Suburban affair

IN the telling and retelling made in the days after the event, the most dramatic moment was not when the burglar slipped in after the grandmother, grandchild and nanny entered the house, leaving the gate and front door open as, according to her four-p.m. habit, our neighbor would then water the plants while her “apo” watched television.

Nor was it when the intruder knocked her down, hit her head, and tried to stab her with his two knives.

It wasn’t also when, despite pain and shock, the grandmother still made sure her grandchild and yaya escaped the intruder, running out barefoot, crying hysterically but also alerting neighbors.

In our village in Lapu-Lapu City, the retelling escalates after neighbors rush to prevent the stabbing, disarm the burglar, and pull off his mask—revealing the familiar, smiling-but-now-contorted features of the man-next-door.

Criminality—the vulnerability of citizens to its daily onslaught and the inability of authorities to curb crime, let alone prevent it—is one of the “decades-long issues,” along with poverty and traffic, that the Philippine Daily Inquirer tagged as priorities that deserve to be on the campaign platforms of the five contenders vying to be chosen this May as the country’s 16th president.

Only one presidentiable—Miriam Defensor-Santiago—explicitly states in the broadsheet’s series on electoral agenda an anti-crime stance: “launch aggressive fight against illegal drugs”.

Another candidate—Rodrigo “The Enforcer” Duterte—offers a solution that strikes at the heart of Pinoys who still remember the darkest years of the country under martial law.

In a political rally, the Davao City mayor declared he does not only favor bringing back the death sentence but also executing the criminals in public. He promised to take “full responsibility” for lawmen accused of killing criminals.

Macabre and horrendous, Duterte’s version of peace and justice would not have gone unapplauded in our neighborhood. A few nights before the attempt on our neighbor, we drove past a street commotion.

According to Flor M. Gitgano’s Feb. 11 report in Sun.Star Cebu, a gunman and accomplice ambushed a local official known for his fight against illegal drugs. Basak barangay captain Isabelito Darnayla survived multiple gunshot wounds.

When our family first settled in the neighborhood in the early 1990s, it was so bucolic, we longed for more public utility vehicles instead of grazing cows in the vicinity.

The prosperity came, as well as crime. Before our neighbor got assaulted in her home, a rash of break-ins hit our street. Suspicion focused on our neighbor’s attacker, who had a history of domestic abuse, unemployment, and an addiction to illegal drugs.

Over a thick undercurrent of suspicions, fear and anxiety are the signs: a familiar face emerging from a burglar’s mask, a tricycle left skewed on the street (Darnayla’s attackers rode a tricycle, the king of the road in sitio Kagudoy).

The signs confirm every citizen’s nightmare: crime has crept out of the news and lives nearby.

The night of his arrest, our neighbor’s attacker died while in the custody of the authorities. When we go home, the sight of two houses, blazing side by side in the night, does not just weave tales of a victim who can no longer sleep in her home and of an accused who died before the process of justice could begin.

These stories are about lawlessness, a suburban affair.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s February 14, 2016 issue of the “Matamata,” a Sunday editorial-page column

Queen’s confessions

FROM slippers to shabu. Hers is the story of Cinderella that went wrong.

Last Sept. 5, Daryl T. Jabil reported in Sun.Star Cebu about the arrest of Badian’s “queen of shabu”. When Jerami Matugas, 49, was arrested in her new home in Poblacion, Badian, the operatives caught her repacking the illegal white crystals for selling. On the streets, the packs might fetch P1.3 million.

Minus the substance, that domestic scene would have complemented the self-reliance stamping the story of Matugas.

According to Jabil’s nuanced report, Matugas once sold slippers made in Carcar. In November, an acquaintance introduced her to shabu so she could “send her children to college”.

Matugas has five children, aged four to 21. She told Sun.Star Cebu that, even without a father, her children “never went hungry under my care”. In February, the family moved from Barangay Awayan, Carcar to their newly constructed and “more comfortable” home in the town center of Badian.

The story moved to a different vein last March, when a warrant for her arrest was issued. Metamphetamine is concocted from several chemicals and then crystallized. Known also as “ubas,” “siopao, “sha,” and “ice,” “shabu” is smoked, snorted or injected by about seven million Filipinos or 10 percent of the population. It is the illicit drug “most used” in the Philippines, reports the United Nations.

Once associated with big cities and corruption, shabu has made inroads in new markets. Queen said the police have yet to catch other “big fishes” in the illicit drug trade in the south, which curves from Carcar City to reach as far as Alegria and Badian on the southwestern side of Cebu.

The day before Sun.Star Cebu reported Queen’s arrest, I climbed to the fourth-floor Capitol office of Vice Governor Agnes A. Magpale to get our copy of the Badian and Alegria town histories. From 2008 to 2011, my husband Roy and I were part of the team of writers, researchers and editors tapped by the Cebu Province and the University of San Carlos (USC) for the landmark Cebu Provincial History Project.

Last month, the 55-volume set of books narrating the local history of Cebu—the province, the Provincial Capitol, nine cities and 44 towns—was turned over to the local governments.

Roy and I met first in Badian. He was tapped by the USC for a research project. I was a development communication worker with the government. One rainy night in 1987, we met at a farmer leader’s house. I escorted a group of Manila journalists interviewing farmers about the impact of a World Bank-funded project.

Presuming he was the farmer’s son, I was surprised when he answered the journalists articulately in English. This bias shamed me, which worsened my ill temper with the journalists, who dawdled in our trip and kept the farmers waiting. Roy thought I was one of the rude visitors, who demanded the farmers be roused from their sleep so they could have their interviews before flying back to Manila.

Despite the checks imposed by all disciplines, from journalism to research, no discourse is ever complete. The shabu trade in the south is not in the town histories I co-authored. The Queen’s confessions reveal a gap that has to be addressed in the threads of “sugilanon (story)” interwoven one night in 1987.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 6, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”