Pablo
Pablo Cabangon was a widower raising four kids by working as a butcher. Within weeks of being put on a barangay drug watchlist, he was murdered by cops.
THE POOR
10/5/20263 min read
December 2016. The first festive season under the reign of Rodrigo Duterte turned into a season of terror among the residents of impoverished communities in Metro Manila. Barangay officials had compiled lists of alleged drug pushers and every day, groups of men in uniform and men in masks would raid the homes of people on these lists, leaving bloodied bodies in their wake.
When Pablo Cabangon found out that his name was on one of these watchlists, he tried to figure out what to do. Having lost his wife in 2009 to a botched Caesarian procedure, he had raised his four children by working as a butcher. Like many overworked and underpaid men who relied on their physical strength to survive, Pablo resorted to taking shabu (methamphetamine) to keep going.
Finding himself included in the list made him assess his options. How could he continue providing for his family without having to rely on drugs?
He decided to sell the only asset he owned—his house. With the proceeds, he could fund his eldest daughter’s application to work as a domestic helper in Saudi Arabia. She could then help support her siblings. He could probably quit his job and move to his home province, do something that would demand less of his aging body.
After he sold the house, he started feeling a bit complacent. Maybe being on the list didn’t mean anything. After all, he was just a user, not a pusher. Surely the police would be able to make the distinction. And so he stayed.
They came on the evening of 2 December 2016. A van without a licence plate stopped at the entrance to the alley where Pablo’s house stood. Men—some in police uniforms, others in civilian clothes and wearing bonnets and masks—spilled out of the vehicle and surrounded his house. They were carrying guns and sledgehammers. Some of the armed men ordered the neighbours into their houses and switched off their lights.
A knock on Pablo’s door. When it didn’t open straight away, the men forced it open with a sledgehammer. Inside the house, Pablo’s son, who was named after him, heard the men scream ‘Dapa!’ (‘Face down on the floor’), followed by two gunshots. In a panic, the young man jumped out of the house into the ditch that ran alongside it. A cop saw him and fired at him, but he managed to make it out of the alley without getting hit.
When Joy, one of Pablo’s children, reached their house, she caught a glimpse of her father on the floor, a part of his brain seeping out of his skull. Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO) who arrived at the house only asked her for her and her father’s names. None of them appeared to be interested in what happened to her father. They then took his body to the hospital. Princess, Pablo’s eldest daughter, would find out that her father’s body was then taken to a funeral parlour in Payatas, Quezon City, in the wee hours of the morning.
She would also discover that they had been robbed.
Things the cops took from Pablo’s house: the remaining proceeds from the sale of his house, which he kept in his wallet; his watch; two necklaces; his butchering tools.
Things the cops left behind: a damaged front door; Pablo’s wallet, now containing just one peso; four terrified, devastated orphans.
During Pablo’s wake, only a few women and children turned up to sympathise with his children. The men, all too aware of the horror lurking in the shadows of their neighbourhood, ready to pounce on them, opted to stay away. In the weeks after Pablo’s funeral, his children were hardly able to sleep, hounded by burly men who would surround their house at night, whistling, taunting, taking pleasure in their terror. Princess and her siblings would stack heavy objects against the door to try to keep the evil that took their father from hurting them further.
The police report would put the blame for Pablo’s murder on masked men and claim that the cops arrived at the house in response to the shooting, thus absolving both their men in uniform and those out of it.
Pablo’s children, now fatherless and homeless, were forced to eventually move into an old pigsty.
Pablo was 46.
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