EDITORIAL – An appalling security lapse

Predictably, Gregorio Rosal was gloating over the raid staged by New People’s Army rebels last Saturday on the Batangas provincial jail, which led to the escape of nine NPA inmates as well as four suspects detained on drug charges.

Yesterday Philippine National Police officials said they were tipped off earlier this month about the possibility of the raid, which was staged by about 20 rebels clad in Army uniforms and riding in vans with blinkers, sirens and government license plates. Why wasn’t jail security beefed up despite the tip? Because, the PNP explained, the jail is under the provincial government and not the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, an agency that, like the PNP, is under the Department of the Interior and Local Government.

If this is the kind of reasoning that the PNP has to offer, it is not surprising that the NPA keeps staging successful raids across the country, seizing firearms from police armories and freeing arrested rebels from detention. In the age of mobile phones and e-mail, there is no excuse for not alerting the Batangas provincial government or at least jail personnel about a possible NPA raid. The failure of the PNP to act on the tip is just as appalling as the security lapse at the provincial jail, where the guards obviously did not even bother to check the identities of the uniformed men who pretended to be delivering four inmates clad in orange uniforms to the jail.

If authorities cannot even keep captured rebels in detention, it is also not surprising that they cannot protect businessmen from communist rebel shakedowns or catch the thugs who bomb cell sites, burn buses and attack farms whose owners refuse to yield to NPA extortion.

The NPA, protected by its front organizations, has become the country’s largest organized crime ring, hindering development, driving away investments and forcing Filipinos to work abroad for lack of employment opportunities at home. The communists’ bankrupt, godless ideology has no chance of being embraced by most Filipinos. But these thugs continue to thrive, exploiting poverty, illiteracy, bad governance and the incompetence of law enforcement agencies.