Motive Behind the Twin Murders

Manila Standard Today

http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/?page=felMaragay_mar23_2009

"Who had the motive to have prominent public relations man Salvador 'Bubby' Dacer killed?" asked the blurb in my previous column which appeared in this paper last Saturday.

 Former President Joseph Estrada and Senator Panfilo Lacson were tagged as the principal villains behind the abduction and killing of Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito on Nov. 24, 2000.  That was contained in the sworn affidavit of former police Supt. Cesar Mancao, a subordinate of Lacson in the now-defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, which the senator then headed in a concurrent capacity as director general of the National Police.

Mancao’s claim was based on what he allegedly heard from then Senior Supt. Michael Ray Aquino as he was talking to Lacson inside a car: “We will finish off Delta (code name for Dacer) first, sir, because Bigote (Estrada) is already irked with him.”

Estrada quickly dismissed the damaging testimony against him as a hoax since “it is not in our blood to kill people.”  Besides, he said he and Dacer were “very good friends” and kumpadre twice over.  He was the baptismal godfather and wedding sponsor of Dacer’s daughter Ampy. He denied insinuation that he had a feud with the PR man at that time. And to prove this, he recalled that Dacer, Ampy and her husband visited him at the Palace two days before the abduction.  He even mentioned the names of personalities who witnessed the visit.

 As narrated in my previous column, Estrada was then fighting for his political survival, with his foes frenziedly moving to impeach him over the "jueteng-gate" and the scandal over the alleged Best World Resources insider trading. If Estrada really had a hand in the killing of Dacer, then it would appear that he was a confused, desperate man unable to discern the fatal consequences of such act on his government.  But he was not foolish not to know that a political murder leading to the doorsteps of the Palace would be the worst thing that could happen to his embattled administration during those turbulent days.

 During the dying days of the Marcos dictatorship, opposition stalwart Evelio Javier, governor of Aklan, was brutally murdered in the vicinity of the provincial capitol of Kalibo. The tragic incident further inflamed the people’s fury and hastened the downfall of then President Ferdinand Marcos.  At the height of the impeachment proceedings against him, Estrada said he purposely refrained from ordering the police to break up the protest rallies lest he be accused of violating human rights. Much less, he said, could he have ordered the taking of the life of a person who is not even his political opponent, but in fact a friend of long standing.

Former Chief Supt. Reynaldo Berroya, who was head of Task Force Lawin under the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission headed by Estrada during his vice presidency, said he did not believe that Estrada had anything to do with the Dacer-Corbito slaying.  But he said investigation conducted by the PNP-Intelligence Group that he headed under the Arroyo presidency indicated that a team led by another Lacson subordinate, former Supt. Glenn Dumlao,  allegedly conducted surveillance operations on Dacer with a mission to look for documents on a business scandal allegedly incriminating to Estrada that were supposedly being kept by the PR man.

Probers were looking into the angle that the Estrada camp feared Dacer would turn over the documents to the opposition and that these pertained to records of the alleged insider trading of the BW Resources, owned by businessman Dante Tan. It turned out that Tan was a former PR client of Dacer.  How credible is that angle in the light of the testimony of Mancao, head of Paoctf’s Task Force Luzon? In his sworn statement, Mancao recalled after Dacer was snatched away by a group of Paoctf operatives, Dumlao informed him that he had gotten hold of documents recovered from the PR man’s Toyota Revo.

“I commented that it was risky for him to be keeping them.  I later on learned that he [Dumlao] disposed of the documents by burning the same,” Mancao recounted.  If the Paoctf operatives were under instruction to track down and get the BW Resources documents supposedly incriminating to Estrada, why did Dumlao destroy the documents that he found?

In reaction to Mancao's testimony, Lacson categorically stated that he never received an order from his superior regarding Dacer.  He also claimed that his purported conversation with Aquino inside the car mentioned in the Dacer affidavit did not occur.  He said there was never a time when Mancao rode with him in his official car. He added that the front seat, beside the driver’s seat, was always occupied by his aide-de-camp.

Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez said that the National Bureau of Investigation is now looking for Lacson's ex-driver, identified as retired Sr. Police Officer 4 Reynaldo Oximoso because he is "a very crucial witness" who could corroborate Mancao’s testimony.  But Oximoso has already spoken. “I do not remember that I ever had Mancao on the front seat," he was quoted as saying in a newspaper report.

Lacson branded Mancao’s affidavit as incredulous because if would be very silly of him to be giving an order to kill any in the presence of three persons, including one  who had nothing to do with such sensitive operation.  And even more incredulous, he added, was that he supposedly came to know of an order  to kill Dacer from a lower officer (Aquino) on a “for-your-information” basis instead of getting it directly from his superior (Estrada).

If the go-signal to eliminate Dacer had come from Lacson, the latter would also look like a bum.  How plausible is this considering that Lacson also presumably knew that a political killing such as this was like pouring gas on a burning house and  would only multiply Estrada’s troubles? His fortunes were also inextricably tied with Estrada's. If Estrada was thrown out of power, so would Lacson be stripped of his PNP chief’s rank.

Confronted with a very grave accusation in a gruesome crime, Lacson appears unfazed and prepared to defend himself.  Men of lesser stuff would have felt downhearted, sulked and stayed away from public view. But he said that in personal crises like this, “truth is my greatest ally.”

 On the day a newspaper banner-headlined the story on the Mancao testimony, pointing to him as the brains behind the double murder, Lacson went ahead with his speaking engagement before a nationwide association of local government assessors and treasurers at the Manila Hotel. The next day, he flew to Isabela where he met with political supporters. This time, he was on the offensive, counter-charging that the revival of the murder case was meant to pre-empt another of his expose against the Arroyo administration. He also appealed to Dacer’s daughters not to jump into conclusions on the basis of unproven assumptions.