EDITORIAL - Cafgus not meant for law enforcement

Rep. Benhur Salimbangon says the City of Bogo, whose mayor, Celestino Martinez Jr., is a political rival, is recruiting Cafgus for what he suspects are election-related purposes. Cafgus, to those too young to know, are paramilitary volunteers trained to fight communist rebels.

While Salimbangon has written President Aquino to ask that the recruitment be stopped and the Cafgus to be disbanded altogether, Martinez adamantly denies recruiting any. He did admit the existence of a plan to do so, but only to fight criminals.

That is a laughable argument, difficult to swallow without gagging. Anyone with a head on his shoulders can readily see what is going on. Even if Salimbangon is wrong, Martinez cannot be right. No self-respecting mayor will turn over the task of law enforcement to Cafgus.

Cafgus are like dogs of war, trained only to aim and pull the trigger. Police are trained differently. They emerge from training not only skilled in shooting but, more importantly, with a fair sense of what is wrong or right.

A basic understanding of human rights is instilled in the police before they are let loose on the streets to fight criminals. They know what the demands of justice are, and they are expected to employ only legal means to carry out those demands.

In other words, police and Cafgus are oriented differently. They are not interchangeable pieces of the same machinery. You can’t put them together to perform the same function especially if that function bears heavily on civilized society during peacetime.

Even if what Mayor Martinez admits to is only a plan, it should be said this early that it is a very bad plan. And for the leader of a growing city to even think of tapping Cafgus to fight ordinary criminals is as chilling as the plan is bad.

But of course Mayor Martinez may not have made a clean breast of his real plan. And it is only fair to assume that he, in fact, is not telling, in which case it becomes imperative for the president to indeed step and nip in the bud whatever might be in the offing.