Torres title

“Don’t let our bosses down,” P-Noy (President Benigno Aquino III) bade newly appointed PNP Director General Nicanor Bartolome last week. Specifically, he said, Bartolome would serve his bosses well if he made it his “personal advocacy to more aggressively pursue kidnappers, carjackers and other criminal elements in our society.”

Bartolome responded by saying that he was committed to transforming the police, whose image has been mired in corruption and ineptitude. “We shall set targets that measure reform programs through a road map and a score card.”

Well, he doesn’t have to look far to see what he can do to not let his bosses down, to pursue with utmost vigor the criminal elements in our society, to find the first target in his road map of setting things right. It’s right under his nose.

All he has to do is stop Wilfredo Torres dead in his tracks. That will be one huge service to his bosses.

That of course is a job for the Department of Justice, too, to see to it that this fellow is put away for good, and the key to his cell dropped into the bottom of the sea.

This is one person who has been terrorizing subdivision residents in Quezon City, largely middle-class people who worked their asses off to make the payments on their homes. Not unlike the shady characters in America’s Wild West who just grabbed the land around them and sent gun hands to bully the settlers out of their property.

Bartolome is the new marshal in town. He’s got a “High Noon” scenario cut out for him. Though in his case, he has the odds entirely in his favor: he has the whole town behind him. He fails in this, he might as well hang up his tin star and slink away.

I first heard of this Wilfredo Torres way back in the early 1980s when writer and public official Pacifico “Pic” Aprieto, a decent person to the core, complained about him. Pic lived in Sanville and learned one fine day that this person was carrying legal documents that laid a claim to his property. He would have simply dismissed him as a nut case except that this was one nut case whose threats were not purely mental. It took the very physical form of squatters sprouting up in the fringes of his property and thugs amply armed and amply menacing backing up the occupation. This guy would not just lay claim to his property, he would lay waste to it.

Fortunately for Pic, he knew officials in the government and refused to be cowed. Though pacific by nature and not just by name, he fought back.

Pic died quietly in the early 1990s from prostate cancer, but not before he had the satisfaction of securing his property.

I thought nothing more of it until I read the news about this batty RTC judge, Tita Marilyn Payoyo-Villordon, who had granted him ownership of 23.7 hectares of land, which included Sanville, some years ago now giving him leave to enforce it. Truly the justice department has its own work cut out for it, specifically to determine whether this judge’s brains are just naturally addled or several million reasons helped to make them so.

It turns out that this was exactly the same person who was harassing Pic and homeowners in several subdivisions (Tierra Pura was also one of them). Now 75, the fellow is undeterred from trying to separate people from their homes by the knowledge that he won’t be able to bring any of it to the next life. It turns out moreover that this guy has been laying claim to all sorts of property way back before Marcos. “When I was still in UP,” said Chiz Escudero’s father, Salvador, a Sanville resident, “he was already claiming a portion of UP.” It turns out further that he has already been jailed for falsifying documents. He was sentenced to 11 years in October 1973 but was released on conditional pardon by Ferdinand Marcos in 1979.

Prison did not chasten him, and he went back where he left off when he stepped out. Some say he never stopped doing what he did even while in prison, his subalterns carrying out his nasty business for him. Certainly he went back to it with a vengeance, raising the levels of terrorism over the years.

The terrorism has often proved effective. In the late 1990s, according to Sanville residents, the president of the homeowners’ association protested vigorously against Torres claiming the park in Sanville as his property. Suddenly, a truckload of armed thugs materialized before his home and camped out there. Reports to the police went for naught. The guy folded up and stopped complaining.

Fortunately for residents of Sanville and other subdivisions, the Court of Appeals has taken note of Judge Villordon’s insanity and issued a 60-day TRO on her ruling. It has stopped her court from carrying out Torres’ takeover. But that’s way too little, if not altogether too late. It’s so not just because it’s just a two-month reprieve, Sanville residents continuing to see the sword of Damocles dangling over their beds. It’s so because the point is not just to block, or parry, Torres at every turn. The point is to put an end to his oppression once and for all.

The situation is not unlike the one we had during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s time, when she foisted one iniquity after another on us, and we rejoiced each time the Supreme Court thwarted her. When the point was to stop her completely by ending her illegitimate rule. Here, we have someone who has been foisting one iniquity after another on hapless homeowners, who are the PNP’s bosses too. Should we  just content ourselves with the courts reversing themselves and giving the world a respite? That is not the point. The point is to stop him completely by jailing him. This time for life, such as he has much of it left.

If only to make the people, quite apart from him, see one fundamental thing:

There’s a difference between a Torrens title and a Torres one.