‘Dawatlimpyo’: how silence and complicity marked Garma’s days in Cebu

Now that former Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office general manager, retired police colonel Royina Garma, is being made to account before the House of Representatives' ‘Quad Committee’ for the drug war killings during the Duterte administration, it is time for us Cebuanos to account for what happened in our own city between 2018 and 2019. This was when Garma was the Cebu City police chief and retired police general Debold Sinas was the regional police chief.

I can say without fear of exaggeration that those were the darkest days for Cebu since the end of theMarcos Sr. dictatorship --not only because killings happened with impunity, which was previously relatively unfamiliar to Cebu, but more so due to the chilling atmosphere of acquiescence. Community voices were silenced by the terror of violence.

What made this period even more troubling was the silence of most Cebu politicians, who either stayed quiet or even went along with what was happening at the time, allowing a once peace-loving metropolis to descend into a Davao-templated gangland of extrajudicial killings, suspected police coverups, and unsolved acts of election-related violence.

The looming threat of losing support or being targeted by the administration silenced most of our local leaders, leading them to merely issue vague, motherhood statements, if not outright ignore what was happening. Only Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña stood up against the administration’s people here during that period.

Thanks to the internet and Google's advanced search functions, we can be reminded of the atrocities in Cebu City during Garma’s stint. In July 2018, I wrote in this column about how Barangay Tejero, Cebu City, Councilman Jessielou Cadungog narrowly survived an assassination attempt, with his bodyguard fatally shooting one of the alleged gunmen --reportedly a policeman-- while another attacker was captured.

A week prior to that column piece, a series of brutal killings rocked Metro Cebu. A PDEA agent, Earl Rallos, was shot point-blank in the head in broad daylight near the Capitol, with the gunmen making no effort to conceal their identities. On the same week, the bodies of 16-year-old Jamie Mata and her boyfriend Stephen del Corro were found in separate locations in Liloan.

These discoveries were part of what police dubbed as a series of drug-related killings, reviving the term “salvaged” in Cebu's headlines. In Talisay City, a barangay councilman was shot execution-style while driving on the Cebu South Coastal Road. On the same day, three inmates were killed in an alleged ambush while being transported to court.

In response to a surge of unsolved killings across Cebu, the Cebu Archdiocese issued an ‘oratio imperata’. It spoke about the danger, not only of the killings itself, but of the community accepting it as the new normal. “Nangaliyupo kami kanimo; pukawa ang hunahuna was wala magpakabana, samoka ang tanlag sa nagpasiugda, kablita ang kasingkasing sa mga miuyon, hupaya ang dughan sa mga naguol.”

On January 1, 2019, I wrote, “Many of these killings in Cebu in 2018 were brazen and the killers showed no fear of getting caught and prosecuted. This is the unresolved story of 2018 and of what will happen next this 2019.”

2019 was an election year. In May of that year, the Comelec proved ‘inutile’ in responding to valid complaints that the city police under Garma’s watch were being used to harass supporters of Bando Osmeña Pundok Kauswagan (BOPK), particularly in the mountain barangays and through 'selective' checkpoints in the urban areas. It was 'dawatlimpyo' time for Osmeña’s political opponents who cozied up to President Rodrigo Duterte in 2019.