EDITORIAL - Early start to violence

With the election season heating up, election violence is also starting. Not surprisingly, it is erupting early in a province notorious for election violence, with its capital town dubbed the “murder capital of the north.”

Last Saturday night, a doctor was shot right inside her home in Barangay Poblacion in Pilar, Abra. Amor Trina Dait was hit in the left leg and died at the Abra Provincial Hospital. Police said they heard gunshots and had rushed to the doctor’s house, but did not find the assailant. Five M16 bullet shells were found at the house.

Dait, a resident doctor at La Paz District Hospital, ran for mayor of Pilar in 2019. Her campaign leader at the time, barangay kagawad Feliciano Tobias, was shot dead while on his motorcycle in May of that year.

Violence has marked Abra politics, with attacks not confined to the province. On Dec. 16, 2006, Abra congressman Luis Bersamin Jr. was shot dead together with his police escort as he stood as sponsor at the wedding of his niece at the Mount Carmel Church in New Manila, Quezon City. His childhood friend-turned-political rival, former Abra governor Vicente Valera, and two accomplices were arrested and convicted of the twin murders.

In January 2006, another opponent of Valera, La Paz mayor Ysrael Bernos, at age 30 the youngest mayor in the province, was also shot dead during a basketball game in the town.

Political violence in this country awash with loose firearms is not confined to Abra. Every Philippine electoral exercise has been marred by lethal violence, with the 2009 massacre of 58 victims in Maguindanao by the Ampatuan clan and their private army just the worst example.

Abra may just be off to an early start, although authorities have yet to establish the motive and find the killer of Doctor Dait. Authorities should catch both the gunman and the mastermind. As in other murder cases, failure to give justice to Dait will guarantee more attacks.