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Philippines
Friday, March 29, 2024

That bloody Sunday

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Three mayors linked to the illegal drug trade have already been killed. Perhaps it’s time for those still involved in this nefarious activity—as well as those critical of the campaign against them—to rethink their position.

Naturally, I expect those opposed to President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs to use the killing of Ozamiz City Mayor Reynaldo “Aldong” Parojinog Sr. for political reasons to look to ratchet up their criticism after last Sunday’s events. But I do not expect them to gain any more adherents to their cause, mainly because the members of the Parojinog clan do not fit the profile of poor, powerless and innocent victims of Duterte’s drug war that his critics like to rhapsodize about.

The Parojinogs of Ozamiz, after all, founded the notorious Kuratong Baleleng gang, which started as an anti-communist movement before it embarked on a nationwide crime rampage. Though the family may have “diversified” to local politics, employing a strategy of Robin Hood-style patronage and old-fashioned fear to keep the people of a sleepy provincial capital in its iron grip, it apparently still considered the drug trade as an important part of its investment portfolio.

Of course, the usual investigations that follow such sensational incidents can be expected to commence soon, focusing on such things as the ill-timed service of the search warrants and the disconnecting of the closed-circuit television cameras by the members of the police raiding team. But I expect a quick end to such efforts, which will mostly be initiated (especially in Congress) by people who wish to make political capital out of the raid.

There will be little mileage that can be gained from the bloody assault, anyway.

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The pre-dawn arrival of the cops was necessary, after all, because the Parojinogs had enlisted the local populace in their defense, through “vigils” conducted nightly outside their compound to protect the clan from inconvenient arrivals of police teams. If the police had to deal with the “people power” shield employed by the Parojinogs, the body count would have been a lot bigger and the suspects could have easily escaped.

The disconnection of the CCTV cameras was required because they would have telegraphed the arrival of the police at the compound. The Parojinogs did not have to know what they were up against, the better to elude their captors.

As Senator Panfilo Lacson implied, the police seem to have learned from the killing of Albuera, Leyte Mayor Rolando Espinosa and have now followed procedure in the assault on the Parojinog compound. And Lacson knows not only how badly the police bungled the Espinosa case, but also how the Kuratong Baleleng syndicate that the family founded operates.

I suspect that whatever Congress probes will be conducted by the opposition in aid of the continuing effort to remove Duterte on this specific matter will die out quicker than most. The Parojinogs, with their criminal record, their ill-gotten political clout and even the Hermes bags favored by one family member, are simply not the sort of people that would look good in a Pieta-like posed photograph of EJK victims.

Even Senators Franklin Drilon and Francis Pangilinan, who have already made noises about alleged irregularities in the assault, should understand that. At the very least, they should know that they have to pick their battles against Duterte’s very popular war on drugs very carefully, unless they are willing to pay the high political price.

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What the citizens should learn, in turn, from what happened in Ozamiz last Sunday is not to sell their votes to their local warlords, especially the sort that have a history of violence and criminality like the family that founded the Kuratong Baleleng. The rise of the political fortunes of the Parojinogs, after all, is a textbook case of a criminal syndicate that expanded into the political realm in order to expand its influence and to protect itself.

Of course, you can also say that voters, especially those living in impoverished communities all over the country, have routinely come to expect the sort of patronage that local political warlord clans like the Parojinogs dispense. At the same time, I know of so many politicians who say that, even if they are not running a criminal syndicate, they are practically being forced into a life of crime just so they can pay their way to office or to counteract the same strategy when it is employed against them.

That the Parojinogs have so effortlessly transformed themselves from criminals to local political warlords is something that Duterte must address. Surely, killing off the members of such a notorious political clan can give pause to people of similar intent; but the root causes of such political anomalies must be address, as well, if we are ever to rid ourselves of unsavory characters who have decided that they also need to become elected leaders of their localities.

The Parojinog family may have been stopped in its tracks in Ozamiz after Sunday’s bloody events. But what’s to stop some other criminal ringleader in some other Ozamiz—or even in the same Ozamiz, for that matter—from following the same template?

I don’t really know. But for the moment, at least, I am comforted that such scandalous political aberrations don’t always end up the way they were so cynically planned.

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