Still, impunity

Ukul Talumpa was the mayor of Labangan, Zamboanga del Sur. He, his wife, a 25-year-old relative, and a year-and-a-half old infant were shot and killed by gunmen as they emerged into the bay area from Naia 3. The gunmen, as usual, rode on motorcycles and drove away before terrified guards and onlookers could react. Not as usual, they wore cops’ uniforms underneath their jackets. How they managed to evade every security check in the airport, only they, and NAIA 3 officials, can say. There is no CCTV to record what happened.

Authorities theorize that the killing was motivated by politics. Talumpa had been locked in a feud with his rival, Wilson Nandang, the former mayor whom he beat in the May 2013 elections. Additionally, it might have been caused by drugs. Talumpa had asked the national government some time ago to look into the proliferation of drugs in his hometown of Labangan, a tiny fourth-class municipality of 2,800 souls.

The day before, lawyer Raymund Fortun’s wife was shot as she got off from her car in their house in Las Piñas. She was hit in the nape and the bullet exited through her cheek. Miraculously, she survived, the bullet missing vital parts of her head by a hair’s breadth. A tearful Fortun theorizes the bullet might have been meant for him, his wife has no known enemies who could want her dead.

Barely has the blood dried on the earth where several Mindanao radio commentators were shot and killed a couple of weeks ago than we have this. A pretty bloody prelude to Christmas. Of course Christmas has never  been known to deter cutthroats from cutting throats, some of whom probably going to confession and communion afterward, justifying their hellish ways as a need to earn a living too. But it remains horrific just the same. It remains outrageous just the same.

Public officials, elected or not, have been gunned down in airports before. But in local airports, not national ones. Or indeed international ones. Camarines Sur has seen its share of it, as have other provincial airports. But other than Ninoy Aquino, who was gunned down at the tarmac of the airport that now bears his name, I don’t know of anyone who has been ambushed at Naia as he stepped out of the arrival area.

It makes you feel vulnerable that something like this should happen in familiar turf. No place is safe in the metropolis anymore, whether you are the intended victim or a mere bystander. Indeed, no national institution is ponderous or intimidating or formidable enough to stay the hand of murder anymore. That is how impunity feels.

Certainly, I don’t recall the murder of an official of a municipality of 2,800 souls in any national/international airport. That fact alone is staggering and lends credence to the theory that drugs may have had something to do with it. How in God’s name can an impoverished town in the heart of nowhere carry out a feud that entails hiring gun-wielding, motorcycle-riding, PNP-uniform-wearing gunmen—even allowing for the discounted rates for murder among the teeming slums of Metro Manila and Mindanao—to wreak mayhem in one of the country’s most pacific places?

Which raises an even more staggering question: If a fourth-class municipality can export its murderous intramurals to Metro Manila, what’s to prevent more prosperous, and crime-ridden, municipalities from doing so with more abandon? It can’t help to know that this was by no means the first attempt on Talumpa’s life in Metro Manila. A few years ago, he escaped death in the form of gun-toting assassins in Ermita. That is quite apart from the attempts on his life in Mindanao.

Of course murder by any other name smells just as foul, murder in any place remains just  as reprehensible. But a murder done in Metro Manila and in Naia too raises the bar on impunity to the max, encouraging replication elsewhere. It gives a macabre meaning to that famous line in “New York, New York:” “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” If I can kill there, I can kill anywhere.

But what really scares the hell out of me in all this is the ease with which we are able to factor in this outrage. There is no real outrage being raised against this outrage. The various explanations that these killings are the product of local politics or even drugs (Talumpa), enmity over a legal case (Fortun, or his wife), or even rido (in the case of killings and reprisals in Muslim Mindanao) are enough to give some sense to the senselessness. Worse, as in the case of the killings of the radio commentators, the explanation by an investigating officer that some of the journalists had it coming to them (one openly dared his targets to go ahead and go gunning for him) seems to justify it.  Certainly, they give us enough reason to believe these things can only happen to other people, not to us.

True, government should exert itself to catch the murderers. We would be well within our rights to exhort it to, to badger it to. But there are limits to what even the best of governments can do. As with corruption, we need to do our part too. By refusing to tolerate the intolerable, by refusing to condone the un-condonable, by refusing to let pass the things we may not let pass. The killing of journalists however abusive they are, the attempted murder of a lawyer, or his wife, however you do not like him, the ambushing of a mayor and his companions, however they may be involved in unsavory activities, are those things. They are intolerable. We may not let them pass.

We do not raise a hue and cry over them, and they will come back to haunt, in unexpected ways, in personal ways. That is the way of impunity. It grows, it spreads. We do not stop it while it is happening to others, it will happen to us.

Impunity doesn’t just kill, it kills you and me.