Peña ambush is troubling

Everybody expects more bloody aftermath from the Wednesday afternoon ambush of Pulupandan Mayor-elect Magdaleno Peña which killed his driver and a bodyguard.

So much blood had been shed. And the usual impact is a call for revenge. Therein lies the problem. One killing leads to another and an interminable series later. Horrible, but possible, unless cooler heads intervene. Whodunit? So far, nobody actually knows. But Peña claims that he knows who his ambushers are since they reportedly did not try to hide their identities. And he claimed they were identified with his rival for the mayorship, Samson Mondia.

Mondia, however, denied he had anything to do with it.

The tense situation can easily be solved if the police speedily solve the ambush. The National Bureau of Investigation can be called upon to pitch in with their forensic and other expertise.

And, if Peña is to be believed, there are other survivors of his party who can very well identity the ambushers since, as claimed, they never tried to hide their identities.

The situation cannot be allowed to fester for long. Of course, the other side of it, is that, Magsi, as he is known to most, has made a lot of enemies. This includes his former live-in partner Plinky Recto, retired Brig. Gen. Raymundo Jarque, and many, among the 3,000 squatters of the family property he had threatened with eviction. And, yes, he had also alienated members of the RPA-ABB and other groups.

But then, again, since he reportedly had identified his ambushers, including his suspicion that some of them must have been wounded, that ambush could more or less be called an open-and-shut case.

Senior Supt. Rosendo Franco, Negros Occidental police director, is expected to be able to whip the police into action immediately to resolve the case at the earliest time possible.

We hope God will shower his graces on the leaders and people of Pulupandan so that this incident will not escalate into a major shooting war among various factions there.

Negros Occidental Governor Joseph Marañon may be able to step into the case and call for a ceasefire. After all, he is the father of the province.

***

The Commission on Elections of Negros Oriental should handle with dispatch the pre-proclamation protests filed before it to defuse the tensions in Bais and Tanjay cities.

It must do so before tensions explode into violence. This usually happens in case of Philippine politics. Acting Negros Oriental provincial supervisor Eddie Aba claimed that he and other Comelec officials had survived "pressures" when they brought the questioned election to Manila.

The problem here is that Aba never told local (Negros Oriental) journalists who pressured him and from whom these came and in what form they consisted of.

It is not enough to denounce the unidentified camps in Negros Oriental, the Comelec officials must be able to pinpoint who pressured them, they owe it to the people to do so.

***

Police issued another warning again yesterday against those who would provide sanctuary to fugitive policemen in evading arrest for the murder-kidnap case against former Pahanocoy Barangay Captain Eleuterio Salabas and two others in 2003.

But what caught my attention was that the police distributed copies of the photographs of the wanted police officers (only six of them) issued by the Guihulngan Regional Trial Court.

So, what gives?

***

It took the death of Jose B. Lopez Jr., 82, to whip up among the younger set of Graciano Lopez Jaena descendants to pledge to take up the crusade Joe had engaged in for decades. In short, that usually happens, it often takes the life of a person to be able to rouse his kin to action.

But they have something going for them. He has left with Tanya a stack of photographs (negatives) and documents on Lopez Jaena which he had collected over years of dedicated obsession with the cause of assuring national tribute to the Ilonggo national hero.

The National Historical Institute, led by chair Ambeth Ocampo, had also endorsed for presidential action the resolution by the Dr. Graciano Lopez Jaena Foundation to name the new Iloilo airport in his honor.

This was reported by Antique Governor Sally Zaldivar-Perez, chairperson of the Western Visayas Historical and Cultural Society, who brought the resolution to the attention of the NHI.*

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