Former Davao City mayor Luis T. Santos, who later became interior and local government secretary during the first Aquino administration, was the gist of many urban legends, part true and part myth, when he was still the chief of police of Davao City. Though his family was into logging, his name was hardly an identity to reckon with, at least not until he engaged the criminals in numerous shootouts.
Unlike President Rodrigo Duterte who prides himself of a political pedigree, Santos, including some relatives, migrated to Davao in search of the proverbial green pasture; he found it in the logging industry at a time when getting concessions was considered a walk in the park.
The exploits of Santos while chief of police in the early 1960’s earned him the moniker of Diego Salvador, after the popular noontime Visayan radio drama with the same title. When he killed the infamous criminal Falcone in the town of Tagum in a clandestine police operation, his fame shot up. Accounts say he personally shot the fugitive, even challenging him to a duel.
Even outside the law enforcement circle, after he left the police force to challenge the mayoralty, the threat to his life, which was obviously an extension of his work as a cop, continued. But his name as a pistolero, a marksman, was larger than the vain attempts to get him.
Legend says that Santos, after being sworn into office as mayor of Davao City in 1971, he was promptly informed that the hideout of a notorious fugitive, long the prized target of the local Secret Service, was already pinpointed. Wanting to personally get the hunted, he left the celebration hosted in his honor and led a squad of cops in literally taking down the criminal.
On Nov. 14, 1972, just months after the declaration of martial law, he and opposition city councilor Zafiro L. Respicio were arrested. Santos became the 36th mayor arrested under the military regime. But his incarceration was short-lived after he signed a manifesto supporting the Marcos dictatorship. Respicio, a diehard militant, stayed long in jail before friends interceded.
Because of his pledge of loyalty to the new regime, Santos retained his position. But this did not deter his would-be assassins from hunting him down even while in office. According to urban legend, the plotters were eventually known and identified, and a certain Rudy (his surname forgotten at the moment) was tagged as mastermind.
Rudy was the son of Dimas, a tough-looking, wristband-wearing bearded muscleman who worked as a foreman of a stevedoring company at Santa Ana wharf. As our neighbor at Soliman, a squatter colony within a mangrove forest adjacent to the now buried Agdao Creek, he was always at odds with his father who would detain him inside a room to prevent him from escaping. At one time, locked in a room and naked, he still made good his flight.
But Rudy was clever. He always used his creativity in escaping, this time using the patadyong (wraparound skirt) given by his mother as his blanket. He used window for his escape. His flight would become top news in the neighborhood in just few hours.
Legends have it that Mayor Santos eventually caught up with Rudy after the cops arrested him for committing another crime. He was brought to City Hall and, in full view of the public, was reprimanded and humiliated. At a time when there was yet no extrajudicial killing to speak about, City Hall gave him another chance to live but on a promise that he would reform himself and adopt more civil ways in earning a living. He left town but did not mend his ways.
Another urban legend that has gained currency (but supposedly took place) involves former mayor, now president, Rodrigo Duterte, given his tough stance against drugs, who was set for the crosshairs. The assassins billeted themselves across City Hall, on a budget hotel at the corner of Crooked Road. The plan was to hit the mayor’s office with recoilless-assisted projectile. Fortunately, the plot was discovered and the culprits arrested. Whatever happened to the criminals is everybody’s guess.
In the annals of Davao history, most of those who died by the muzzle of the gun were provincial officials. Spanish governor Jose Pinzon y Purga was assassinated by the Moros of Tagum in 1861, while American governor Edward Robert Bolton, along with his farm administrator, was fatally chopped down by a Tagacaolo ward leader who had an axe to grind. Bolton’s death on June 6, 1906, resulted in a juez de cuchillo (indiscriminate killing) that cost the lives of many tribesmen suspected to harbor the murderer.
In the post-Marcos era, Davao del Sur governor Ramon de los Cientos, already retired from public service, was gunned down in his farm by suspected rebels. The cause of the killing was traced by authorities to a possible agrarian conflict.
On May 28, 2014, Laak mayor Reynaldo Navarro, the first appointed and first elected vice governor of Compostela Valley Province, was ambushed by armed men in Asuncion town while on his way to Davao City. Probers blamed the New People’s Army (NPA) for the offense but certain sectors thought the whole episode was a politically motivated murder.
On a larger scale, it is a tribute to Filipinos that since proclaiming independence in 1898, no President has become victim to any form of assassination. The closest we had to removing a chief executive from power was the exile of then President Ferdinand E. Marcos to Hawaii in 1986 as a result of a popular uprising and the forced resignation of former president, now Manila mayor, Joseph Estrada in 2001.
