Swift justice

If you’re in trouble, spread the blame. This looks like the intent of the group that tried to make Malacañang – specifically, Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa – take the rap for the killing of 13 men in Atimonan, Quezon on Jan. 6.

I don’t think anyone, especially a lawyer, will be stupid enough to authorize lawmen to pulverize two SUVs, leaving no chance for even a mouse to survive. Especially if the supposed target is someone who, while tagged as a jueteng lord and head of a ring of hired guns, has never been indicted for illegal gambling or murder.

If there was a “coplan” or case operational plan from as early as October, as wounded police Superintendent Hansel Marantan has tearfully indicated, we can presume that the principal target, Vic Rimas Siman, had been under surveillance since that time. And if so, it weakens the initial story that the incident at the boundary of Plaridel and Atimonan towns was a chance encounter.

As of last night, a police fact-finding team had concluded that the “shootout” was an ambush. The findings of the team will be forwarded to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).

The Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission was supposedly notified of the coplan several months ago. Ochoa has categorically denied that the PAOCC, which he heads, gave the green light for the operation that killed Siman.

Since the alleged jueteng lord was under surveillance for several months, surely the lawmen involved knew the vehicles Siman used and could recognize the license plates on one – VIC 27.

If the team at the supposed checkpoint insists that the incident was no ambush, their only defense is if they can prove that the men in the two Montero SUVs opened fire first, and then immediately rolled up the windows (a bad idea once you’ve started shooting at a contingent of 50 armed cops and soldiers).

Before a neutral investigator could inspect and preserve the scene of the killing, however, all the slain men’s bodies were moved, along with shells, slugs, guns, bags (and a suitcase?) and other pieces of evidence.

With even President Aquino now expressing doubts about the shootout story, the next option for Marantan’s group is to persuade the public that Siman deserved to be (as cop-turned-senator Panfilo Lacson liked to say) “neutralized.”

Lacson was the first to talk about a coplan for the Quezon incident, defending the team at the supposed checkpoint and saying the police team was after a group of hired guns. He seems to have intimate knowledge of the operation, maybe because one of the proponents of the coplan, Superintendent Glenn Dumlao of the Calabarzon Public Safety Battalion, used to be his underling in the police.

It’s surprising that Dumlao, implicated in the ambush, torture and brutal killing of publicist Bubby Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito, is back in the PNP.

Dumlao turned state witness in the Dacer case, pointing to former President Joseph Estrada as the one who gave the green light for the operation and clearing Lacson who at the time of the murders headed the group involved, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force. Erap’s reaction: Who, moi?

Lacson is a survivor of controversies involving supposed shootouts. In the cases that got him in legal trouble before the Dacer killing, however, those neutralized had numerous victims and sufficient notoriety to make the public sniff good riddance upon news of their deaths.

Filipinos obviously liked Lacson enough to send him to the Senate.

In the Atimonan case, however, Siman is relatively unknown. And even if he was into jueteng (denied by his relatives), illegal gambling is a minor offense that does not warrant the maximum penalty allowed under our laws, life in prison. In our country, jueteng lords don’t get killed; they become politicians, successfully laundering their money and becoming respectable members of society.

As for Siman’s 12 companions in the convoy, we’re still waiting for derogatory records or previous criminal indictments against them to be presented.

In the neutralization of the Kuratong Baleleng and Red Scorpion Group, there were perhaps two innocent individuals who became collateral damage in what were also described as legitimate law enforcement operations. Pinoys seemed to be able to live with that, as long as the notorious thugs – actually monsters out of control created by lawmen themselves – were permanently put out of commission.

In the Quezon incident, the alleged checkpoint team will find it tough to dismiss 12 of 13 fatalities as collateral damage. This looks like injustice, not swift justice.

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Marantan must have been emboldened by his involvement in previous cases of mass killings, where the cops got into legal trouble but he emerged unscathed.

This style of law enforcement has been around since the creation of the Philippine police. That it has persisted, with public support (think of all the Dirty Harry types holding elective posts), is a symptom of the weakness of our democracy.

Cops take short cuts in law enforcement, executing crime suspects, for several reasons: laziness, incompetence, sheer blood lust (really), or frustration with the judicial system.

It’s not unusual for the innocent to be killed in such short cuts and the real culprits to remain scot-free. But crime victims often go along with these short cuts, thinking that litigation is expensive and can take a decade and in the meantime, the accused can escape or bribe his way to freedom and commit a crime again.

  The public, also frustrated with the criminal justice system, goes along, too. How many suspects arrested for raping children have been killed “while trying to escape” or grabbing a police custodian’s gun? I don’t remember any public outcry over the suspects’ deaths, ever. In such cases, people don’t seem to mind if a cop becomes prosecutor, judge and executioner, all rolled into one.

You don’t hear loud complaints either, except from the slain men’s relatives, when suspected carjackers are killed in alleged shootouts with cops. Marantan was involved in one such case, documented on CCTV.

We don’t have capital punishment, but we have something just as lethal, and swifter.

In private, we even applaud such short cuts to justice. Until someone we know to be innocent becomes collateral damage in a deadly shooting incident.