How a cop kills the bad guys

 By Mortz C. Ortigoza

I dropped by at the office of a top cop whose area is dreaded by drug pushers.  .

This officer, a down-to-earth person, has a propensity to order his men to execute countless drug pushers without even asking the media to cover the corpses that sprawled in different areas of the local government unit (LGU) since almost three years ago when he assumed office.

Another victim of extra judicial killing in the Philippines.
 PHOTO CREDIT;Noel Alamar

As a result, drug pushing there was an all-time low, as horrified pushers absconded, compared to the records of his predecessors and the neighboring towns who had to grapple with the proliferation of Methamphetamine Hydrochloride known in street lingo as shabu.

“When did you learn to kill the bad guys? Who were your idols in “salvaging (slang for extra-judicial killing”) drug pushers?” I posed to him.

He said he learned it when he was assigned at the anti-kidnapping group of the national police when they apprehended notorious kidnappers that his superiors and colleagues easily executed them.

“We kill them there without fanfare. The media did not know about it. We kill them “para sa bayan” (It means, killing them to reduce their ranks not for media publication but for deterrence),” he told me.

“For example, we nabbed a member of the X Group. We interrogated and even tortured the member to squeal who were his companion. We asked him to call through the mobile phone one of them for a meeting in a particular place. When his colleague arrived, we arrested him. We did the same interrogation and torture so he would invite another companion and do the same to the second, third and up to the tenth member”.

He said all of them were executed, mostly by strangulation, and then burned with used car tires without their families seeing their bodies.

“All of them disappeared from this cruel world without a trace”.

He told a media colleague that they no longer used the old way of putting in a drum the dead body, poured cement on it, and threw the cadaver in the sea.

“Matrabaho na iyon, mas madali ang sunugin na lang ng gulong”

He said when he arrived in his post, he asked some subordinates in the anti-kidnapping to do the liquidation or execution for the drug pushers they arrested because he did not yet know the capacity of the men in his jurisdiction.

“When my young beat policemen learned the rope of how to “silence” the peddlers, they did not only do it but became addicted to it,” he narrated.

He said there were some policemen whom he suspected to be in cahoots with big time drug pushers.

“Did you ask somebody to kill these rogue policemen?” a media colleague, who cut his teeth on the nuances of secret police activities, posed to the top brass.

“No, I asked my superior to reassign them because they are the dreg of society,” the brass retorted.

(You can read my selected columns at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You can send comments too attotomortz@yahoo.com)