Going to the dogs

The murder of congressman Rodel Batocabe of the Ako Bicol party-list group allegedly on orders of a political rival he is expected to challenge for the mayorship of a town in Bicol is as high profile an act of political violence as political acts of violence go in the Philippines.

Any person in the country with a fair sense of what is going on around him could not have missed the incident. It was all over the news. Not only that, it stoked such indignation the bounty for information leading to the arrest of the killers came swift and big, even the president chipped in to the kitty.

And as swift and big the prize money was, so was progress on the case quick and explosive. The triggerman in the brazen assassination surrendered within days, apparently in fear for his life and the realization in the hopelessness of his case. He lost no time implicating the victim's political rival, who denied any hand in the killing, as the mastermind.

But if you think everything was going smoothly in the quest for justice for Batocabe, then you have not been paying real and good attention. You missed the absence of any direct condemnation of the savagery and atrocity by a sector that otherwise would have wasted no time condemning other killings.

So far, none of the priests and bishops who are quick to summon the media to issue statements of condemnation of killings associated with the government's war on illegal drugs have come out just as openly to condemn the killing of Batocabe. Certainly all killings are senseless. They are all deeds of evil. Who the victims are ought to make no difference.

Yet here we are, all quiet on the clergy front. Of particularly loud silence are the mum lips of prominent men of the cloth who have made damning the president for his policies some sort of a running homily outside the ambit of any religious rite. Where are the bleeding hearts for the loss of innocent lives?

Actually, there is a difference between the death of Batocabe and the deaths of suspects in the government's war on illegal drugs. In the war on drugs, the government can at least claim regularity in operations and the victims can at least be regarded as suspected law violators.

But Batocabe, while a politician and thus regarded by some mistrust and disdain by some, was not doing anything illegal or sinful at the time of his killing. His only fault, if it can be called that, was to get in the way of the interests of another politician. And that is as condemnable as hell. Yet not a word of protest came from those who think they have a foot in heaven.