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[av_heading heading=’A missive from a ‘missed’ broadcaster’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
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REMEMBER Jay Balnig? He used to be anchorman and chief reporter of Manila Broadcasting Company’s Aksyon Radyo-Iloilo. In answer to persistent queries about his whereabouts, let me just say he has found greener pastures in New York.
The last time I talked to him on the phone, he expressed sadness over the extrajudicial killings happening in our country today in the wake of President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.” He said he had read in American newspapers that the casualties of “extrajudicial killings” in the Philippines had hit the 4,000 mark.
Jay expressed alarm over the tendency of the police to cite “self-defense” as ground for killing drug pushers and users in their eagerness to “kill pa more,” including investigative media men whom they deem “hazardous” to their roguery.
If these rogues in “protection racket” hate investigative journalists, Jay opined, it’s because some of their colleagues have already been demoted, suspended, relieved or dismissed from service for whatever involvement in the illegal drug trade.
These criminals in police uniform tend to cover their tracks with “performance” — by killing alleged pushers – and thus appease the President and Philippine National Police Director General Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa. What “cleaner” way to do it than silence people, including media men, who are privy to their connections with the illegal drug trade?
No less than the President has emboldened them to kill when their own lives are threatened.
I asked Jay to put in writing his opinions and observations. He did as requested. Since space does not permit printing his story in full, let me just digest it:
“There was a time when I came face to face with Ludovico Consumo, a confessed gun-for-hire who showed up to admit that a drug lord enjoying police protection had bribed him to kill certain personnel of Aksyon Radyo.
“He received an advance of P50,000. However, having failed to carry out that mission on agreed deadline, Consumo himself became a target.
“In Consumo’s behalf, the radio network sought the help of the late Justice secretary Raul Gonzalez Sr., who had already validated the information that the gun-for-hire was a target of another gun-for-hire.
“In a matter of a few months, Consumo was shot dead in Badiangan, Iloilo. Thereafter it was our turn at Aksyon Radyo to receive death threats.
“Jonavin Villava, field reporter of the station, was shot by an unidentified motorcycle rider just as the former was alighting from another motorbike in front of his house at 11:30 p.m. on Dec. 10, 2013. He survived with a bullet wound in foot.
“Next came a pouch of human waste thrown on the wall of the building occupied by the radio station. The man behind was obviously warning Aksyon Radyo reporters to shut up or be shut up. But despite risk to life and limb, it remained business as usual for them who had to turn the station into their second home.
“I was already in the United States when suspected drug lord Melvin Odicta Sr. and his 20 bodyguards attempted to occupy the station in the early morning hours of Nov. 9, 2015. It horrified me that the police never lifted a finger to arrest them. It could only mean that the cops were on the take.”
As we all know now, following the ascent of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency in July this year, Odicta and his wife Meriam, were shot dead. The crime has remain unsolved. Whether they were silenced by their own protectors anxious of burying the past remains to be seen.
We are appalled, however, by the brazenness with which operatives of the Criminal Investigation Detection Group (CIDG) murdered Albuera Leyte mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. in his jail cell.
It was obviously a rubout committed by them who used to protect him and his son Kerwin, a suspected drug lord, in “the good old days.” Saying they have “walang utang na loob” would be an understatement./PN
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