The Negros Oriental killings should not shock us. It is exactly what political dynasties, with all their power and wealth, can be capable of doing. Give them power at the ballot box, including buying their votes and electing all their family members to office, and sooner or later they will morph into mafiosi with private armies. Dynasty begins with self-preservation.

The blogger JoeAm of the popular blog Society of Honor proposes that Negros Oriental should now be called the New Sicily of the Philippines. Negros Oriental though is certainly not the first. Other dynastic strongholds of politicians who behave like Sicilian mafias abound. Davao City, for one, is a prime example where state forces like the police obey kill orders from their local dynasts.

How extensive can the current Senate investigation of the killings uncover? Despite the slapstick Q&As going on where resource persons give out hearsay answers, can it arrive at something airtight that can pinpoint guilt at the Teves brothers Arnie and Pryde Henry? At the most, the Senate can only recommend the filing of criminal charges in court, and that will take years to resolve.

The litany of killings being narrated is raising eyebrows at how Negros Oriental and its lovely capital city of Dumaguete, home of the venerable Silliman University, have mutated into killing fields. Friends from Dumaguete, hardened into a culture of silence, have tried to offer leads. Arnie Teves is their Lord Voldemort, their he-who-must-not-be-named.

This one, for instance, is a classic case of impunity. On February 12, 2010, Miss Dumaguete 2007 Ann Rose Fe Neri was shot at close range in Quezon Park, an open space, as she was conducting a rehearsal for a beauty pageant. The vlogcaster Armand Dean Nocum has brought up the beauty queen’s killing in relation to the Arnie Teves issue.

The news report given by the government’s Philippine News Agency was typical Voldemort. It said that police investigators were looking at the “possibility” that the murder had a strong link to a “powerful politician.” Neri was said to be a Teves paramour.

Nocum points out an interesting nuance at how the PNA article was written. It said Dumaguete police chief Leopoldo Cabanag declined to name the politician but that Cabanag “had spoken to the politician.” In other words, the police chief knew who the politician was. That is indeed a strange police force.

There were precursors to the brazen killing. The windows of Neri’s Kia Sportage vehicle, said to be a gift of the politician to her, were once smashed. Later, the car was burned. Then Neri received several death threats. Despite all these, the police had no intelligence reports that could have prevented Neri’s murder? Or they had but were cowed into fear. It meant only one thing – there was a breakdown of law and order in Dumaguete City and the police had become accomplices.

So what transpired after the murder? No case was filed. That was 13 years ago.

The other incident is something that was never reported by Dumaguete media and is whispered only among residents. In 2016, a former president of a state university ran against Arnie Teves for the third congressional district of the province. Was the candidate already an irritant to the Teveses? In 2013, he had ran as vice governor in the team of the now-slain Roel Degamo who at that time had ran for governor under PDP-Laban.

For whatever reasons, and which local townsfolk again attribute to he-who-must-not-be-named, a private aircraft flew low over the vice-gubernatorial candidate’s house and strafed it with automatic gunfire. Why did local residents ascribe it to the powerful politician? Because he owned several aircrafts, that is the reply.

Was Degamo a fly in the Teves’s ointment ever since? He won the 2013 elections against powerful candidates Gary Teves and congresswoman Jocelyn Sy Limkaichong. He identified himself with the grassroots and was said to have adopted the style of Fernando Poe’s common touch. He had no helicopters to fly him around and his party did not have a war chest the size of his opponents’. A news report of that election mentioned that the Iglesia Ni Cristo of the province had supported Gary Teves.

Ironically, it took the Pamplona Massacre of Degamo and the eight others who were killed with him to open a can of worms. Those exposés now magnify our consciousness of Arnie Teves’s possible crimes that have remained unsolved.

How many dynasties have such arsenal and have turned barangays, cities, towns, and provinces into little criminal societies? The answer may astound us. Because until this day we have not solved the problem of political dynasties. Even Degamo’s family has become a dynasty. – Rappler.com

Antonio J. Montalván II is a social anthropologist who advocates that keeping quiet when things go wrong is the mentality of a slave, not a good citizen.