By Alex P. Vidal
NEW YORK CITY -- Now that they have been elected or reelected, the so-called “narco” village officials in the Philippines should be spared from further insult and humiliation from authorities, especially from the Police Regional Office-6 (PRO-6) and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).
Having secured a fresh mandate means they have the full trust and confidence from their constituents; the shame season is over.
PDEA and other law enforcement agencies should now leave them alone and give them a space while they perform their duties and obligations to their constituents.
Authorities may continue to monitor the activities of barangay officials they suspect of engaging in illegal drugs directly (actual trafficking) or indirectly (like protection racket), but they can’t stop or interrupt them now from enforcing their jobs as punong barangay or council members.
They can now fight back under the mantle of being “honorable” public officials, especially if their accusers can’t present a corpus delicti other than slanderous allegations.
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PDEA’s golden moments against them were before the May 14, 2018 elections--years or months away, not weeks.
Those moments have melted away like the iceberg.
Walang forever.
The atmosphere before and after the elections is totally different.
If PDEA and other law enforcement agencies didn’t want these “narco” village officials elected and reelected, they should have doggedly pursued the cases against them and/or file appropriate charges in proper forum to disqualify them.
After the elections, it’s now water under the bridge.
As duly elected officials, they are back or now holding titles as “persons in authority” and may not just be easily harassed by any civilian or police authority.
These “narco” village officials may look like devils to our police authorities, but for their constituents they are heroes and “role models”; and they now possess awesome power and authority under the forceful local government code.
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When a person is from Iloilo he is called an “Ilonggo” and he speaks “Hiligaynon”, the dialect of Ilonggos.
Some people from other regions, especially from Metro Manila, were always confused and would misuse the word Hiligaynon, the dialect, and the word Ilonggo, the person or resident of Iloilo and other Ilonggo-speaking cities and provinces in the Visayas and Mindanao.
Even the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) got confused when it nearly included the ballot boxes from Iloilo City in the ballot boxes from Iloilo Province, which were part of those covered by the electoral protest of Bongbong Marcos against Vice President Leni Robredo.
In Marcos’ electoral protest, only the ballot boxes from Iloilo Province were under protest, not the ballot boxes from Iloilo City, which the Robredo camp insisted to be “separate and independent from the province of Iloilo.”
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TREATING EMOTIONAL PAIN. Let us think of physical and emotional pain as two sides of the same coin. "MRI scans reveal that the brain regions that light up when you stub your toe are the same ones activated when you feel socially rejected," says Nathan DeWall, Ph.D., who conducted a study on treating emotional pain…NO HEALTH RISK in full-body scans at the airport. It would take 100 scans over the course of a year for us to receive what's considered a "negligible individual dose," the American College of Radiology reports. In fact, we're exposed to more naturally occurring radiation when flying cross-country, thanks to our proximity to outer space.
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