Rebel without a clue
Daddy’s girls
By Patricia Evangelista
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:09:00 12/14/2008
Filed Under: Police, Crime, Government
IT happened on a Monday, to a 7-year-old girl on her way to school in Gingoog City. It was a little after seven in the morning, and her papa had just lifted her up from the motorcycle. And then there was a short, sharp hiss, what a vendor said sounded like the popping of a tire. At 7:15 a.m., Aristeo Padrigao was dead, a single 9mm bullet in his right jaw.
His daughter shook her father. “Bakod na, Papa, kay daghan na kay dugo.” Wake up, Papa, you’ve spilled so much blood. Papa did not wake up. The men in the motorcycle, the silent men in masks and crash helmets, rode off while the little girl held her bloodied father.
Padrigao was 55 when he died on Nov. 17. He was a radio commentator for dxRS, and a columnist for the Mindanao Monitor Today. His little girl had blood on her hands when she ran home to tell her mother what happened. When Teresita came, the police were still on their way.
It happened late Friday night at the United Parañaque Subdivision 4. There was a shootout, the bank robbers fleeing the scene, the policemen not far behind. Sixteen people were dead in the silence after the gunfire. Then the cameras came, the media with their white lights and microphones and coils of cable. Questions were asked. There were bodies beside motorcycles, blood on the concrete. And then there was a woman, tall and thin, running, clutching a bouquet of flowers. And they followed her, the police and the media and the neighbors who had cowered in their homes during the 40-minute gun battle. And then they saw him, the man slumped on the street in a blue shirt, the single man’s slipper outside the car door, the grimy yellow stuffed elephant on the ground.
A witness says Philippine National Police-Special Action Force (PNP-SAF) members trained their guns and opened fire on 53-year-old Alfonso de Vera even after he threw himself out of his vehicle, clutching his wounded 7-year-old daughter.
They call it crossfire. They say it was collateral damage. Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile says it was a function of necessity. In an encounter, there is only one rule of engagement: survival. “There is no other way. You do not talk about human rights at that point. You talk of survival.”
The windshield of the Isuzu Crosswind is studded with bullet holes.
Resident Larry Indiana, a former vice mayor of Bongabong, Nueva Vizcaya, said he and his neighbors saw at least seven SAF agents shoot and kill the De Veras.
“I saw them,” said a witness, “I saw the SAF operatives fire their guns, and they didn’t stop when Alfonso went out of the car. They kept firing at him. They did not stop until he died on his knees.”
The senator delivers his diatribe with the air of a preacher on a pulpit. “If it just so happens that it is in a crowded place then my God they cannot stop even in a matter of self-defense. If you’re not a law enforcement agent and somebody shoots at you and you have a gun, you have to preserve your life, you have to shoot also if there are people who are unintended victims of your shots then it’s just too bad.”
When Lilian de Vera knelt on the street that Friday night, her husband studded with bullets, her smiling little girl gone, Director Leopoldo Bataoil, chief of the National Capital Region Police Office, asked for her understanding. She had blood on her hands when she told him she understood nothing, that she did not trust him, that there was no reason to kill her little angel, that her husband was a good man.
I write this one Saturday in December, two weeks before Christmas. I remember sitting under a table in the newsroom last week, watching the news report while a roomful of news veterans watched in silence as Lilian de Vera cried. I remember picking up my phone to call my own father, to ask how he is, to ask if he was okay, to tell him I loved him.
Nobody is safe, that is what Enrile is saying. Anyone is fair game, and the men with guns, in uniform or out, have more right to survival than little girls with yellow elephants, or fathers on motorcycles who laugh with their small daughters. This is his lesson to all of us who mistakenly believe in the humanity of the individual.
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Email: pat.evangelista@gmail.com
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