Castillo’s ‘leap in the dark’

WHEN he left last Saturday for a fraternity’s overnight welcoming ceremony, Horacio Tomas Castillo III seemed certain no harm would come to him. According to the Inquirer’s report, he told his family that he would be home early the next morning so he could go to mass with them.

We know now that the 22-year-old law school freshman never made it home. Officials of both the Aegis Juris fraternity and the University of Santo Tomas (UST) have yet to answer many of the questions about the would-be lawyer’s death.

Among the things they’ll have to sort out is whether UST’s administration had been informed about the initiation rites. Under Republic Act 8049, school authorities must be informed about any organization’s initiation activity seven days before this takes place. Also, initiations should not last longer than three days, and those in the sorority or fraternity involved are supposed to be bound by an undertaking “that no physical violence (shall) be employed by anybody during such initiation rites.”

That law was enacted in 1995, in response to the 1991 case of Leonardo Lenny Villa, who died after two days of intermittent beatings while being initiated into the Aquila Legis Juris Fraternity of the Ateneo de Manila University. According to the Supreme Court’s (SC) ruling on the case, Villa suffered “multiple traumatic injuries” so severe that his heart stopped.

The lawmakers who worked on Republic Act 8049 tried to make its provisions strict, in the hope that the law would rein in the violence implicit in most fraternities’ initiation rites. Among the provisions was that anyone present during a hazing that results in injuries or death would be tried as a principal, “unless he prevented the commission of the acts” that caused harm.

But as the Supreme Court pointed out in its February 2012 decision on the Villa case, his death did not stop hazing. In fact, six other deaths blamed on hazing surfaced within a year of Villa’s death.

Given the violence that likely awaited them, the Court said that those recruited into fraternities were taking “a leap in the dark” in exchange for kinship and its practical benefits. It’s a tragedy bound to repeat, unless lawyers and judges themselves break the silence that protects hazing in university fraternities. — Sunnex