Mindanao is comfortably distant from where we are. We hear about violence and kidnapping there but take it as a fact of life. However, the details slowly coming out regarding the massacre of women, journalists and innocent passersby who simply happened to be in the wrong place in Maguindanao that day make your skin crawl and your blood boil. We are not yet into election season but blood has already been drawn. We can only hope this will be the last. Will the victims of what media call the ?Maguindanao Massacre? ever get justice? Will the murderers be caught? Will the mastermind pay for this crime?
Twenty-five years ago in Zamboanga City, the colorful Mayor Cesar Climaco was shot and killed in public, in broad daylight. That crime remains unsolved to this day.
My family visited Zamboanga regularly when I was a boy. We were not from there, we had no relatives there, but my mother was drawn to the imported goods in the barter trade market?like ants to sugar. My father was then busy developing what was to become the first 5-star hotel in the city located on Pasonanca Park, called the Zamboanga Plaza, now a historical ruin like Angkor Wat. It was during these trips that I met the noisy Mayor Climaco who went around town in his motorcycle. Everyone greeted him with a genuine smile or the wave of a hand. Children chanted his name as he passed by and he reciprocated by showering them with candy from his pockets. Here was someone who was loved by his people, yet he met a violent death.
Climaco didn?t fit my textbook idea of what a mayor looked like because the few times I saw him he was in shorts and slippers. As a martial law baby, I saw Manila Mayor Amado Bagatsing?s photos in the newspapers and asked myself why he looked so stiff in his Pierre Cardin-cut Barong Tagalog he seemed to be not out of place in a coffin.
In contrast, Climaco was colorful and to my child?s eyes literally larger than life. When I asked my father why Climaco didn?t comb his long grey hair, I was told that he stopped having his hair cut when martial law was declared in 1972, and that he would remain this way until democracy was restored. He did not live to see the dawn break.
On the morning of Nov. 14, 1984, Climaco directed rescue and relief efforts in a section of downtown Zamboanga that had burned down. It is said that as he passed some coffins being prepared for the victims, he remarked jokingly, ?Hoy! Reserve one for me.? That joke was to be his last, and turned grim and prophetic because as he boarded his motorcycle to continue his rounds around the city, a man went behind him and shot him in the back of the head, with the bullet exiting on his right cheek. The assassin walked away quietly, unchallenged. Climaco was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
Shortly before his assassination Climaco spread the news that the military was going to do him in. He probably thought that by making raw intelligence public it would make the mastermind think twice. He was wrong. Police and military investigators pointed to a Muslim group lead by the Alih brothers out to avenge the death of their brother who was killed in a checkpoint a month earlier.
It has been 25 years and Climaco?s assassination remains unsolved. Climaco remains alive in my childhood memories?and in the transcript of an interview I had with the late Fr. Hilario Lim, another colorful character. Father Lim, an ex-Jesuit, was expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1958 when he refused to follow his vows of obedience and continuously sought the Filipinization of the religious orders in the Philippines then headed by foreigners. Father Lim was not expelled because he threatened to expose the so-called ?Jesuit chastity belt,? about which his primary source was Cesar Climaco. He narrated:
?[This] cannot be proven either way because the person who told the story is dead?this story was told to me by the pilyo-est (naughtiest) man in Zamboanga. The Jesuit chastity belt? What could it be? It?s just lead tied to the head of the penis so that it will not erect. Climaco exasperated me because every time I spoke about priests, especially Jesuits, he would stop me and say, ?No versa a varno y plomo. No hay. No hay plomo.? This is the pilyo-est man in Zamboanga and he must have seen a Jesuit through a hole while adjusting the plomo! Or maybe some sacristan told him how he saw the plomo on the bed while the priest was taking a bath. There could be something to it? Burgos and Rizal exempt the Jesuits from the sexual excesses of the friars. How do you explain that? ... I have never come across a tsismis (rumor) or a bit of scandal that a Jesuit had violated his vow of chastity. Now, I don?t know, kasi iba na ngayon, but to satisfy my curiosity and answer the unanswered question of the Jesuit being so chaste, then you must give weight to this story of the chastity belt.?
Climaco remains alive in history, he is commemorated by a marker from the National Historical Institute. He remains alive in my memory, and he remains alive in my notes, as a unverifiable source of information on the Jesuit chastity belt.
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On Friday, Nov. 28, I will deliver a lecture on ?Chastity covers, Phallic implements and the Boxer Codex: Exploring Philippine Prehistory? at the Ayala Museum at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu
