Kidnap for ransom: State of failure in the

Where I am, it is the buyer’s market for mangoes. You get a liberal splash of mango slices at breakfast in the hotel or P25 per kilogram for the golden yellows in the public market.

It’s also the season of the repulsive — the unrecorded kidnapfor-ransom cases where families of victims seek their own devices to deal with perpetrators, since the State is absent or busy elsewhere. Victims are snatched, seemingly at random, and ransom demands are valued only after knowing the income status and political resources of the victim’s family. Sometimes, kidnap gangs recoil at the thought of a higher negative consequence if the victims’ family has the power to retaliate, especially clans that behave like a state in their own domains.

Do people show fear? It doesn’t seem so. The city appears normal and people have daily pressing needs other than worrying over the possibility of falling into the hands of kidnappers. But it happens that even if you calmly and trustfully walk the street where you grew up or go on a date with your girlfriend, some elements look at you as a person of interest. Then by a stroke of bad luck, you disappear in the dark until ransom payment is made. Some remain on the waiting list of those yet to be found again by their families. They do not necessarily form part of cold cases in police records simply because the State is not there when it happens.

This is a small city that used to act as a pleasant amalgam of cultures — of Maranao Muslims, non-Muslim indigenous peoples, and Christian settlers; an amalgam that was constantly tested in the fires of inter- clan political violence. The big clans have long agreed to carve a zone of compromise, including intermarriage as one of the solutions. But underlying horizontal conflicts and accompanying violence appear like a Gordian knot that constantly presents itself during highs and lows of rebellion. Now there’s the Bangsamoro Basic Law ( BBL) that is tearing the political elite and communities apart — one side fearing the fragmentation of the city’s territory and the other hoping to benefit from the promise of peace, even to the point of treating the BBL as the singular indicator of success and peace.

But while everyone is watching the BBL spectacle in Congress, shadow actors are demonstrating a new play as if to taunt the State whether it can behave like one: kidnapping for ransom. But of course the State is also saddled with so many problems from within and without. In fact, it tends to react and then freeze before a pile of crises — from Yolanda to the Zamboanga seige and Mamapasano; and now the BBL and how to publicly narrate the bad news that is unfolding.

Of the eight kidnap victims known to the grapevine this year, seven are college- age youths. One other is a woman in her 80s. None belong to the super rich and do not show the slightest flamboyance that would tempt anyone to think that they have benefited from the Priority Development Assistance Fund or the Disbursement

While everyone is watching the BBL spectacle in Congress, shadow actors are demonstrating a new play as if to taunt the State whether it can behave like one: kidnapping for ransom. But of course the State is also saddled with so many problems from within and without. In fact, it tends to react and then freeze before a pile of crises — from Yolanda to the Zamboanga seige and Mamapasano; and now the BBL and how to publicly narrate the bad news that is unfolding.