See - http://opinion.inquirer.net/39804/horror-story-2
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THE EXPLANATION itself is surreal. “I told them,” Davao City Vice Mayor Rodrigo Duterte said, “to be careful because (suspected carjacking leader, Ryan Yu, alias) Baktin is armed and dangerous…. If he surrenders peacefully, that does not involve danger. But once he is arrested and he resists and gets killed, that involves danger to the lives of the arresting officers. That’s why the reward is doubled. I decided to add P1 million more because once he is dead, you cannot bring the body without putting yourself in jeopardy; you’re carrying P5-million worth of baggage in your hands.”
“The reward (on Baktin’s head), dead or alive, that’s legal,” Duterte said. “Do not castrate the government,” he begged Commission on Human Rights Chair Etta Rosales, who has remonstrated with him on this. “That will make us impotent to fight crime. Do not do that to my city.”
Surreal as this is, it’s just a pale echo of the original. “Two million ako kapag buhay si Ryan. Kapag pinatay ninyo, four million ’yan. ’Pag dinala ninyo ang ulo, balutin lang niyo sa ice, dagdagan ko ng one million sa campaign funds … so it’s five million.” (“P2 million if you capture Ryan alive. P4 million if you kill him. You bring his head in—just wrap it in ice—I’ll throw in another million from my campaign funds.”)
Can anyone in his right mind—or in his wrong one, since you have to wonder at the type of characters this will draw to the hunt—possibly miss the meaning of this? Can anyone in his right mind—or in his wrong one, given that this was issued by a high-ranking public official—possibly not know the meaning of this? Of course it is illegal. You offer a bounty for information that leads to the capture of a fugitive, that’s legal. You offer a bounty for the head of a fugitive, you should be jailed.
Make no mistake about it: That is an open invitation to murder. And a huge one, given the size of the bounty and the destitution of the invitees. You can get P5 million instead of P2 million to bring a guy in dead rather than alive, would you bother to bring him alive? Indeed, you can get P5 million instead of P4 million to bring a guy in not just dead but missing his head, or his body, would you not lop off his head while he is in the toilet? And say afterward that he resisted because when you called out to him he turned around and attacked you with his piss? I don’t know how much ice costs in Davao, but surely it’s a negligible deduction from P5 million and worth the investment. The bizarreness of it all lends itself to morbid humor.
I was tempted to say that Duterte has been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies, but it struck me that the more direct inspiration for this comes from another movie. One directed by Sam Peckinpah, who made a fetish of violence, called, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.” That is what this is, Duterte saying, “Bring me the head of Ryan Yu,” without any of Peckinpah’s artfulness, with only the muck, sordidness and mindlessness of sick life.
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