Atimonan a year later

The incident was bad enough. Eleven of 13 policemen and civilians were killed with multiple gunshots, a number with two wounds in the head, the worst showing 16 fatal shots all over the body. The first vehicle had 196 bullet entry points, the second 61—sustained from an alleged shootout with 22 policemen and 14 military personnel at a checkpoint in Barangay Lumutan, Atimonan, Quezon, on Jan. 6, 2013, or a full year ago.

But worse was the attempted coverup that followed. First, the official police report that it was a shootout, later debunked by the National Bureau of Investigation which said “the victims were summarily executed and all indications point to a  ‘rubout,’” and that, according to an NBI forensic expert, “there is no indication that any of the passengers of the two vehicles fired shots directed towards the outside.” Second, the shocking audacity of the policemen involved not only to tamper with the evidence at the crime scene to back their yarn about a shootout, but also to mislead investigators by submitting a different set of firearms when the NBI demanded that they submit the guns used at the operation for testing.

By any standard, such conduct would have merited the steepest penalties for the police and military personnel involved. Yet, a year later, even after the NBI had recommended that charges of multiple murder be filed against the ground commander, Supt. Hansel Marantan; a former Calabarzon regional police director, Chief Supt. James Andrew Melad; and 33 others involved in the incident (19 members of the Philippine National Police and 14 members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines), none of the 22 policemen have been meted out administrative sanctions.

The accused cops are confined in Camp Crame’s Custodial Center. Meanwhile, 11 members of the Army Special Forces Battalion, the military detachment that provided support to the police operation, have been exonerated, the charges against them dropped by the Department of Justice along with the charges against Marantan’s superior, Melad.

Marantan, the only police officer who was wounded in the bloodbath, still maintains it was a legitimate shootout. But the PNP’s own fact-finding committee said no shootout had occurred, and the NBI report supplied the motive. Marantan organized the ambush to kill Victor Siman, one of the passengers of the attacked convoy who was said to be an illegal gambling lord with his own private army in Southern Luzon. Siman was engaged in a supposed turf rivalry with another alleged jueteng operator, Cenen “Tita” Dinglasan, who counted Marantan as a protector.

Marantan had received P100,000 from the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission to gather intelligence on and eventually move against Siman under an operational plan called “Coplan Armado.” Apparently, that was just the pretext; Marantan was on a mission to eliminate Dinglasan’s rival. Or, as the NBI report put it: “The Atimonan encounter was a well calculated plan to close the book on Vic Siman under the pretext of Coplan Armado, using government forces and resources. The fault of the other victims was that they were with the wrong company, at the wrong place and at the wrong time.”

The Atimonan rubout is one more textbook example of the rot at the heart of the Philippines’ law enforcement system. Many of the PNP brass are in the pockets of gambling operators, drug lords and assorted lowlifes with money to burn for official protection. As in the Atimonan “shootout,” these police officers have no compunction using the power and resources that come with their badges and offices to stage Potemkin operations for the benefit of their favored criminal syndicates. No less than the country’s top crime-fighting bureau says so, in a report that should make the entire PNP hierarchy cringe in shame.

And yet, a full year after the bloodbath that has exposed, yet again, the outrageous levels of corruption and criminality in the police ranks, there has been no headway in the punishment of the perpetrators, as though certain powers were banking on the inevitable disappearance of the story from the newspaper headlines and the TV news. The government needs forceful reminding that the Atimonan case is not closed with the rendering of the PNP and NBI reports, or even the filing of charges against the gunmen. The case gets resolved only when the guilty are punished. What is taking the government so long to do so?