Twenty-seven years ago, sleepy, old Domeng Landicho scattered us, his handful of writing students, to visit police stations and scour their blotters in search of real stories.
Twenty years ago in Nezahualcóyotl, a tough Mexican city of around 2 million people, the police officers who wished to be promoted had to sit through literature workshops. Regularly, they had to read through pages by Agatha Christie, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Arthur C. Clarke, and Honoré de Balzac. In a city where 40% of adults didn’t read books, the off-duty cops adventured in Macondo and La Mancha, in Octavio Paz’s “The Labyrinth of Solitude”. Along with a need to elevate the public’s appraisal of their police force, the hope was to develop defenders more attuned to the pulse of the people. 1.
Eight years ago, four year-old Bladen Skyler Abatayo, “was struck in the chest by a stray bullet after finishing homework, caught in a police operation meant to foil a pot session in the neighborhood.” Inquirer interviewed his father who said, “I had asked him to practice writing down his name. Yesterday was the first time he had written down his full name. I was very happy, but I did not know that [that day] was also his last.” 2.
[1] Wood, J. (2009). Sympathy and Complexity. In How Fiction Works (pp. 169–170). Picador; and Tuckman, J. (2006, October 24). Literature classes help maligned Mexican police to go by the book. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/24/booksnews.mexico?
[2] Abatayo, R. (2018, July 15). Cebu boy had just learned to write name when ‘drug war’ bullet came. Philippine Daily Inquirer. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1010327/cebu-boy-had-just-learned-to-write-name-when-drug-war-bullet-came and Kurt Dela Peña, K. (2026, February 27). Lives lost too soon: Children not spared in Duterte drug war. Philippine Daily Inquirer.
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2188383/lives-lost-too-soon-children-not-spared-in-duterte-drug-war?