Stop the killers October 12, 2006

I HAD just talked about the killings of journalists and political activists in a gathering of Filipino press clubs in the United States when I read about the killing of Bishop Alberto Ramento of the Aglipayan Church in Tarlac City. My instincts, like those of Ramento’s kin and friends, told me the killing was a political one, notwithstanding that the cops were quick to say it was a simple case of robbery. Ramento had been stabbed several times and his room in his San Sebastian parish was missing articles.

My instincts were right. It was far too much coincidence that the bishop, who had figured prominently in anti-government activities such as a citizens’ initiative to investigate the cheating in the last elections, would end up the victim of a crude robbery. It happens all the time in detective stories and thrillers with a “twist” -- a high-profile murder turning out to have originated from low-profile causes, the sublime springing from the paralytic. But that is so rarely so in real life. In real life, people are killed for the most obvious reasons.

There were many holes in the police’s version to begin with. Ramento, though an archbishop of his church, or precisely because of it -- archbishops of Catholic churches are another matter entirely -- was not a rich man. He had no business being robbed. Moreover, the notion that a notorious gang operating in the area would settle for a DVD player and a ring, whose value lay only in its sentiment, strained credulity. The clincher was that Jovito Palparan’s favorite law enforcers, the Tarlac police, could actually catch the perpetrators in record time and even return the stolen goods. That did not just strain credulity, that snapped it like a dry twig.

As it turns out, based on the findings of a private fact-finding team headed by lawyer Rex Fernandez, Ramento was probably killed by a man who relished his assignment. Ramento’s wounds bore it out. This crime wasn’t done by someone, or some people, who was or were in a hurry to get away. This was done by someone who took his time. “The most evil thing,” says Fernandez, “is that he really intended to kill him (Ramento) and was proud of it.”

“Evil” is the word. The obscenity of it doesn’t just lie in the fact that persons of the cloth have now become fair game for murderers who more than likely carry with them an official mandate. The obscenity lies in the efficient, dispassionate, business-like way in which dissenters are being dispatched. The murder of Pablo Glean, Jejomar Binay’s security aide, already upped the ante on the mayhem, bringing it, as it did, right at the heart of the capital. The murder of the head of an entire church, the fifth biggest in the country, the Obispo Maximo of the Aglipayan Church, ups it even further. The graduation or up-scaling is happening methodically, systematically, implacably. And there’s little that stands in its path.

It is not hard to see why Ramento’s murderers didn’t mind including him in today’s mounting dead. They probably figured that like the members of the Bayan Muna party-list group and the countryside journalists, he wouldn’t be sorely missed. He was not a priest or, heaven forbid, a bishop, of the Catholic Church. He wasn’t Eraño Manalo or Mike Velarde who could command hordes at the snap of a finger. All he had by way of stature were his towering principles. That might have made him bigger than the others in the reckoning of God, but that made him so much smaller than the others in the reckoning of those who were out to do him evil, and did.

But that brings me to something even more evil, or obscene, than the killings themselves, systematic and methodical as they are, inexorably graduating and climbing up the ranks of dissenters as they do. That is the lack of ferocity with which we are greeting them. Of course, as Archbishop Angel Lagdameo says, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, which he heads, has already condemned the political killings. But it has done so in the most pro forma, if not timid, of terms. Everyone can condemn the killings. Even Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who did so loudly in her Sona speech, notwithstanding that she is doing nothing to stop them. Indeed, notwithstanding that her hands are awash in the blood of the dead, completely subverting, as she did, her condemnation of the killings by holding up Palparan’s malefaction as worthy of universal emulation.

In this respect, the Catholic Church is no more and no less than the national media which have also condemned the killings of their own in the provinces but have brought no real pressure to bear on the authorities to catch -- not to speak of jailing -- the killers. Everyone can condemn the killings of journalists, too, even Arroyo, who did so repeatedly in her last sortie abroad.

The point is to go beyond mere condemnation, “in the strongest terms,” the point is to raise an accusing finger at the true source of those killings, which is government itself. The point is for all the institutions of society -- the Church, the media, the legal community, civil society et al. -- that still believe that life is heaven’s gift, that the life of another person is as precious as one’s own, to hale Palparan, Norberto Gonzales and Arroyo herself into the court of public opinion at least, if not of law -- that will come later -- and bring them to justice. The point is to put the pulpit, the pages of newspapers and the bandwidths of radio and television, and the weight of judgment of the entire civilized world to bear on the perpetrators, telling them with the stern benignity of a magistrate that no one may get away with murder, least of all to defend an illegitimate rule.

All these institutions have already tolerated lying, cheating and stealing -- whining life goes on. Must they tolerate murder, too?

We want to stop the killings, let’s stop the killers.

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