Will the real Peter Lim please stand up?

The column title gets its inspiration from a 2000 hit song “The Real Slim Shady” by rapper Marshall Mathers aka Eminem which Wikipedia said was a “critique” of the pop songs and the singers and celebrities that were popular at the time, i.e the late 90s — Will Smith, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Limp Bizkit and Pamela Anderson, to name a few.

The song which is filled with “F” bombs could very well suit President Rodrigo Duterte’s temperament and style since he was known to unleash a cuss word or two in his interviews and public speaking engagements as Davao City mayor prior to assuming the presidency full time.

But being Pinoy and probably averse to anything American, Duterte prefers Ka Freddie Aguilar’s mournful, nationalistic tune and fervor as translated in his hit song “Ipaglalaban Ko (I will fight for you)” that was played during one of his victory parties.

But President Duterte’s disclosure of a “Peter Lim” as being the alleged chief drug supplier in the Visayas and the subsequent revelation by police that there are over 4,000 Peter Lims in the country as listed in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) beg the question of who was the Peter Lim that the President was talking about.

The President referred to Peter Lim aka Jaguar as staying in China and he warned this Peter Lim that if he sets foot in the country, he will surely be shot to death. Then there’s also a Peter Lim referred to by former congressman Antonio Cuenco as an alleged drug lord in his 2001 congressional inquiry.

There was no mistaking President Duterte’s public identification of retired PNP director Marcelo Garbo and retired police regional chief turned Daanbantayan Mayor Vicente Loot as alleged drug lord protectors during speaking engagements at the Philippine Air Force grounds and Malacañang.

However, when a Cebu-based businessman named Peter Lim had his spokesman talk to local media to deny that he was the “Peter Lim” referred to by the President and the Bureau of Internal Revenue and other police chiefs including Chief Supt. Noli Taliño, the new Police Regional Office chief, are unable to specifically identify who the President was actually referring to, the public can only shake their collective heads in confusion and — to borrow columnist Gerard Pareja’s penchant for quoting popular songs — chant a reworked chorus line of Eminem’s “Real Slim Shady” song: “Will the Real Peter Lim please stand up?”

Unfortunately that won’t be the case anytime soon and the Peter Lim referred to by President Duterte may be hiding in plain sight among his other namesakes, safe and comfortable in the knowledge that the public doesn’t know him for now until the President becomes specific and exposes him to the country and the rest of the world for what he really is.

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Read a Facebook post by former Cebu Daily News editor Bencyrus Ellorin who shared his thoughts about Oplan TokHang which he described as a “shakedown” of drug suspects.

He also raised a good point when he said that the documents these self-confessed drug users and dealers were made to sign — an affidavit I guess which includes a public renunciation of their lifestyle and trade of choice — are mere scraps of paper that cannot stand up in court since they were not represented by lawyers of their choosing.

That said, the underlying reason or motive behind Oplan TokHang, aside from their public pronouncement of letting them change for the better, is to identify and confirm their watch list so they can monitor them better.

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It’s hard enough to verify whether someone is a drug user or peddler because they can mask it under the noses of law enforcers, their neighbors and even their loved ones.

I received a phone call from a columnist’s brother who asked why is it that murder victims usually don’t have any shoes on when they were found lying on the ground.

He recalled that the only time he saw a murder victim with his shoes on was the security guard who got killed in a September 2011 robbery of a mall in Cebu City. Maybe we need to ask the police why that’s the case.