Keep them alive

In the terrible heyday of Colombia’s civil strife—“a nightmarish period of bloodletting so empty of meaning it is simply called ‘La Violencia’—terror became art,” wrote Mark Bowden in his book “Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw.” He wrote: “In Colombia it wasn’t enough to hurt or even kill your enemy; there was ritual to be observed. Rape had to be performed in public, before mothers, husbands, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. And before you killed a man, you first made him beg, scream, and gag… or first you killed those he most loved before his eyes. To amplify revulsion and fear, victims were horribly mutilated and left on display.”

A whiff of that horrifying state of affairs seems to have made its way to the Philippines, with the death of a former militiaman who had served as state witness in the 2009 Maguindanao massacre case against the Ampatuans, the main accused. Esmail Amil Enog went missing for two months, and was recently confirmed to have been murdered, apparently in retaliation for his testimony against the warlord family in July 2011. But Enog wasn’t merely shot, he was brutally dismembered. “Chi-nop-chop, parang chainsaw massacre” was how private prosecutor Nena Santos described it.

Enog might not be the first and last victim of vendetta in the ongoing trial. Another possible witness, Alijol Ampatuan—a distant relative of the accused—is also missing and is feared to have suffered the same fate.

It’s bad enough that the crime for which the Ampatuans are in the dock is among the world’s most ghastly acts—57 people summarily executed then buried en masse along with their vehicles and personal effects in a bare-faced effort to wipe them off the face of the earth. What’s worse is how, despite the accused warlord family’s power having been supposedly clipped and the main suspects hauled to jail, the Ampatuans still retain enough wherewithal in their home province to commit acts of terror intended to intimidate and silence anyone who would dare go against the family’s interests.

Why was Enog not safeguarded by the government’s witness protection program? Santos said he did not want to be confined to a government safe house. But given Enog’s key role in the prosecution of the accused and the very real risk that he would be subject to reprisal, shouldn’t that decision not have been left to him alone?

Two fathers, Arsenio Evangelista and Oliver Lozano, are asking the same thing. They have lost sons purportedly to the notorious car theft syndicate led by the Dominguez brothers, who are now behind bars. But in circumstances similar to Enog’s, the main witness against the Dominguezes, Alfred Mendiola, was found dead recently, along with two other men, their bodies bound and gagged and with bullet wounds in their heads. Like Enog, Mendiola “didn’t want restriction,” said Justice Secretary Leila de Lima. “He wanted to be able to go around freely. We told him it was not allowed because he was high-risk.”

Mendiola was let out, anyway, subject only to a waiver he reportedly signed to attest that he was leaving the justice department’s custody at will. Twice before his ultimate disappearance, Mendiola was said to have slipped away from his safe house, at one time even going on an out-of-town trip with family and associates. Why the star witness of one of the nation’s biggest criminal trials was allowed such dangerous leeway is a puzzle. In Lozano’s view, it is a fatal shortcoming of the witness protection program. “[The program] needs to be amended,” he said. “Under the present law, a breach of the agreement leads to the termination [of the witness] as a state witness. But if you terminate the witness, you may lose the case. We need a witness to convict.”

Without a witness, a case hangs by a thread. Latest reports, for instance, say that one of the witnesses in the electoral sabotage case against ex-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has refused to testify. The witness—Lilian Radam, a former election official who was to link former Commission on Elections chair Benjamin Abalos to fraud in the 2007 elections—was a no-show in court, thus allowing Abalos to post bail despite poll sabotage being a nonbailable offense.

The usual claim that a case is solved with the filing of charges and the clapping of suspects in jail, without successful prosecution and conviction, is hollow, careless and negligent, and an affront to the cause of justice. The government must do more to make the charges stick—first and foremost by keeping witnesses alive.