Time to stop the foolish policy

By: Manuel “Boy” Mejorada

TWO days ago, I was shocked to view a video of a retired policeman who died in the middle of the Iloilo Strait as he was being ferried to a hospital in Iloilo City because his health condition had deteriorated while confined at the Guimaras Provincial Hospital.

The family of the patient had chartered a motor pump boat for an emergency “sea-lift” transfer so he could get better medical attention for his ailment. Unfortunately, a heavy downpour fell as the vessel had departed the Jordan wharf. The patient, his family and nurses accompanying him, got wet. This must have distressed him too much. He was already in a critical condition, and he needed to be handled with delicate care while being transported. The downpour soaked him; he suffered a cardiac arrest and died.

This should really jolt the Marina and Coast Guard into a state of wakefulness and realize that it’s time to stop the foolish policy they imposed in prohibiting pump boat operators from unfurling their tarpaulin roofs. Yesterday, I went to the Parola Ferry Terminal to take a look at the conditions there. It was only 7:30 a.m. when I got there, and the sun was not yet scorching hot. Still, I saw passengers unfold umbrellas to get protection from the sun.

It wasn’t hard to figure out that a heavy rain would get everybody drenched. Even with umbrellas, the rain would soak them to the bones. The situation for passengers on the Iloilo-Guimaras-Iloilo pump boats is really miserable. And the sad thing is that there is no basis for Marina and Coast Guard to adopt this policy. In other parts of the country, pump boats still have tarpaulin roofing when plying their routes.

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Money talks.

That is the sad reality at the Bureau of Corrections.

It’s not as if it is a freshly discovered truth. As I’ve said before, corruption at the BuCor has been a perennial problem. But it would now seem that the worst corruption seen at the BuCor took place when Senator Leila de Lima held the helm at the Department of Justice.

At yesterday’s Senate hearing presided by Senator Richard Gordon, it was disclosed that nearly 80% of heinous crime convicts released took place during her incumbency as DOJ secretary. The number of heinous crime convicts released under De Lima was more than the total of released convicts during the watch of three other DOJ secretaries.

The BuCor was headed by Rafael Ragos as officer-in-charge when De Lima was DOJ secretary. Ragos was a deputy director of the NBI previously, with no experience in running the operations of prisons. But he enjoyed the trust and confidence of De Lima, which was why he got the plum job. And a flood of testimony points to Ragos as perhaps the most corrupt head of the Bureau of Corrections.

Former CIDG head and now Baguio City mayor Benjie Magalong gave the public a good idea about the activities of Ragos (whom I had actually met and known when he was Assistant Regional Director of the NBI in Iloilo nine years ago). With this as background, we can make sound conclusions as to why Ragos became the pet of De Lima.

In fairness to De Lima, the corruption didn’t end when she ran and won as Senator.

Money talks was how one resource person (was it former DOJ Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre who said that?) described the situation. Even when President Duterte deployed the Special Action Force to take over the guard duties at the New Bilibid Prisons, the illegal drugs trade continued because of the connivance of the SAF guards.

This is really becoming a big headache for the government. It seems no amount of changes can turn the situation around. Until now, there is still drug trafficking being directed from inside of Bilibid. Indeed, how can we solve a problem that just cannot say “no” when money talks?