COLUMN ONE : Good Guys Act Bad in ‘Wild East’ : Manila has long been a rowdy city. Now men in uniform are blamed for a surge in kidnapings. Foreign investors and tourists are scared off, and the wealthy are fleeing.

Even for this tough town, long known as one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden capitals in Asia, it was a grisly case.

College students Kenneth Yu Go and Myron Ramos Uy, both 19, were driving home from a late party when a four-wheel-drive vehicle suddenly cut them off. Men with assault rifles quickly dragged them away. Anguished letters from the youths soon were delivered in a pizza box and a flower bouquet. “They are beginning to hurt me,” Go wrote.

The kidnapers initially demanded $835,000 in ransom. The parents, middle-class Chinese-Filipinos, couldn’t afford it. Finally, a deal was struck. “They will be driving this car back,” a gang member promised after he accepted $60,000 in a crowded restaurant parking lot.

But then, tipped off by one of the families, police arrived. In moments, a gun battle raged in the busy streets. The crooks escaped unharmed. The two youths did not. Their bodies turned up in a garbage-strewn lot the next day, Sept. 17. Both had been shot in the head, scalded with boiling water, burned by cigarettes and mutilated with razors.

“It was a direct message to the families of would-be victims to keep quiet, not to cooperate with police,” said Teresita Ang See, editor of a monthly Chinese-Filipino newsletter. “And the message is they (the kidnapers) are untouchable.”

Even worse, the untouchables in this roaring, rowdy city are often corrupt cops and soldiers. By all accounts, men in uniform are chiefly responsible for the rash of kidnapings and other crimes that have dominated President Fidel V. Ramos’ first four months in office, frightened foreign investors and tourists, and forced a growing number of wealthy businessmen and their families to flee the impoverished country.

In what has become one of the nation’s few growth industries, at least 48 people have been reported kidnaped since Ramos took office, from a toddler snatched from his nursemaid’s arms to a 77-year-old school principal who died of a heart attack after he was abducted. That compares with 50 known cases all last year. Most frequently targeted are wealthy Chinese-Filipinos, but American, German, British, Japanese and Australian citizens also have been abducted this year.

“Nobody’s secure,” said a 35-year-old Manila-born machine shop manager who was seized by four armed men and held blindfolded for 10 hours. The man, who believes he was kidnaped by police and who asked not to be identified, was released when his wife paid $40,000 in ransom. “Almost every second I thought I would die,” he said.

Crime and corruption obviously aren’t new in a trigger-happy town once called the “Wild, Wild East.” As before, the Philippines had the highest murder rate in Asia last year, and the seventh-highest worldwide. But the latest violence--complete with speeding car chases, wild shootouts and daring daylight abductions--makes it harder than ever to tell the good guys from the bad.

“Sixty-five percent of sensational crimes are caused by active or former police or soldiers,” said Rafael Alunan III, the interior secretary and chief of the national police commission. “Murder, kidnaping, bank robbery--you name it, they do it.”

“Cases involving hoodlums in uniforms have become more the rule than the exception,” agreed Vice President Joseph Estrada. Fully 90% of those arrested for kidnaping and other serious crimes since July are current or former police and military men, he said. Critics say he exaggerates, but no one really knows, since each law enforcement agency keeps separate and conflicting records.

Estrada heads the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission (PACC), which was created in July after a public outcry over growing reports of drug smuggling, extortion, bank robberies, car thefts and kidnaping. A former movie matinee idol, Estrada now stars in headlines as “Chief Crimebuster.” Wearing dark sunglasses and a bulletproof vest, with a pistol tucked in his ample belt, the vice president routinely joins his agents on raids and busts.

Several weeks ago, he invited Chief Inspector Jose Pring, head of a police anti-kidnaping task force, and another police major to a news conference at his home--and then, in a scene from one of his shoot-’em-up films, dramatically arrested them for allegedly running a notorious kidnaping ring.

“Where else in the world but the Philippines can you find the chief of an anti-kidnaping task force turn out to be the king of the kidnapers?” Estrada asked with a grin.

But not everyone is laughing. So far, Estrada’s men have shot and killed at least 12 people under questionable circumstances. The vice president makes no apologies, blaming “hoodlums in robes,” or corrupt judges, for taking bribes to release suspects. “Sometimes it is better not to take prisoners,” he told foreign correspondents last month.

The next day was a case in point. Several carloads of PACC agents chased and gunned down four men, including two policemen, on Manila’s busy South Expressway, riddling their red Toyota with 66 bullet holes and wounding four people in a passing bus. As rush-hour traffic backed up, the agents then waited nearly five hours before removing the bodies; one victim reportedly bled to death during the wait.

Estrada’s aides said the dead men were drug dealers and had fired first. Witnesses disagreed, and police paraffin tests showed that only one suspect “could have possibly fired” a pistol. In any case, an autopsy showed he was shot in the head from two inches away. “It was a gangland execution, pure and simple,” complained the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

If so, it wasn’t the first. The rescue of kidnaped California oil executive Michael Barnes on March 18 after two months of captivity produced a blood bath. In a wild series of raids, Philippine police teams shot and killed 14 people in six different houses. Barnes escaped unharmed. So did all the police. And so did the former police informant who allegedly led the kidnaping gang; he remains at large.

Police justified the carnage by describing “shootouts” at all six houses. But a new report by the National Bureau of Investigation, the nation’s FBI, says two victims were killed after they had surrendered and were face down on the ground, while two others were killed three hours after they were handcuffed and taken into police custody. The bureau has recommended murder charges against all 132 police involved in the raids.

“We arrived at the conclusion there was no shootout,” said Mariano Mison, the bureau’s acting assistant director. “Most of the victims were just plain, simple citizens. . . . I don’t believe any of them were involved in the kidnaping.”

Few here seem overly concerned, however. Law and order are relative terms here in the best of times. Most hotels, restaurants and offices post armed guards and signs asking patrons to deposit their own guns at the door. Well-heeled businessmen travel with burly bodyguards in bulletproof cars. Even celebrations are violent: Several people are killed and hundreds wounded each New Year’s Eve when revelers fire guns in the air.

Police are rarely much help. In a celebrated case last year, five heavily armed men spent 35 minutes robbing a jewelry store close to a major police station. Although witnesses shouted for help and guards fired guns in alarm, the cops stayed inside. Adding insult to injury, a newspaper photo showed the crooks--identified as Philippine marines--directing traffic to facilitate their escape through the crowded streets. No arrests were made.

Courts, in any case, are glacially slow. Former First Lady Imelda Marcos, for example, has been acquitted of fraud in New York while her late husband’s estate has been convicted of human rights abuses in courtrooms in Seattle and Honolulu. Six years after fleeing the Philippines, however, Marcos has yet to face trial here for any of the dozens of charges against her.

Corruption remains endemic. Well-known provincial governors reputedly run illegal logging, smuggling and gambling. Government clerks demand bribes for everything from driver’s licenses to passports. Allegations of fraud surround construction programs to aid victims of the Mt. Pinatubo volcano. Much-publicized efforts by Manila’s new mayor, Alfredo Lim, to close an infamous strip of brothels and bars has produced far more headlines than padlocks.

“They just raised the rent,” one Australian bar owner said with a shrug, referring to police protection money. “Everybody gets paid off, from the cop to the flower girl.”

And while kidnaping is not new--hundreds of abductions were reported, especially on the southern island of Mindanao, in the last three years--the current spree has sparked special concern.

The reason is that Manila’s Chinese community has been hardest hit. The 500,000 or so ethnic Chinese families make up less than 2% of the Philippine population. Many live and work in Binondo, Manila’s dingy Chinatown. But the area’s garbage-clogged canals and horse-drawn carriages hide the fact that ethnic Chinese are major players in Philippine banking, stock markets and real estate, and control one-third of the nation’s trade and manufacturing.

Cardinal Jaime Sin, Manila’s archbishop, blamed the kidnapings for choking an already weak economy. “Many businessmen have canceled plans of expansion because of the deplorable breakdown in peace and order,” he said. “Prospective investors have chosen to stay away from our country.”

Others are leaving. Local Chinese leaders say a growing number of wealthy families are simply moving to Canada, the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong and southern China. “A lot of businessmen have opted to go abroad,” said Bernardito Ang, who represents Binondo on the City Council.

In hopes of stemming the flow and repairing his country’s tarnished image, President Ramos ordered the nation’s armed forces and intelligence services to help combat kidnapers. He declared “urgent” a death penalty bill pending in Congress. Police also sent armed guards to Chinese schools after newspapers reported--erroneously, as it turned out--that an entire school bus had been hijacked.

It wasn’t the only mistake. At a crowded press conference in late September, the armed forces chief of staff and other top officials announced the breakup of a major kidnaping gang and the arrest of 12 suspects, including the chief of intelligence of the Department of Immigration and four other immigration agents. To date, however, all five men continue at their jobs since “no formal charges were filed,” said Immigration Commissioner Zafiro Respicio.

Officials later announced the shooting death of one man and the arrest of seven others, including three police officers, who allegedly abducted and killed Go and Uy, the two students. Three former marines and a navy lieutenant are still wanted for the torture-murders, officials said.

What will happen to those arrested is unclear, however. Col. Antonio Gana, executive officer of the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission, said only one kidnaping victim so far has agreed to testify against his captors. Prosecution of many other abductors may be impossible. “The victims don’t trust us,” he said.

It’s hard to blame them. In some cases, police demanded money from victims to cover “expenses” for investigating or released their names to the press. Other victims were convinced they were held in a police or military camp. They said they heard the sound of marching and people addressed as “Captain” and “Sir.”

In at least one apocryphal case, according to Gana, a family tried to report a kidnaping to a general. “And when they got there, they saw the kidnapers were aides to the general,” Gana said. “So the victim, the family, just turned around and left.”