Lim, 64, rose to power after a long career in Manila’s Western Police District (WPD), the city’s most macho precinct. When he was chief of the WPD in the 1980s, he says, something snapped after several officers were killed in action. In 1987 he led a police charge to retake a TV station and hotel captured by rebellious soldiers during a coup attempt. A grateful President Corazon Aquino named Lim chief of the National Bureau of Investigation-the equivalent of the FBI. There, one of his most celebrated cases involved the arrest of a Manila drug lord who ended up dead on the ride to jail.
After Lim won the election in 1992, national police authorities rejected his attempt to form an elite police force that would answer directly to him. So Lim installed a fellow ex-cop and martial-arts expert, Reynaldo Jaylo, as head of the Mayor’s Action Group for Investigation and Complaint (MAGIC). Among other things, Jaylo “and some of my [Jaylo’s] boys” began vigorously entrapping prostitute; and building cases against bar owners in the 30-year-old Ermita red-light district. The most obvious sex bars have been closed, some replaced by antiques stores and travel agencies.
Lim tempered his early campaign to evict some of Manila’s 400,000 homeless squatters, reportedly at the urging of Cardinal Jaime Sin, the country’s Roman Catholic prelate. But at a religious service last November, Lim vowed that he would rid Manila of its drug pushers within six months or resign. The mayor says he was subsequently surprised when the bodies of executed young men began turning up on Manila’s streets-about 20 so far, according to the U.S. State Department’s latest human-rights report-some next to signs reading DON’T PUSH DRUGS, YOU’LL END UP LIKE ME.
A body here, a body there. The mayor claims he’s just trying to turn the capital into a place where citizens can open their windows to the night breezes rather than to burglars and rapists. What’s next? “Illegal gambling,” says Mayor Lim. Bookies, clean up your act, or something more than your dice could be rolling.
