Tough guy Byron
Like a scene from Rambo, Byron Garcia returned to exact justice.
After being challenged to show his mettle (“Who do you think you are?”), the former Capitol security consultant presented his credentials as the neighborhood’s new president.
The American who faced him down, a new arrival in Corona del Mar subdivision, couldn’t have chosen a more troublesome introduction.
Who doesn’t know Byron Garcia?
Wayne Morris would have saved himself an ugly confrontation if he had bothered to ask first.
But of course, Cebu and the world knows Byron.
He’s the maestro who mounted YouTube’s sensation, the “dancing inmates” of the Cebu provincial jail. The de facto warden and official security consultant of the Capitol, pulled off a miracle by getting over 200 grown men and women inmates to master choreographed dance numbers as “prison rehabilitation.”
No wimp could pull off a feat like that.
Sunday’s flareup in a Talisay City subdivision put the governor’s younger brother back in the public eye after months of a low key life.
The last we heard of him, he had fallen out of favor with his eldest sister, Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia, who booted him out of the Capitol by not renewing his contract in 2010.
He campaigned for Manny Villar’s presidential bid, which infuriated his powerful sibling, and went on to advise the Manila city government how to replicate the success of the “dancing inmates” in the capital.
But it takes more than a warden’s badge to get civilians to toe the line.
Barely a week after being elected president of the subdivision’s homeowner’s association on Sept. 11, Byron was back to being the boss and making sure disrespectful Americans know it.
The governor’s brother, slighted by the new neighbor’s rebuff of his attempt to remove a road barrier, returned with his calling card.
It was vintage Byron to make a clear impression with an AK-47 in his arms.
“I am a nobody,” said Byron, “but I have this,” as he pulled out the assault rifle from his vehicle.
What did they fight over? The irritant was “Slow Down” road signages put up by the American businessman outside his houseto caution motorists not to speed. He said his daughter almost got run over and he didn’t want an accident.
According to Byron, it was his duty as the new village president to act on the the complaint of other neighbors inconvenienced by the road barriers and to remove them. Nonsense.
Whatever the aggravation — and levels of arrogance on both sides — no civil conversation can arise looking down the barrel of an AK-47.
It’s illegal for a civilian to be carrying a submachine gun in public. To show off like that is an act of misplaced machismo and reveals a dangerous appetite for power.
