan was not arrested in connection with rice smuggling, which was the subject of the Senate hearing. He was arrested for power pilferage, for which Bangayan swiftly posted bail and got freed in no time, making the whole exercise pointless.

The arrest was pure theatrics because Bangayan could have been arrested without involving the Senate. But there would be no cameras then. So de Lima made sure the arrest was made when all the lights were on. There is nothing god-like in Bangayan, but if his arrest was made in some garden of olives, it might ring a bell.