Execution
THE road was not dark at 7:30 p.m. on February 17. The streetlamps lit Edsa a fluorescent white. Taillights burned red and yellow. Just ahead, McDonald’s arches glowed neon against a backdrop of northern traffic. It was Tuesday night in Quezon City, and it sounded the same as any other Tuesday night in Quezon City: the whine of police whistles, the rough idling of car motors, the random impatient shout. And then the gunshots. Like the report of a car tire. Or a hammer pounded to wood. Or a bullet exploding out of a .45 caliber pistol. Once, twice, thrice, yellow fire bursting from the mouth of a pistol.
This is what people saw, on ABS-CBN’s six o’clock news the next day. A policeman, holding up a hand to stop incoming traffic. The man in the oversized white-T-shirt and shorts, swaggering to the slate-blue sedan at the side of the road, his back crisscrossed with the straps of his holster. The man in the blue uniform, shifting into shooting stance in front of the open door, resting his weight on the balls of his feet, shooting steadily with the same cavalier nonchalance as if he were aiming at a cardboard cutout in a marksmanship class. Then the man in the T-shirt, pulling the body out of the driver’s seat, calmly aiming his rifle down, bang bang. Dead, dead again.
The Quezon City Police District dismissed any allegations of a “rubout.” The officials went on the defensive, and later admitted there “could” have been “possible lapses.” Possibly, it was a lapse that the policemen were not in uniform. But even that could be explained, after all, police officers are permitted to wear civilian clothes in undercover intelligence operations.
The next day, the blue sedan is clean, a car anyone’s father or brother could be driving home from work, only there are bullet holes ripped into the car doors, great gaping holes on the windshield, spider webs of cracks crawling over the glass. The Commission on Human Rights is not happy with the new development. All had been removed, the blood on the seats, the bullets on the floor, the necessary mess that death leaves behind. Oddly, there are no bullet holes on the car’s tires.
The National Police Commission, in a unanimous resolution, ordered the preventive suspension for 90 days of 29 policemen who were involved in the February 17 incident. The ABS-CBN footage, now the “major basis” for investigation, proved that “policemen violated police operational procedures.”
The officials of the QCPD, who continue to deny accusations, insist on their claim that they were only “performing their duties.”
A letter from Public Attorney’s Office (PAO) chief Persida Rueda-Acosta asked Commission on Human Rights Chair Leila de Lima to “cease and desist from further investigating the subject incident due to the apparent bias, partiality and prejudgment” that she displayed. This is, of course, the same impartial, unbiased Acosta who said there were “no grave offenses,” the same bleeding heart who added as proof of innocence the fact that no civilians got hurt in the encounter. “Ma’m we didn’t want to fire just then because civilians in the area might be hit.”
Voltaire says that the longer people continue to believe in absurdities, they will continue to perform atrocities.
Her version of events is this: that the third suspect, Ronald Batapa, who on video was hauled halfway out of the car then shot repeatedly as he lay slumped on the ground, was in fact being carried out of the car to be taken to the hospital by the considerate gentlemen who had initially shot him. Acosta reported that the limp and bleeding Batapa fired back when he was being hauled out of the car, and that he was pumped with bullets in self-defense. In the video, he is dragged out and shot point-blank.
A lawyer of the policemen, Jose Ramon Remollo, said: “What the officers did was just to neutralize the suspect. Not to kill.”
It is an old, old justification. “We were only doing our job,” say the men who led Jun Lozada out of the airport away from his waiting family, and drove the frightened man in circles around Metro Manila. “The public knows I am doing my job,” says Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, after being threatened with impeachment for sitting on half a dozen varying cases against government officials, including the World Bank fiasco, and after announcing she is considering filing libel suits against her detractors. “She’s just doing her job, just let her alone, leave her alone,” says First Gentleman Mike Arroyo of his Ateneo batchmate Gutierrez.
Dr. Racquel Fortun, one of only two forensic pathologists in the country, says that the police autopsy was marked by “confusion” and mixed up the injuries sustained by Ronald Batapa, Alfredo Pimentel and Romeo de Guzman. “In one body, it was reported that the clavicle was fractured, but definitely it was not. And I think there was some confusion because that description [was] meant for a particular body and yet it was actually seen on a different body,” Fortun said.
The PAO says that re-autopsies cannot be trusted, that evidence is degraded by the time there is a second autopsy. Logical, although it is difficult to imagine how the disappearance of a fractured clavicle is due to a “degradation” of evidence.
Dorothy Thompson once said that there is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings. In a country like this, where a small girl and her desperate father can be shot 70 times in the middle of a police operation, with the entire police force denying any responsibility, it is easy to pick out the one truth left: that those with much to hide don’t lend themselves very well to the pursuit of truth.
