Blood brothers
A boy died last Monday.
His name was Cris Anthony Mendez. His friends from the National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG) called him CA, and his pictures show a boy who made faces at the camera while surrounded by friends. This year was his last in the University of the Philippines Diliman, the year he sat in the student council. He was the eldest of his family, and his mother in Tiaong, Quezon believed he would pull them out of poverty. He was 20 years old.
Cris was tall, and thin, and kind, and when he was killed last Monday, his killers ran away and tried to forget who he was.
I write this at dawn, six days since he was carried into the Veteran’s Memorial Medical Center, battered and bruised purple. The doctors say Cris was dead on arrival. According to the statement of security guard Jonathan Garduce, it was Dr. Francisco Cruz, a VMMC physician, who brought Cris in from a white Toyota Innova. And after leaving information, Cruz and his companions rushed out. Reports say Dr. Cruz has gone on emergency leave.
According to classmates in UP Law, his son Miko is a member of Sigma Rho, a UP Diliman law-based fraternity. Chief Insp. Lino Banaag of the QCPD-CIDU told this paper that the doctor has gone into hiding.
Cris Mendez left testimony with his friends that he was joining Sigma Rho, and that Ariel Paolo Ante, chair of the NCPAG student council, was his recruiter and initiation master. Ante has disappeared. In a report from this paper, Ante asked Cris’ friends to wish him good luck “for the initiation” which was to take place over the weekend.
Right now, the men who watched Cris die can still sleep in their beds at night. They remember how his eyes looked those last few minutes. They know if he cried, if he begged; if he said please, stop. They held his broken body on the way to the hospital. They saw him and touched him and heard him scream, and today some of them still go to class and study human rights law.
There are many things I do not understand. I understand that these fraternity men are scholars, law students, people educated by the state in the hope that someday they will give back in service to the nation. I do not understand what sort of twisted logic can make intelligent men believe that friendship and loyalty need to be proven through a brutal initiation.
“Such distorted values,” as UP Diliman Chancellor Sergio Cao says, “have no place in an institution of higher learning like UP.” Hazing is illegal, and has been for more than a decade. The administration is currently building its case against Sigma Rho, and its officers have been suspended.
Last Friday, Cris’ friends from NCPAG lit candles and gathered on the steps of the Palma Hall building. There were around 200 of them, less than the numbers of those who protested tuition fee increases, thousands less than those who turned up for last Christmas’ lantern parade. The Office of the Vice President for Public Affairs has received more calls over the streaking of two women during the Oblation Run than he has regarding Cris’ death. This is UP. We say we stand for the people. We condemn the violence of the war against terror. We rage against those who mangle the Constitution. We fill the streets with our numbers for the disappeared and the distressed. Yet we continue to work and study beside barbarians who whip unresisting boys into submission. Today one boy is dead. One life is gone. Many others have been lost before, but were forgotten. Why are we silent now?
I have been told that the men of Sigma Rho are men of character. Maybe they tell themselves it was an accident, that they did not intend for Cris to die, and perhaps that is true. Maybe they can convince themselves that they are good people. Last month they built houses for charity, played with children, sweated for the less fortunate under the heat of an afternoon sun. Maybe they have girlfriends who sigh over Valentine’s presents, and mothers who hug them in the morning. And maybe, like so many of their illustrious brothers, they will become senators and opinion makers and judges of men.
Sigma Rho has closed ranks. There is a conspiracy of silence, even among the alumni. In spite of evidence linking members to Cris and his death, members deny they know him, and that any sort of hazing has taken place.
Character is not the ability to slam a paddle on bare legs, or the strength to endure it. Character is not “standing by a Sigma Rhoan, right or wrong,” as they claimed they do in their freshman orientation in UP Law. Character is the willingness to stand alone, for what is right, for the boy named Cris who once laughed with his friends, for the truth that may stop the next boy from being beaten to death at the hands of such gentlemen of character. Every man who bears the name of this fraternity, or one who behaves in a manner similar to this, is a man with blood on his hands.
This is how they will be judged. Not by what they have achieved, or how great they become. They will be judged by this moment, when they have chosen to run, to hide, to remain silent.
In Tiaong, Quezon, Cris’ mother sits beside his coffin. She is quiet, and her eyes are flat and blank. And then she shakes her head, violently, and moans, and her wail cuts through the thick air of the quiet funeral parlor. There is anger here, and a stunned sort of disbelief. Why, she asks, why her son, her Cris who was such a good boy? Why did they have to kill him, they didn’t have to, and even if they had beaten him up, she would have made him well, she would have nursed him, she would have gotten a doctor even if she was poor. And while she trembles, she tells his killers that someday, they will have children too.
How can men, who gleefully smash their paddles behind thighs and arms, be called brothers by their victims? Don’t they know that had they died the way Cris died, none of their loyal fraternity brods would call them brother?
