The Pestaño case: His death haunts them still

Much has been written about the death of Ensign Phillip Pestaño in 1995, which led to the filing of murder charges against ten Navy men. They were cleared in 2009, but the reopening of the case last January has once again put them in the spotlight. In the first of a 3-part series, two of the accused – a navy Commander and the alleged gunman – give rare interviews on little-known aspects of the case, including the illegal logging controversy.   The second-in-command of the Philippine flagship Gregorio del Pilar was catching up on his afternoon reading in the boat’s wardroom when he received a call from a fellow officer on his cell phone. Commander Reynaldo Lopez had had his mind far from the shore, new ideas brimming in his head, but the sudden news pulled him back to a past that he thought had long ago disappeared with time.   The slight rocking of the ship reinforced the unsettling problem that he would very soon have to deal with, unexpectedly; moored on the quiet blue bay of Palawan, Lopez had been thinking of a future for the Navy’s defense strategy on the South China Sea, but now he’s got to pack his bag and will be relieved from his position.   On his way to the airport to catch a flight back to Manila, he received other calls, three from former chiefs of the Navy, known as the Flag-Officer-In-Command or FOIC. They offered him consolation and advice to help him get out of the gravity of the situation that fell upon him, for he would be the senior among others. There were three more officers in the active service, and two enlisted men. Four of the ten Navy men accused of murder had since retired, including their commander then, Captain Ricardo Ordonez.   They all go back together, more than 16 years ago, on another ship, a huge 275-feet Logistics Supply Vessel called the BRP Bacolod City that was a beauty and just purchased from the United States. Having sailed all the way from Mississippi, this bulk of a grey ship became the Navy’s workhorse, traveling around the country to ferry cargo for military operations, and to the very corner south of the Sulu Archipelago where the ship had originated from when it happened.   In the morning of September 27, 1995, as BRP Bacolod City was nearing to berth at the headquarters of the Philippine Navy along the Manila Bay, a young officer was found dead in his cabin – and the circumstances of why and how it happened is the reason why Lopez et al are bound again today: to answer a renewed charge that they were accomplices to an alleged cover-up in what had once been a national scandal threatening to rack the Navy itself.     Lumber from Tawi-Tawi   In mid-January, the Ombudsman ordered the dismissal of the officers for grave misconduct and filed a case against them on charges of murder – all these in response to a motion by the parents of Ensign Phillip Pestaño, who have over the years tirelessly pursued every course of action to see some form of punishment over the fate of their son.   Don Pepe, as Pestaño’s father is called, a hefty man of considerable fortune, had painted a sinister picture surrounding the death of his son. He alleged that his son, having discovered dangerously illegal smuggling activities, had fallen victim to a conspiracy.   Lumber had been loaded onto three M-35 trucks on the BRP Bacolod City while on a mission in Tawi-Tawi. The piles of lumber cut from the preserved forests of the province were offered as a ‘departing gift’ by the politically powerful governor to the Navy chief who was about to retire; he would be using the wood to build his home in Cavite province, where BRP Bacolod City had docked overnight at the base of the Philippine Fleet on Sangley Point prior to the tragic event that occurred the following day.   In return, the governor received four drums of diesel fuel, each containing about 200 liters, ostensibly to help build roads on his undeveloped island. The exchange covers a wide grey area of corruption and extra-legal dealings so common in a military culture deprived of resources to keep up with its capability.   Both the governor and Navy chief are now deceased, but the transport of illegal timber had cast doubts on whether the Navy had been telling the truth. Through the years, Don Pepe has added more to the cache of other supposed shipment of drugs and weapons, with no hard evidence to prove a grand design befitting a thriller.   This case has been heard with intense emotional drama – even including testimonies from spirit callers – in the mid-1990s in the halls of the Senate and the Commission on Human Rights. Both bodies took the side of the Pestaño family, but fell short of precision as to the masterminds. The case at the Ombudsman paints the accused Navy men as conspirators of a supposedly elaborate cover-up.   “I know for a fact that they’re just following orders,” Don Pepe said of the officers who were his son’s colleagues, surmising that the mastermind could be someone or others “higher than [the FOIC]” at that time, without elaborating.   Would this mean putting the officers’ lives in a shambles if they would be proven innocent? “It could be something like that … they have to talk, they can be part of a conspiracy,” he said. And to do so would restore the honor of his son and that “he did not die in vain, that’s the part that hurts.”   The alleged gunman   The family has laid out what they saw as suspicious circumstances to bolster their case against the navy men – Pestaño’s body had been washed clean before substantive forensic evidence could be collected, the suicide letter found in his room was allegedly fake, and Phillip had been complaining to his parents about the illegal transport of lumber aboard the navy ship.   Don Pepe’s theory points to the Navy chief’s security escort as the alleged killer, Petty Officer First Class Carlito Amoroso, who had personally followed the delivery of the lumber from Tawi-Tawi island to Cavite province on orders of the FOIC. Don Pepe suspected, as spelled out in his motion for reconsideration filed before the Ombudsman, that Amoroso might have been the culprit based on circumstantial evidence: the torn pages of a logbook that supposedly showed he was on board during the last traverse from Sangley Point to Manila Bay, the duration of which was longer than usual so he could carry out his deed.   Don Pepe’s lawyers provided an element of mystery by suggesting that Amoroso, one of the accused enlisted men who retired from the Navy in 2000 after 28 years in the service, has been missing or hiding from the allegations, or possibly made to disappear as part of the cover-up.   A bald man of heavy stock, Amoroso has in fact been living on his pension with his wife in a crowded Quezon City neighborhood. “There I was sweeping around with a broom and my neighbors suddenly avoided me or would look at me with fear” when they saw on the television news that he was a suspected murderer, he said.   Amoroso said he had gotten off BRP Bacolod City upon reaching Sangley Point, having accomplished his duty, an assignment given to him by the Navy chief to personally show the ship’s captain a private letter ordering him to bring the lumber on board – cargo that Ensign Pestaño allegedly told his father were “dirty goods, I want to burn them.”   Having finished the lumber assignment, Amoroso had gone home, taking a bus back to Manila. That was all that had taken place, he told GMA News Online.   “Getting on board the ship was like going through the hole of a needle, you can’t just move around, you’re restricted as to where you sleep and eat with the crew. I was just an ordinary Navy man,” Amoroso says in Filipino. He said he had never come across Ensign Pestaño, claiming he neither saw him personally nor spoken to him.   “The truth is, we’re small people with no money to fight” the wealth and influence of the Pestaño family, he says.   Careers on hold   The revival of this case comes at a juncture for the Navy, still haunted by this event, as the first signs of modernization kick in. After a long period of neglect, they have acquired a Coast Guard cutter now deployed in Palawan as part of the maneuvering, minimum at best, in the current geo-political hotspot of the West Philippine Sea. It is the Hamilton-class Gregorio del Pilar in which Commander Lopez was its executive officer, having built his reputation as an outstanding naval course man.   When the Ombudsman’s order came, Lopez was being eyed as the potential Captain of one of two or three cutters coming in to join the fleet. The other officers had also cut short their assignments that could have well put them in higher places: Commander Casis was in charge of a landing vessel stationed in Cavite; Lieutenant Commander Colico was the logistics officer of the Naval Forces in Davao; and Lieutenant Commander Alba was just about to be named the executive officer of a patrol craft in Zamboanga’s coastal areas.    They have now found their careers dead in midstream, locked as they are in a legal battle to clear their names from what happened on BRP Bacolod City when they were of lower ranks and trying to prove their worth as officers. “We were not endangering the ship,” said Lopez of that time, “we were not ordinary men, we were sailors.   “We fight with our coffee mugs because we think. That’s the heaviest weapon we’ve got and nothing else,” he explained. Lopez asserts that they have been accused wrongly, misunderstood and miscast in a scenario that they felt had turned against them because of an angry father. – YA, GMA News Next: A love affair gone sour Criselda Yabes is a veteran journalist specializing in military and defense reporting. She is the author of the books Boys from the Barracks and Peace Warriors: On The Trail with Filipino Soldiers.