PNP chief Archie Gamboa was visibly irked with CNN TV Philippines’ Pinky Webb’s question on whether a gun had been planted in the sling bag of Army Corporal Winston Ragos. Gamboa’s curt reply, “Sabi nyo lang yan,” seemed to mirror the remorseless police drug operatives involved in EJKs for the past four years.
No one is being taken for a fool that the victim was carrying a revolver and that he was reaching for it when he gunned down by Police Master Sergeant Daniel Florendo Jr. Metropolitan court judges have grown tired and weary over the common practice of the PNP in planting evidence, notably drugs and weapons, but driven by the shameless affront by the police they chose instead to make the petitioners sweat it out while the suspects, mostly belonging to poor families, have languished in jail.
The concocted police report will lead from one lie to another until a string of perjured testimonies finally becomes a rope that tightens around the necks of the assailants.
Gamboa should drop this idiotic spin in the killing of Ragos and stick to the defensible judgment call against an unarmed adversary. Ragos as mentally challenged may be less complicated than earlier thought and his provocative response to the police until it seemed nearly evident for Florendo that he was going for a gun in his bag was ample provocation to necessitate a judgment call.
Gamboa doesn’t seem to respect the memory of Ragos, one among a growing number in the AFP who have proved their worth in the battlefield but are still seized in their own silent war as PTSD patients, The Philippine Army has made sure that he was similarly honored like the hundreds in the military who gave up their lives fighting until the end.
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Ugandan President Kaguta Museveni issues the following warning against people misbehaving during this corona crisis. “In a war situation, nobody asks anyone to stay indoors. You stay indoors by choice. In fact, if you have a basement you hide there as long as hostilities persist. During a war, you don’t insist on your freedom. You willingly give it up in exchange for survival. During a war, you don’t complain of hunger. You bear hunger and pray that you live to eat again. During a war, you don’t argue about opening your business. You close your shop (if you have the time), and run for your life. You pray to outlive the war so that you can return to your business (that’s if it has not been looted or destroyed by mortar fire). During a war, you are thankful to God for seeing another day in the land of the living. During a war, you don’t worry about your children not going to school.
“The world is currently in a state of war. A war without guns and bullets. A war without human soldiers. A war without borders. The army in this war is without mercy. It is without milk of human kindness. It is indiscriminate — it has no respect for children, women, or places of worship. Its only agenda is a harvest of death. It is only satiated after turning the world into one big death field. Its capacity to achieve its aim is not in doubt. Without ground, amphibious and aerial machines, it has bases in almost every country of the world. Its movement is not governed by any war convention or protocol.”
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Dr. Neal Orteza, fondly called Bimboy, was the brother of actress and movie writer Bibeth Orteza. Bimboy was the medical director of the family-owned Ospital ng Paranaque. Bibeth chided him once after seeing him doing his rounds without a face mask at the onset of the spread of the coronavirus. Still, he would do it again and again until he himself got infected. He would say it pained him to see his patients turning pale with fear and anxiety. With the mask gone the fun-loving Bimboy could smile easily and joke with them.
One of his four daughters, Patsy Orteza Shaw, wrote about his father with whom she danced during her wedding reception in 2018. She is a Biblical Christian and knows they will be reunited in the life to come. “We will dance again, Daddy! And it will be better than last times! I love you with all of my heart, and it hurts and breaks my heart to know that you are gone for a little while. Thank you for sharing your joys with me, and for trying to give me the whole world. But, we know this is only for a moment. I can’t wait to dance with you again.”
She quoted from Romans 8:35: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
