IT IS EASY to make stories up. What is difficult is supporting them with details that will make them verifiable and credible.
The extrajudicial confession of Joel Escorial pertaining to Percy Lapid’s assassination was initially met with credulity or disbelief.
Now the conspiracy is fast unraveling. It appears that, consistent with Escorial’s statement, the plan to kill Lapid was indeed hatched inside Bilibid prisons where a convict by the name of Jun Villamor died or was killed a mere four hours after Escorial’s presentation to the media.
Forensic pathologist Dr. Racquel Fortun has come out with an autopsy report containing her opinion that the manner of Villamor’s death was homicide.
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Forensic pathologists are doctors who have undergone specialized training that allows them to examine the bodies of people who died “suddenly, unexpectedly, or violently.” Their exposure to forensics, toxicology, firearms, etc., have placed them in an exceptional position to tread both the legal and medical realms.
Villamor was only in his early forties when he died. President Bongbong Marcos himself had doubted that he died of natural causes given the convenient timing of his passing.
It appears that Villamor died of asphyxia or suffocation. A plastic bag was the most likely instrument of death. The fact that there was no “gross morphologic cause of death” is said to be consistent with the reported asphyxia.
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Escorial said that he and Villamor used to work for one Herman Agojo.
Agojo is a convicted drug lord who also testified against former Senator Leila de Lima when the House of Representatives conducted a probe on the alleged drug manufacturing and trading happening right inside Bilibid.
The police have tagged Agojo as the alleged mastermind in the killing of Judge Voltaire Rosales of Tanauan, Batangas in 2004. It was Judge Rosales who sent him to Bilibid for illegal drug trading.
Like Percy Lapid, Judge Rosales also drove himself to work. Like Lapid, the judge was also gunned down by motorcycle-riding assassins.
Agojo hogged the news in early 2015 after then Department of Justice Secretary Leila de Lima swooped down on Bilibid and found some papers that recommended parole for the drug lord for unclear reasons.
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If syndicates can direct the drug trade from inside Bilibid, is it any less believable that contract killing can also be planned and guided from its innards?
In January 2020 the police arrested personalities linked to the killing and burning of lawyer Edgar Mendoza – a former congressman from Batangas.
The mastermind was identified as Sherwin Sanchez, a murder convict in Bilibid, who allegedly conspired with a fellow prisoner – Arthur Fajardo, a member of a notorious kidnap-for-ransom group – in the killing of Mendoza.
Police said that instructions were made from inside the prison facilities. The actual killers were paid money to do the job.
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This paints the picture of a penal colony that has not severed its ties with the criminal world.
Penology’s avowed intent is the rehabilitation of prisoners, and their eventual re-integration with the rest of society.
What is happening is the opposite. Bilibid has become a nucleus for criminal activity whose tentacles can deny us the safety of our own communities.
This could not have been happening without the cooperation, conscious or otherwise, of the leadership and personnel of the Bureau of Corrections. The chief of corrections can be king in his own kingdom if he wants to.
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If at all, Percy Lapid’s killing can be a real catalyst for change in penology. This presents the Marcos administration the opportunity to effect critical reforms that can remove the Philippines from the list of the most abominable prison systems in the world.
Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons./PN
