“His inclusion in the drug list was simply an attempt to justify the murder.”
The 2020 assassination of Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office Secretary of the Board, Retired Police Brigadier General Wesley Barayuga, is the perfect example that demonstrates the excesses committed in the so-called war on drugs from 2016 to 2022. If the public is not yet convinced by what have been revealed by various witnesses in the ongoing QuadCom hearings in the House of Representatives, I do not know what else will.
Here was a public official who brought his own lunch to work, took public transportation and by all accounts performed his duties as Board Secretary of the PCSO exemplarily. More importantly, he had no record whatsoever of any involvement in the illegal drug trade. Yet, that was the reason given why he was gunned down.
His being a senior retired police general did not protect him from his own kind who went ahead and killed him anyway — this basically guaranteed that killings related to the war on drugs continued unabated till the end of the last administration. Granting that he was indeed involved in illegal drug dealing, why not just arrest him so he can reveal additional information?
In the old Constabulary days, such would have been unthinkable because of the strong esprit de corps that existed in the organization. That is apparently no longer true nowadays. What has happened to our police service? Has it gone so low that PNP personnel are so willing to kill one of their own who the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency said was only included in the drug list after his death?
His inclusion, therefore, was simply an attempt to justify the murder. If not for the tearful public confession of PLt Col Santi Mendoza, the officer tasked to perform the dastardly act, the murder would still be a statistic. Now however, the public knows a lot more about what happened and hopefully, his family can finally find some closure.
But for those who have been tasked to investigate this murder further, there are still a lot more questions that need to be answered. The most important is whether there are people higher than the two alleged people who gave the order to kill Barayuga. Why didn’t General Pinili do more than simply send the widow of Barayuga a text message? After all, he was the one who recruited his classmate to be the PCSO Board Secretary. He apparently knew the motive of the murder and who were responsible as soon as it happened. Yet, he remained quiet for the last four years and even up to now, judging from his demeanor during the QuadCom hearings, he appeared tentative and unwilling to say more.
One positive thing about all these QuadCom hearings, however, is that it could help lift the heavy burden that the country is carrying due to what happened in the six year war on drugs. It is another chapter in our history that I am sure we all wish never happened. So, let us all hope that those members of the House who have shown their determination and steadfastness in the hearings will succeed in their quest in order for the country to be able to move forward and not be consumed by what happened during those six horrible years.
For old fogeys like myself who have given the best years of our lives to the police service, we naturally do not wish to see the PNP go down the gutter because of corrupt and unscrupulous police leadership. People may not realize it, but there is now a slow process of changing of the guards in the PNP. Within a couple of years, the leadership of the PNP will entirely be in the hands of graduates from the Philippine National Police Academy. All PMA graduates will be gone by then.
If what we are seeing now are signs of things to come, it is worrisome. I am neither a graduate of the PMA nor the PNPA and do not advocate any kind of management culture. What is important is a national police force that is professionally and competently led that all Filipinos can be proud of and not a police force that people fear and do not respect.
