Whatever one says about the recent killing of Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa, the fact is that it effectively serves as a warning to every jailed drug lord, dealer and runner that they aren’t safe even behind the confines of their stinking, cramped cells.
Correction, make it spacious and air-conditioned cells, which they renovated courtesy of the millions of pesos worth of drug money they received which they gave a portion of to their jailers in exchange for their relative comfort and the cooperation of jail management in the continued operation of their illegal drug trade behind bars.
The relatively nascent war against illegal drugs, which entered its fifth month this year has been switched to high gear with the police promising to capture bigger fish in order to prove to a skeptical public that their campaign isn’t lopsided in favor of the rich and influential drug lords and against the lowly pushers and drug users.
And in the absence of hard evidence against the likes of businessman Peter Lim and Daanbantayan Mayor Vicente Loot, it was the misfortune of Albuera town Mayor Rolando Espinosa, who surrendered to the police precisely for fear of being targeted for summary execution, that he became an example of the Duterte administration’s acknowledged relentless war on the illegal drug menace.
Despite the claims of the mayor’s family that he was summarily executed and Sen. Panfilo Lacson’s assertion that the mayor’s death was an example of extrajudicial killing , the burden of proving that contention certainly weighs heavy on whoever wants to pursue it.
At the same time, the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group in Eastern Visayas (CIDG-8), whose operatives went after and killed Espinosa and drug suspect Raul Yap in a “shootout” despite failing to present a search warrant to jail guards at the sub jail of Baybay City, Leyte, are in no way exonerated of their responsibility for the operation.
In fact if initial details of their operation have sufficient basis, they have much to answer to the mayor’s family and to the public who have serious doubts about the validity of their operation. That the guards were not allowed to accompany the CIDG personnel, only fuels public suspicion that it was a summary execution.
How this would impact on the mayor’s son, alleged drug lord Kerwin Espinosa, remains to be seen, but we have to question whether the order to kill the mayor came from the police or from the drug syndicates and their protectors who want to snuff out anyone who can point to their involvement in the drug trade.
For now, we can only agree with what Sen. Richard Gordon, chairman of the Senate justice committee, said when he pointed out that the mayor’s death is a “slap in the face of the country’s justice system.”
When even suspected drug lords and criminals are unsafe behind bars, when they and the public know that they can be snuffed out anytime, then what does that say to us Filipinos and to the rest of the world? Do we now equate justice with killing the guilty?
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