Pinoy kidnappings,
national hijacking

LAST Monday, in broad daylight, 61-year-old Anthony Uy was murdered in front of a bank on Libertad Street, Mandaluyong. He had just withdrawn money and had gotten into his car when armed men approached his vehicle in an apparent robbery attempt. Uy resisted and was gunned down.

For months now, fear and anxiety have been on a slow simmer in the Chinese-Filipino (Chinoy) community. Even before this latest rash of kidnappings and murders, there were 157 kidnapping victims reported between January and September 2003. Heaven knows how many more abductions occurred and were hushed up.

Last month the Chinoy community declared that it had had enough, after the kidnapping-murder of Betti Chua Sy. Chinoys converted her funeral into a protest march. The President came out trying to look tough, but the kidnappings have continued.

I started out with the Uy case because his murder, while making it into all the front pages of local Chinese papers on Tuesday, was not picked up by any of the major English dailies, at least not on the front page. Uy was well known in the Chinoy community, as a tenor singer and someone active in civic organizations.

The Chinoy community is reeling from all these assaults but I feel that while the larger Pinoy community is reacting with some sympathy, this is often accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders: "Oh, it's only a few Chinoys being victimized. We're not Chinoy, so why worry?"

I worry that we see this crime wave as a problem limited to the Chinoy community when, in fact, what we're seeing is a very sick body politic taking a turn for the worse. Whatever's happening now to the Chinoy community threatens to hijack the entire nation's future.

Wednesday's newspapers focused on the 10 most wanted kidnappers, painting a picture of large crime syndicates behind this latest wave. Many Chinoys are worried that the latest kidnappings suggest that it's actually amateur gangs at work here. There are several reasons to suspect this. First is the choice of targets: a 10-year-old school girl last week, then a two-year-old boy this week. Second is the way some of these operations are bungled up: Sy was shot by her kidnappers and left to bleed to death.

The descriptions of the kidnappings, and the murder of Uy, suggest clumsy operations by amateurs unsure about what they're doing but all too ready to spill blood. During the kidnapping of the 10-year-old girl last week, the girl's driver and nanny were critically wounded. The driver has since died while the girl remains with her abductors.

The fear many Chinoys have is that the emergence of these amateur gangs shows a total breakdown of law and order. The criminals-veterans or amateurs--are now so totally emboldened. It almost seems that every time the President or a government official comes out trying to look tough, the criminals strike back in defiance by launching more heists.

People wonder about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's leadership, fed up with the alphabet soup of task forces and commissions and committees, all seen as political gimmickry. Erap's PACC (Presidential Anti-Crime Commission) gave way to GMA's PACER (Police Anti-Crime Emergency Response) and NAKTAF (National Anti-Kidnapping Task Force). The latter was first headed by then justice secretary Hernando Perez, turned moribund after his exit from the political scene and was then awarded to Angelo Reyes as "consuelo de bobo" (consolation prize) after he resigned as defense secretary.

Now how does one translate consuelo de bobo? A fool's consolation? But who's the fool here? The Chinoy community complains that a military man shouldn't be directing police matters. It's not just a matter of competence but also of turf, so crucial in the Philippines. One community leader who asked not to be identified observed that Reyes came in with his own ideas and with his own men, demoralizing the police force: "Reyes comes into the anti-kidnapping scene like a stepfather, with his own brood of children."

The police have reason to feel like neglected stepchildren. PACER agents get an allowance of 50 to 100 pesos a day, and actually go off on official business taking jeepneys. They lack firearms and equipment. How do they feel reading of the 300-million-peso fund available to NAKTAF for informers, knowing, too, how such funds often end up misused?

Phone lines burned on Tuesday as Chinoys frantically rang each other up, the Uy murder plunging the community into greater depths of despair. Several Chinoy families have called relatives based overseas to cancel holiday visits. Others are looking at their own suitcases, wondering if it's time to pack up and leave. Many of those who will leave are the younger and highly skilled Chinoy professionals, for example, physicians and IT specialists. If they leave, it will not be as short-term overseas contract workers but as permanent migrants, exacerbating the already serious brain drain we're having.

Capital flight, brain drain-all that's going on as well in the larger Pinoy community, all part of a frantic search for solutions: bringing in the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, implementing the death penalty.

I see capital punishment as a futile measure against crime, but I'm not surprised the Chinoys are so vocal about implementing the death penalty, some even suggesting public executions. Such views only reflect wider national sentiments. Even the President has expressed support in the past for the death penalty, backtracking now only because she's running for president and is afraid of losing support from the Catholic hierarchy.

What's there to keep the criminals from going full blast, terrorizing the entire nation? Watch out, too, as Chinoy talk about public executions, about supporting vigilante groups, about putting Senate Panfilo "Ping" Lacson in Malacañang. Again, the Chinoys are only reflecting what many Pinoy and Pinay have in mind. Despair, no longer a monopoly of the Chinoy community, might well drive us to consider "solutions" that will, in the long term, be far worse than the problems. Perhaps we are already a nation kidnapped and hijacked, paying a ransom with our children's future.

Comments to miguel@pinoykasi.net