Cebu City’s “vigilante killings” of suspected hoodlums didn’t escape the notice of United States officials.
A US Embassy cable recently released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks showed that in 2005, the US Ambassador to the Philippines reported that Cebu government officials and the public were perceived to be supporting the killings of suspected criminals.
The WikiLeaks report, carried in several news channels, quoted excerpts from a declassified memo sent by former US Ambassador to the Philippines Francis Ricciardone Jr. to the US Embassy in Manila titled “Latest Vigilante Killings in Cebu—No End in Sight” (see page 2 for text).
The cable referred to media reports that at least 41 people were killed by vigilantes since December 2004.
It said this came after the Cebu City mayor, Tomas Osmeña, announced the creation of a “Hunter Team,” a special police squad to go after criminal suspects and offered a P20,000 reward for every criminal “permanently disabled and neutralized.”
The Ambassador’s report noted that the mayor later denied any involvement in summary executions “while noting that, as a result of the vigilante killings, crime in Cebu has gone down.”
The US Embassy report observed under the heading “Public Support for Extrajuidical Methods” that Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia, Regional Director Alejandro Alonso of the Commission on Human Rights in Central Visayas (CHR-7) and the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI) publicly expressed support for the Hunter’s Team to promote peace and order.
The cable said the Catholic Church, led by Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, and the Cebu chapter of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines condemned the mayor’s action and the extrajudicial killings.
In 2005, Cebu newspapers and broadcast news were full of almost daily accounts of suspected hoodlums being shot dead on the streets by unidentified assailants usually riding by twos on motorcycles.
The US Embassy report ended with the comment: “Many, perhaps even a majority of Cebu residents appear to support the Mayor’s tough stance against crime, especially appreciative of the drop in crime rates. As long as local officials believe that the public will tolerate such extreme measures, they are likely to continue at least tacitly to sanction such killings, despite our repeated expressions of concern.”
“Civil society groups have condemned the extrajudicial killings, but much of the public appears willing to tolerate them as an expedient means of combating crime,” the US cable said.
The cable was created on April 18, 2005, and was released by WikiLeaks last Aug. 26. WikiLeaks, an online archive founded by Julian Assange, calls itself as a public service organization for whistle-blowers, journalists and activists. WikiLeaks has released several declassified U.S. State Department cables.
Osmeña, who is now a congressman of Cebu City’s south district, yesterday denied anew that he was involved in the series of killings of suspected criminals during his mayoralty term.
“That (allegation) is not true. You have to keep in mind that there are many of my political opponents who are accusing me of that,” he told Cebu Daily News.
“All my enemies put it in the headlines saying that I was behind all those killings. Of course, you as the US Embassy read all these things they just them on,” he said.
The congressman said he was sure the US Embassy was just quoting local newspapers at the time. /Ador Vincent Mayol, Reporter