What, no thieves at Davao’s Malls Park?

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

I was taken-aback recently at the parking area of the U.S -  style S & R Warehouse Store in Davao City where my elementary classmate Ontoy Fabila vigorously assured me that the huge styrofoam box of boneless and smoked milk fish – the vaunted Dagupan City’s Bangus – I soldiered, er shouldered on as give away to kin and relatives and my bulky knapsack loaded at the carrier of his twin cab pickup truck Nissan Navara would be safe.

“Nobody will steal your belonging here in Davao City, come and join us inside for shopping with my cousin Truck Czar Don Junior Alba,” he assured me at the membership-shopping club modeled after the warehouse chains introduced in the United States.

The Nissan Navara of Farmer Joe Nathaniel “Ontoy” Fabila and our belongings at the truck’s cab. Look at the white styrofoam box full of the vaunted boneless and smoked bangus from Dagupan City as my favorite give away to kin and friends in the rambunctious Mindanao whenever I go home.

He explained that even during the time of then mayor Rodrigo Duterte sneaking thieves and intimidating robbers did not take the belongings of other people in a parking space like the one at the S & R.

“I surmised that would-be culprits were afraid to stash shoppers belongings at the park otherwise they would die in case the cops nabbed them,” I told Ontoy and Junior who were scouring for the display of imported liqueur they are going to quaff  with wide eyed peasant friends in M'lang, Cotabato Province and before the start of our school’s global reunion.

Whenever I was in Manila I asked taxi drivers about robbers forcing them to give their monies just like those incidents under the administrations that preceded Duterte.

“Halos wala na. Meron panakanaka na lang (Taxi robberies seldom happened. There were reports but they were the exceptions),” the usual retort of drivers of these public utility vehicles to me.       

During the presidency of Benigno Aquino, Jr. hold ups and even murders of taxi drivers were common regular television footages.

“Na-ay huldap ba ug taxi dinhi? (Were there Taxi drivers robberies here?),” I posed in my wannabe Cebuano vernacular to a driver when I and Rommel Alba, my town mate whom I coincidentally met at the Davao International Airport.

The driver amusedly stared us with his big eyes we called in Ilonggo as “Bukaw (Owl) Stare” and laughed as if I asked an incredible question.

“No sir. That thing did not happen here even Duterte was not yet president,” he told me in his Visaya accented Tagalog suspecting we were tourists from Manila because Rommel kept badgering me in Tagalog.

When Duterte became president, the bad guys who victimized the taxi drivers in the rough and tumble Metro Manila silently disappeared in pitch darkness with cold chills on their back.

“These sonnafabitches feared to die after they are apprehended by law enforcers who I suspected put bullet holes on their forehead as deterrence to their brethren in crimes,” I usually pounded on my radio program whenever my topic zeroes on the rambunctious Capital City.

After Rodrigo Duterte became president, this I wrote on my column: Winningthe PH Crime War: Less Robbers and Drug pushers Now.

I could say that the dangerous drugs war launched by the Duterte Administration were picking up and resulted to significant drop not only of drug pushing and using but of index crimes like theft, robbery, and other petty crimes.

The author in a “photo selfie” at the parking area of U.S- Style Warehouse Club S & R in Davao City. This was taken before my trip back to Manila. I, my California based brother and his wife dropped by inside for a sumptuous giant pizza and mouthwatering French Fries where each slice was as big as the dirty finger, er, middle finger of Donald Trump.

Drug pushing and using dropped significantly in the 44 towns and 4 cities Pangasinan.

The immense dropped in narcotics uses and other crime incidents in the Cities of Alaminos, Urdaneta and Dagupan where I interviewed their chiefs of police whose ranks were Lieutenant Colonels in the military and those in Manila, the center of the demographic congestion in the country, are epitome’ of what happened in the entire Philippines.

What can those skeptics say of those robbery, cellphone snatching, akyat-bahay incidents that plummeted to all time low  since July last year, poser  to me by a high ranking cop in Urdaneta City?
Gee whiz, that was a first in this cursed country I thought we were going to the dogs when its presidents started with surnames  like Quirino, Macapagal, Marcos, Arroyo, Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo, Aquino steered this Republic.

The only crime that peaked in this administration was murder because the juggernaut of the state does “ethnic, er, ailment cleansing versus the bad guys similar to what Yugoslavia’s State Serbian president Sloban Milosevic to the  Bosnian Muslims he and cohorts considered as pesky thus zealously massacred them in the 1992-1995 Bosnian War where tens of thousands of them  died and the 1965 Indonesian Communist Purge where Indonesia’s General Hajji Suharto who considered the Partae Komunis Indonesia (PKI), its sympathizers, and the Ethnic Chinese as termites ordered the soldiers and paramilitary to kill like slashing their throat with parang machete or cleaver thus clogging the rivers with cadavers and turning them red with blood.
 Reports said 500, 000 to 1,000,000 Reds and Chinese, their families and sympathizers were murdered in that infamous genocide, son of  a gun, backed by the dossiers of the U.S Central Intelligence Agency.
These people hated the communists there while in the Philippines they became cabinet secretaries, columnists, and rally leaders.

(You can read my selected intriguing but thought-provoking columns at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com. You can send comments too at totomortz@yahoo.com)