JOURNALIST Felipe “Philip” Lustre Jr. has one frustration in life. He tried very hard to learn the Kapampangan language, the native tongue of his maternal grandmother, but failed. His attachment to his Pampanga roots was — and still is — likewise deep. He would often vividly recall the trips he made to the small town of Sta. Rita as a young boy. And the friendly, regular banter in ancient Kapampangan that his late grandmother would exchange with the many Kapampangan-speaking women of her age in the Grace Park, Caloocan City neighborhood where he grew up.
The families with Pampanga roots in that Grace Park area during Lustre’s childhood years there included the Lagman family, which turned out nationalist politicians and dissidents, and the Banal family, which turned out journalists and basketball players and coaches.
Failing to master the language, he did the next best thing, which was to befriend the Pampanga natives who, like him, covered the political beat for the major newspapers in the 1980s: Jess Diaz, the late Vet Vitug, myself and Benjie Guevarra, who was from the Kapampangan area of Southern Tarlac. I clearly remember that, like most Kampampangans, Lustre was clannish and proud of his place of origin. Benjie would jokingly call him “tabo” for the countless stories he filed as a stringer for a Japanese news agency. I would call him “pitong okra” and the whys behind that name is unprintable. Later in life, he remained an active member of the Kapampangan journalists who would often meet and hold press forums at the Clark Freeport.
But there was nothing clannish or parochial about Philip Lustre’s view of the nation and the world, nothing narrow and nativist about his political views.
He has this expansive embrace of the universal themes of freedom, justice, liberty and rights of men and the supreme belief that nothing could be better than the grand ideals and the ethos of democracy.
He loathed, with every sinew of his body, despots and autocrats.
And that kind of journalist, a journalist committed to the democratic ideals and to the idea that every man has value — and a very outspoken one at that — would naturally oppose the six years of the Rodrigo Duterte regime in his very outspoken way. And continue to oppose the Duterte princelings headed by Vice President Sara Duterte.
A few days back, Lustre was arrested based on a warrant of arrest issued by a Davao City court. He was in jail briefly and was freed after posting bail. The arrest warrant, supposedly based on a cyber libel case filed against him, did not specify the specific grounds and the complainant.
Kafkaesque, a favorite word of Lustre, was a situation he was in a few days back. An arrest based on a supposed crime with no specifics. The Philippine Daily Inquirer where Lustre never worked, was the address stated in the warrant. He was arrested coming out of a press forum.
Lustre said the whole thing was a setup. “It was a special ops against me by the Davao Group,” he said without adding other details. They operate this deep.
He delivered a message to the “Davao Group.” I will not back down and no one can silence me.
Lustre’s book, Kill, Kill, Kill, which the papers correctly summed up as an accounting of Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, was self-published but supported by friends who believed that the said bloody war — the grim specifics of the victims and their suffering, especially those coming from the slum areas of the Camanava part of Metro Manila — should be written for posterity. It did not create as much of a splash and global recognition as the book that came before it, the one written by journalist Patricia Evangelista. Kill, Kill, Kill was not meant to be an elegiac rendering of the war on drugs. Its purpose was to account for most, if not all, lives lost in the senseless orgies of extrajudicial killings that form the evidence of Rodrigo Duterte’s ongoing trial at The Hague for “crimes against humanity.” Kill, Kill, Kill was a book of record not a book designed to elicit encomiums for an elegant turn of phrase.
An upcoming book of Lustre will center on the husband and wife team of Mans Carpio and Sara Duterte. Like Kill, Kill, Kill — which is an accounting of the alleged crimes that form the basis for Rodrigo Duterte’s ongoing trial at The Hague, Lustre’s new book will be an accounting of the alleged acts of impunity that now form the basis for the ongoing impeachment trial of the Duterte princeling.
The dark sinister forces behind Lustre’s arrest forgot one thing: He never backs down.
His arrest based on Kafkaesque charges will just intensify his effort to record for posterity the transgressions of ghouls, despots, kleptocrats and autocrats.
