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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Thursday, August 3, 2017
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Failed ‘solution’ to the illegal drug problem
SHOULD we rejoice over the police raid that killed Ozamiz City mayor Reynaldo “Aldong” Parojinog, his wife Susan, sister Mona, brother Octavio Parojinog and 12 unnamed others?
“Susmaryosep!” used to be the normal reaction of people shocked by the gravity of the massacre.
But some reactions in the social media today – e.g., “Good for them” – seem to betray a warped sense of righteousness on presumption that the mayor deserved that “punishment” for illegal drug dealing. No pity for the rest of the victims shrugged off as “collateral damage.”
Whether the mayor was a drug lord is beside the point. The question is whether the police observed the rules of engagement in raiding his house.
The security guards of the mayor could not have matched the firepower of the composite team of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG), Misamis Occidental Police Provincial Office, and the Ozamiz City Police Station.
But if we are to believe the station commander, Chief Inspector Jovie Espenido, the dead could not have died had they not met his group with a barrage of gunfire. They had come not to kill, he insisted, but to serve a search warrant to a suspected drug lord.
“Self-defense” has become the police’s “standard” excuse for killing suspected drug lords. If it’s believable, we have no quarrel with that. But the circumstances behind the Parojinog raid indicated otherwise.
Why the sudden brownout and the disconnection of the CCTV cameras at the time – an unholy 2 a.m. – they were there? The obvious reason could only be to hide from belated public view what was about to transpire.
A whitewash might not prosper against the testimony of a wounded survivor of that raid, who insisted that, contrary to Espenido’s claim, the mayor’s bodyguards had not “welcomed” the raiding team with a barrage of gunfire.
Parojinog is the third mayor killed by the police in the government’s one-year-old war on drugs. The others were Samsudin Dimaukom of Datu Saudi Ampatuan, Maguindanao in October 2016; and Rolando Espinosa Sr. of Albuera, Leyte in November.
Dimaukom and his convoy of nine companions were on the road in Barangay Bulatukan, Makilala, North Cotabato, allegedly to deliver illegal drugs to unnamed clients, when intercepted and died in the ensuing “shootout with the police.”
How the end came to Espinosa could not have been thought of by a movie director aiming for realism. He was asleep in a prison cell when CIDG elements led by Chief Superintendent Marvin Marcos came to serve a “warrant of arrest” but shot him dead instead – as “dead” as the CCTV camera overhead – before he could fire his own gun. Arresting an already arrested and jailed gun holder?
As everybody knows, Marcos has been “rewarded” with the post of officer-in-charge of CIDG Region 12, confident that the case filed against him, et al. – homicide, downgraded from murder – would eventually fizzle into nothing.
In the aftermath of the Espinosa killing, President Rodrigo Duterte announced, “These policemen who were charged, I cannot abandon them because maybe they followed my order to a tee.”
His still prevailing order to policemen is to kill drug suspects if they fight back during anti-drug operations. Blessed are the killer cops who always survive such “shootouts.”
Killing suspects would not end the illegal but very lucrative drug trade because their followers would always be around to take over.
It is ironic that, as today’s headlines scream, 600 kilos or P6.4-billion worth of shabu from China had already passed the Bureau of Customs’ “green lane” when intercepted belatedly.
Now that the President knows that the bulk of shabu comes from China, will he seek the help of his friend, President Xi Jinping? (hvego31@yahoo.com/PN)
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