At various times since our independence as a nation, other running stories headlined bloody details of shooting wars in political hot spots, involving other political clans. The return of democracy may have rid us of a dictator, but it has not rid us of aspiring future dictators. Politics has become a family business worth staking an eternal claim to, worth protecting with real lives, worth feeding with the lives of others who stupidly involve themselves and get in the way of crossed ambitions.
Perhaps the Bersamin murder will end the vicious bloodshed in Abra. Perhaps it will not. Who knows what lies deep in men's hearts? If they were really good men, wanting only to help their townspeople and provincemates, would they go into politics? And having gone into it and wallowed in the best and the worst of it, wouldn't they kill to stay in it? We'd be stupid if we didn't know the answer to that.
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Editorial, The Evening PaperIssue or 26 April 1995
Do we wonder that an encounter such as the one that exploded between Governor Joson and Mayor Perez on Saturday afternoon could take place? In broad daylight? Before an election? When a gun ban is supposed to be in force?
Is this not the ultimate insult for an electorate that, like the world's worst fools, never stops wishing and praying for fair and free polls every election year? That never stops hoping that the baseline of "keeping the peace" will at least be met by people in authority?
How dare a PNP regional director calmly announce that they have allowed 2,000 firearms to remain loose in an acknowledged political hot spot?
We are told the protagonists in the violent encounter had their armed bodyguards exempted from the election gun ban. Given the bloody history of these two families' decades-old feud, how could the Comelec have allowed such a situation to prevail?
Anybody could see it was a murder waiting to be committed--by one, by two, by both, by anybody! Allowing them all to carry firearms, when everybody knew that emotions would be running high and vengeance would go to the fast and not necessarily to the just (as who can still trace who is the just in such a convoluted tale of only-less-than-Shakespearean length?), would have been the height of naivete. After the Espinosa ambush, the dice would already have been loaded against peace in such violent terrains.
As, indeed, it turned out to be: a gruesome killing scene played out against a faux-Hollywood landscape.
Except that, in this case, there is very real blood, very real killing, very frightening violence. And the perpetuation of a feud that can go on until the end of the world. The widow takes up the gauntlet, the brothers plot out their countermoves, and the followers--yes, the unthinking followers--line up, there on the highways and the town plazas of their hometown, like cowboys in a forgotten Western, to willingly sacrifice their lives, their families, and their future on the altar of politics.
We are told the whole scenario is unavoidable. We are told the debts have to be paid, the revenge to be extracted, the future to be plotted out by feuding political warlords because that is the nature of the lives they have been fated to live out.
Was it also unavoidable that our police officials should allow loose firearms in the thousands in Nueva Ecija, scattered like kites waiting to be picked up by boys pretending they are men and leaders? Was it also unavoidable that the Comelec should join in the macabre fun and give such violence-prone politicians the authority that the very possession of metal gives so they can freely stage their own bloody games?
No wonder the "bad boy of Philippine movies" has the gall to offer himself for election to national office! In his natural habitat, he begins to look no more infantile than the rest of everybody else. He may even reap the whirlwind from this cardboard scene.
The idiocy of Philippine politics!
-- NBT
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