He was called the man in white. He liked all-white attire. His office, in the original building of the Manila Hotel, was pristine white, from the carpet to the upholstery and wallpaper. He sent large bouquets of white roses to friends.
Salvador “Bubby” Dacer was an amiable man. But even at his friendliest, there was a sinister aura about him, possibly formed because of his long involvement in crisis PR.
Only the best survive in that rarefied world that is often identified in this country with dirty tricks and black propaganda. Bubby survived, and thrived… until that day in November 2000, when armed men waylaid him on his way to his office.
It took several months before a state witness led investigators to a spot near a creek in Cavite, where what was left of Bubby and his luckless driver Emmanuel Corbito were dug up. The remains were identified through some personal items and dental records.
At the time he was snatched, Bubby was supposed to have in his possession documents that were damaging to a powerful individual in the administration of Joseph Estrada.
If such documents existed, they would have been destroyed even before Bubby and his driver were strangled to death.
The person who might have known about such documents would have been the leader of the police team that stands accused of perpetrating the ghastly crime. But Senior Superintendent Teofilo Viña was shot dead in Tanza, Cavite in January 2003.
Why would the Philippine National Police want a public relations man dead? And who would dare take out Dacer, who also acted as publicist of former President Fidel Ramos?
We might finally get the complete story at the homecoming, expected in a few weeks, of former police Senior Supt. Cesar Mancao.
It doesn’t matter if the government played a role in the decision of Mancao to be extradited and reveal what he knows about the twin murders.
Another suspect, police Senior Supt. Glenn Dumlao, had said Mancao and Senior Supt. Michael Ray Aquino were among those who planned the kidnapping and execution of Dacer. Corbito was collateral damage.
With Dumlao’s statement, the government is duty-bound to find Mancao and Aquino, both of whom fled to the United States shortly after EDSA II. By a stroke of fate, the two were arrested in the US for espionage.
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All the police officers implicated in this case belonged to the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF), which was formed when Joseph Estrada rose to power.
The PAOCTF evolved from the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission (PACC), formed when Estrada was vice president and named anti-crime czar by Ramos amid a spate of ransom kidnappings targeting mostly the Chinese-Filipino community in Metro Manila.
Under Panfilo Lacson, the PACC faced several cases of summary executions, including those involving 11 members plus a sister of the leader of the Kuratong Baleleng gang. The complaints are with the Supreme Court.
But Filipinos have little sympathy for notorious criminals, and the PACC managed to neutralize the kidnapping scourge. Lacson could afford to laugh about the macabre jokes about his brand of law enforcement. PACC, he said, stood for “pak, pak” – pronouncing the acronym the Pinoy way, which is a Tagalog slang for the sound of a gunshot.
Neutralization is fine when the targets are notorious criminals. As the martial law regime showed, however, neutralization can be used against enemies not of the state but of those in power.
Both Lacson and Estrada have vehemently denied involvement in the murders of Dacer and Corbito. Erap has emphasized that one of Dacer’s daughters is his goddaughter.
The double murder is not the only case that has been linked to them. Erap’s hand is also seen in the disappearance of an employee of the PAGCOR casino.
Edgar Bentain was suspected to have passed on to former sweepstakes chief Manuel Morato a video clip showing Erap playing high-stakes poker at the VIP pit of a casino in Manila when he was running for president in 1998. Morato released the video to the press.
Bentain disappeared in 1999. The police buzz is that Erap’s gaming adviser, Charlie “Atong” Ang, might know something about the case, being the one who controlled all state-run gambling operations under Erap.
Atong Ang, incidentally, claimed that Lacson made him pay off the families of the Kuratong Baleleng gang members who were killed.
Lacson has one weapon against these accusations: he can invoke politics. Having exposed many of the scandals that have hounded the Arroyo administration, most of them involving First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo, Lacson can claim that the administration is doing everything to get back at him.
He’s probably right, but he wouldn’t have these problems if he has not given the administration powerful ammunition.
There are some ghosts that cannot be easily exorcised by invoking political warfare.
Atong Ang seems to have disappeared. The nation sheds no tears for kidnappers and bank robbers. Perhaps if he talks about Edgar Bentain, he might find a sympathetic audience. What was Bentain’s sin?
And what could have earned Bubby Dacer the gruesome fate of being beaten up, strangled to death and then burned together with his driver?
We await the story of Cesar Mancao.