Flushing out ‘ninja cops’ can end vigilante slays

What’s keeping the government from recompensing thousands of Hacienda Luisita farm workers with P1.33 billion? The Supreme Court has ordered the Dept. of Agrarian Reform to release the money not once but thrice, since 2011. Still no go, cries Noel Mallari, leader of one faction of the 6,296 beneficiaries of the redistribution of the vast Tarlac plantation once owned by the Cojuangcos. Another school tuition time has come and gone, he says, deepening in debt the supposedly emancipated tenants for household expenses. Divided to P205,000 each, the cash would have gone a long way to upgrading their lives and lands.

The P1.33 billion came from two sources. First was the conversion and sale by the Cojuangcos’ Hacienda Luisita Inc. of 500 hectares (of the 4,916-hectare estate) from agricultural to industrial. The sale in the 1990s came in two parts, first of 300 hectares for P750 million, then of 200 hectares for P500 million, for P1.25 billion in all. Second was the government’s expropriation of 80.51 hectares, for P80.51 million, to pave the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway.

Although approved by the DAR, the conversion-sale initially was questioned. It looked like an attempt to exempt the 500 hectares from agrarian reform. The farm workers lumped it with the issue of farcical agrarian reform via distribution not of actual land but mere stock shares of HLI.

On July 5, 2011, the SC ordered the actual distribution of the land to the farm workers, at 6,886 sqm each. Too, the P1.33 billion was to be given to them. The DAR was to inform them of the implications of the land and cash distribution, for their consent by secret balloting.

On Nov. 22. 2011, the SC amended the first ruling. It deemed the buyers of the 500 hectares in good faith, and the new land titles valid. The P1.2 billion proceeds should go to the beneficiaries, along with the P80.51 million. But three percent of the total P1.33 billion was to be set aside for final HLI corporate audit and land survey expenses.

On Apr. 24, 2012, the SC reaffirmed the first two rulings. It was “final and executory... No further pleading shall be entertained in this case.”

Mallari alleges that a handful of beneficiaries are still lobbying with the DAR to revoke the 500-hectare conversion-sale. Those few supposedly work on the false premise that they can have the industrial estate redistributed as well, along with the P1.33-billion payout.

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Some policemen not only coddle drug lords but actually run the syndicates. The Philippine National Police knows it. There’s even a term for such hoods in uniform: “ninja cops.” Busting those shadowy units would cripple a conduit of the narco-trade. In the process the PNP can solve the vigilante killings and dispel criticism of abetting extrajudicial executions. The public would understand too how narco-politicos use anti-drug campaigns as cover for narco-trafficking.

Recycling shabu (meth) is the ninja cops’ modus operandi. They are not stereotypical “pulis patola” or bungling patrolmen, but good operatives turned bad. With painstaking intelligence, they’d tail lowly shabu (meth) street peddlers, the first tier, to the area supplier, the second tier. Upon arrest they’d take him not to the precinct for booking but to a safe house. The diversion is for a “palit ulo (exchange of heads).” The captive is made to sing on his provincial distributor, the third tier. Swiftness is key, so as not to alert the latter that the police already are holding his field man. The captive orders a huge delivery, say 20 kilos worth many millions of pesos, to their usual tryst. Arresting and booking that third-tier distributor, the ninja cops earn citations and promotions. But they report only, say, one-tenth of the confiscated shabu. The bulk is shipped to a faraway region, for resale by street pushers there. No one bothers with the fourth tier, the shabu manufacturers; mostly abroad or inside loose prisons as convicts, they’re beyond touch.

The ninja cops do not care that recycling consequently spreads the drug menace elsewhere. So long as they keep their jurisdictions clean and make extra money, if dirty, on the side, it’s okay. Some fall for the drug habit, and stay crooked to sustain their addiction. Others rise to become general, then retire wealthy. The racket has been going on for years (I wrote many articles about it in 2001-2005). Crooked politicians have become part of the syndicates, leading legitimate drug busts but illegally recycling the catch.

Drug tests and lifestyle checks can flush out the ninja cops. But merely transferring them to hardship posts in Mindanao might not reform them; some may be so addicted to be of further use to the police force. Best is to investigate the vigilante killings, along with the instances (from the Senate hearings) of summary execution of suspected pushers during official buy-busts and raids. The vigilantes apparently are riding on President Rody Duterte’s war on drugs. He suspects, from intelligence gatherings, the motive for those killings to be to silence the pushers from ratting on their ninja cop-bosses.

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