Filipinos shuttered the bad news of 2008 with a last spasm of violence in the alleged mauling of the De la Paz family members by the sons of Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman and their bodyguards over an altercation involving golf etiquette at the Valley Golf Club on Dec. 26.

The golf club mayhem sparked a cause celebre and public outrage among the blog community over violence perpetrated by functionaries holding public office. The assault took place in week marked by violence in the war zone in Mindanao. The Philippine National Police reported that on Christmas Eve renegade forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front attacked civilian communities in Senator Ninoy Aquino town in the province of Sultan Kudarat, killing at least seven people. The attacks continued until Sunday in Sultan Kudarat and in the province of North Cotabato.

These attacks were staged by rebels in the Mindanao separatist war, and have been taken by the public in stride almost as a normal part of the conflict stemming from the Moro separatist movement. But the violence at Valley Golf Cub is an entirely different thing. Even giving allowance to the fact that the police investigation is still incomplete and that there are two sides to the case, a number of facts have crystallized in reports lodged with the Antipolo City police by the De la Paz family:

First, Nasser Pangadaman Jr., son of the Cabinet member and who is also mayor of Masiu, Lanao del Sur, and his brother Hussein, and their supposed bodyguards, allegedly beat up a Pampanga fishpond owner, Delfin de la Paz, and his 14-year old son, Bino, a first year-high school student at the Ateneo de Manila University, following an argument over golf etiquette.

Second, the Pangandamans appear to be the aggressors, and the De la Paz father and son were the victims. The latter filed a complaint of physical injuries with the Antipolo police, although Secretary Pangandaman was not accused of joining the violent fray. He claimed it was De la Paz who first hit Nasser Jr. with an umbrella. He said De la Paz was later helped by Bino, prompting Nasser Jr. and Hussein to retaliate. Secretary Pangandaman claimed he didn’t join the assault, but he admitted to reporters, “There really was brawl. They did punch each other, but it was De la Paz who started it.”

De la Paz, 56, told reporters that during the altercation, Nasser Jr. suddenly attacked him and his son, punching and kicking them and shouting: “Don’t you know me?” Bambee, De la Paz’s 18-year-old daughter, who witnessed the brawl, said Nasser Jr. continued to attack even though her brother was already on his knees. In her blog, she says, “Once again my brother pleads, says sorry, and is crying… But no, the relentless mayor still punches him in the face, and then he sees my dad and goes after my dad again.”

Another member of the De la Paz family told reporters: “How could a 56-year-old man, a 14-year-old boy and an 18-year-old girl fight it out with five, six or how many big men? Have you seen how big the mayor [Nasser Jr.] is?”

Amid a welter of conflicting accounts of the incident, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the incident highlighted an unequal encounter between officials holding public authority and plain powerless citizens. This abuse of authority has been the stamp of the violence that has defined the response of the high officials of the administration, in which Secretary Pangandaman is a key Cabinet member, to social and political issues confronting it.

The government is closing the old year with an unabated record of violations of human and political rights in a culture of violence perpetrated by either state security authorities or state functionaries enjoying impunity from accountability. Such is the culture in which functionaries like Secretary Pangandaman, his mayor son, and their bodyguards, and the law enforcement and justice department officials, are bred. It is a culture that propagates arrogance and violence as a response to insurgencies that have now shifted to the parliamentary arena from the mode of armed struggle. It is a culture that has made a monster out of retired Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan.

The justice department has been directed to conduct an inquiry into the Valley Golf mayhem, and the prosecutors will go through the motions of investigating to determine criminal liability. This process is biased against the De la Paz family. The violence has left evidence of injuries on the victims, but so far the aggressors have not shown any sign of their hair having been ruffled in the brawl.

The justice department is a forum that promotes bullying by public authorities of the weak and that protects them from being accountable for the numerous death squad killings of social rebels over the past four years in the campaign to end insurgencies by 2010.

Before the Christmas holidays set in, Pangandaman’s Department of Agrarian Reform had become a killing field of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) after the administration left it for Congress to strangle. The administration allowed Congress to pass a joint resolution that extended CARP for another six months after it expires on Dec. 31 but removed the agrarian reform program’s mandatory provision of distributing land titles to farmers out of landed estates.

By the time Congress finally decides the fate of CARP in June next year, Pangandaman may not have any more portfolio that he can abuse to bully the weak. But there are still power bases in the structure of Cabinet positions and local offices from which violence can be used to settle disputes, not excluding those involving golf etiquette.