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Opinion
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
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EDITORIAL
“I
Adelle Chua, Editor
Killing the youth
will kill people if they destroy our youth.”
This was the warning to drug users and pushers that President Rodrigo Duterte issued when he spoke to a group of Boy Scouts at the Palace in April. “You drug addicts, since you’ve been identified, avoid the streets, stay in your homes because I will throw you in Manila Bay. I’ll make you fertilizer for the fish,” he said. The recent body count in the Philippine National Police’s “one-time, bigtime” anti-drug operations in Metro Manila and Bulacan—81 dead in just four days—was a grim reminder that this President means what he says. Unfortunately, some of the casualties
in the government’s war on drugs are the same youth that the President has vowed to protect. Kian delos Santos, 17, a Grade 11 student, was killed Aug. 16, shot dead in a Caloocan City alley after being dragged away from his home. Police claims that the boy shot first and that they merely returned fire in self defense are contradicted by eyewitnesses, CCTV footage that showed two policemen dragging him to where his body was later found, and autopsy findings that showed Kian could not have fired a gun before he was shot dead while he was face down on the ground. The gun and drugs “found” on the dead boy were so obviously planted that even PNP chief Ronald dela Rosa urged police to stop planting evidence “because God is watching.”
By all accounts, the police narrative that Kian was a drug courier was also false. A Grade 11 student at Our Lady of Lourdes College in Valenzuela, Kian had only recently told his mother, who worked in Saudi Arabia, that he wanted to save up to buy a bicycle so he would not have to walk a long distance to school. His classmates remember him as a cheerful joker. He pawned his phone and sold t-shirts to help a classmate who had been hospitalized, yet could not afford to buy a cheap bicycle that a drug courier most certainly would have had. His dream, ironically, was to be a policeman one day, and his last words to the police who beat him was a plaintive plea he had a test in school the next day. He died with a gunshot wound to the back and two to the head. In this manner did the police kill the
youth. How many more Kians are there in the PNP anti-drug campaign? The recent recovery of the body of 19-yearold Carl Arnaiz, a former student at the University of the Philippines, in a morgue in Caloocan City indicates there are more. The Public Attorney’s Office has announced that an autopsy on Arnaiz, a valedictorian in his elementary school, showed the teenager was tortured and shackled before he was shot dead. Will the President keep his vow and kill the people who kill the youth? Wouldn’t that include the policemen who tortured, shot and killed Kian delos Santos, Carl Arnaiz and others like them, whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Who will pay for snuffing out their future? VIRTUAL REALITY TONY LOPEZ
Is Andy Bautista guilty?
North Korea in the Senate LOWDOWN
JOJO A. ROBLES PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte recently described Senator Antonio Trillanes as a one-man “political ISIS.” I think Senator Richard Gordon would agree with me instead of with Duterte when I say that Trillanes is really like the North Korea of the Senate, because he never follows the rules but never gets punished, either, for some still unknown reason. The point is simple: If the Senate allows Trillanes to do whatever he wants because he knows he will never be sanctioned by his peers, how different is that supposed august body from all the other institutions that protect its members by looking the other way when they misbehave?
Gordon, Trillanes’ current accuser, has said that he is out to prove that the chamber where the Olongapo senator has served for a long time is not really an old boys’ club. This is why, Gordon said, he wants Trillanes to pay for his unparliamentary behavior, or basically for thumbing his nose at his colleagues for a long time. “We keep accusing the police, the people at Customs and everywhere else of protecting their kabaro [co-workers],” Gordon said. “It’s about time someone stood up to this fellow here in the Senate.” Since the restoration of the Senate in 1987, the Senate has only officially censured two of its members after they were accused of misbehaving before the ethics committee. Senators Juan Ponce Enrile and Heherson Alvarez got the equivalent of senatorial
slaps on the wrist, the former for accusing Paul Aquino (father of current senator Bam) of various unsavory dealings and the latter for
Trillanes has only himself to blame, of course, if nobody likes him in the Senate—or outside of it. interfering with a purely police matter. But no senator has really has had the book thrown at him for misbehavior in recent times. And Trillanes,
who has developed a unique style of parliamentary trolling that he first perfected on resource persons, seems hell-bent on proving that the Senate will simply not go after one of its own even if he repeatedly trolls his own colleagues. I already wrote last week about how Trillanes first tasted “victory” as a Senate bully when he so embarrassed Secretary Angelo Reyes that the latter decided to kill himself. But now he seems to have gone beyond mere trolling of Senate witnesses and graduated to irritating his fellow senators just to see if he can get a rise out of them. Trillanes, of course, is not really as brave as he pretends to be. After he first clashed with Gordon last year, during the Senate investigation on the so-called Davao Death Squad, Trillanes went to visit Gordon in his office to apologize.
But Trillanes, who staged two failed coup attempts during the Arroyo years, is apparently such a creature of habit that he cannot resist doing what he does when the opportunity presents itself yet again. And since he can no longer apologize to Gordon for trolling the latter in the session hall, he delivered a speech yesterday explaining that he was not guilty of unparliamentary behavior when he called Gordon’s committee a “comite de abswelto.” I think Trillanes has once against been spooked by the possibility of majority of his colleagues deciding to finally do something about his being a general pain in the Senate behind, which is why he had to explain himself. And over the years, Trillanes knows that he has collected an impressive list of enemies even inside the chamber who would probably enjoy nothing better
than to see him get what he deserves. Trillanes has only himself to blame, of course, if nobody likes him in the Senate—or outside of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if even his own colleagues in the opposition, if they didn’t have to present a united front against the Dutertefriendly majority, would vote to sanction him. Kim Jong-un doesn’t have a lot of friends, either, outside of North Korea. And it’s not really because of that terrible haircut of his. *** Personally, I don’t believe that the Senate should impose the severest penalty of removing Trillanes from office, which it can do, if it really wants to. I think Trillanes should remain in the Senate but only after he serves a suspension or a similar penalty, not just a slap on the wrist.
ON AUG. 23, 2017, former Negros Oriental Congressman Jacinto “Jing” Paras filed an impeachment complaint at the House of Representatives. It was endorsed by three congressmen: Deputy Speaker Gwendolyn Garcia of Cebu, Abraham Tolentino of Tagaytay City, and Harry Roque of the Kabayan Party-list. Bautista’s alleged three main crimes: 1) neglect of duty as Comelec chair resulting in leaking of private data of millions of voters before the 2016 elections, 2) neglect resulting in the hacking of the Comelec website, and 3) failure to disclose in his SALN assets, deposits and properties valued at more than P1 billion, the existence of which was discovered and revealed in sworn affidavits by his estranged wife, Patricia “Tish” Bautista. The late Chief Justice Renato Corona was impeached by the House and found guilty by the Senate in 2012 for failure to reflect in his SALN dollar deposits which being foreign deposits were not even required to be disclosed in one’s SALN. Contacted by BizNewsAsia, Bautista texted “everything will be explained in the proper forum—not in media.” The grounds for impeachment against Andy Bautista, per Jing Paras’s impeachment complaint, and his lawyer Ferdinand Topacio: • For grossly neglecting his duty as head of agency, in that he failed to adopt adequate safeguards in consonance with the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act no. 10173), to prevent the leak of personal data of millions of voters before the 2016 national and local elections to the detriment of said voters; • For betraying the public trust for grossly neglecting his duties as head of agency, in that he
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