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| (From left) President Rodrigo Duterte, former senatorial candidate Gary Alejano and Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo / compiled photo from the Manila Times |
Former Magdalo party-list Rep. Gary Alejano blasted Presidential
Spokesman Salvador Panelo for using President Rodrigo Duterte’s Bisaya language
as an excuse in his “ambush” comment about former mayor Vicente Loot.
Alejano chided Panelo for allegedly depending the President
and for putting Visayans into “shame.”
“Do not put to shame Visayans. We studied tagalog and we
know how to speak tagalog. Papalusot ka na naman, secretary of distortion!
Bakakon kang daku!” he said in a tweet.
In a speech on Tuesday, Duterte said he ordered the ambush
on Loot, a former police general who was a suspected narco-politician.
However, Presidential spokesman and legal counsel Salvador
Panelo clarified that the President’s remark was not an admission of
involvement and was only a case of language “mix up.”
“Inambush kita, buhay ka pa” is uttered by a Bisaya
President who is not proficient in Filipino, the vernacular language used in
the capital city of Manila and in most areas in Luzon,” Panelo said in a
statement.
“What the President intended to say was: ‘Inambush ka na,
buhay ka pa.’ That has been his line as shown by the transcripts of some of his
previous speeches every time he touches on the topic of General Loot’s ambush,”
he added.
Panelo said it would be “absurd and silly” to assume that
Duterte was behind the ambush of Loot just because of language mixed up.
“The Filipino nation by this time is already familiar and
used to the language of the President who invariably uses a mixture of English,
Bisaya (Cebuano dialect) and Filipino in communicating with the nation,” he
noted.
It has been reported earlier that Loot and his family
survived an ambush at a dockside in Daanbatayan in May 2018.
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