Above the Law

He promised to kill 100,000 and dump the bodies at the Manila Bay. If he has had his way, the famous sunset scene would be the real cesspool, not Boracay. Here, the country would not only have a humanitarian, but also an environmental, disaster. 

The mass slaughter was Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s centerpiece strategy for the campaign platform of solving crime in six months, specifically ending the drug problem. He had the record of 1,700 killed (per his account) by the Davao Death Squad to prove he meant business.

Despite the glaring madness of it, 16 million Filipinos voted him to be the 16^th president of the republic. They believed he was the guy they wanted. With their credulity, Duterte made a killing of the 2016 presidential election garnering a landslide margin of seven million over second runner Mar Roxas.

The electoral massacre was only the foretaste of his dish. He has barely assumed office when the actual killing of people in senseless mayhem began to pile up.

“I will really kill you,” he bristled promising to end the drug menace very soon or he will resign. Eighteen months later, he would admit that it cannot really be ended during his term.

Illegal drugs continued to flow even as the deaths spiraled. From 1.9 million drug users and peddlers previously reported by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, the number got to four million in Duterte’s list. His top diplomat and extra mouthpiece Alan Peter Cayetano would later revise it to 7,000.

Before anyone says again that he was only joking or has been taken out of context, the killing was for real. Now, the reported victims of drug-related summary executions have already surpassed 20,000. They were listed suspects who would never be proven either guilty or yet be able to prove themselves innocent anymore.

Duterte admitted in public that the Davao Death Squad was his brainchild. Media quoted him to say, “I am the Davao Death Squad.” In July 2016, upon his assumption to office, the DDS would no longer be a local affair. It rose in size, scope and operational scale to cover the whole archipelago.

Cops were reportedly commissioned to augment the Davao-style vigilantes. They shed uniform, wore hood, and transformed into bounty hunters. The thugs could not wait for Duterte’s inauguration. By June, young and old began falling like flies on dark alleys and streets of Metro Manila.

But the masked rogues were not the only group doing the bloodletting. Uniformed police themselves finished off, in the open, tokhang (knock and request) invitees on the oft-rehashed pretext of “nanlaban” (the suspect fought).

Under the baton of Duterte’s right hand, Philippine National Police Chief Rolando Bato de la Rosa, the law enforcers metamorphosed into law breakers, fabricators of stories, and planters of evidence. They turned their agency into a hideous bloodthirsty monster.

Insiders revealed that a quota-and-award system (vintage Davao) enjoined as well as incentivized executions. Higher-ups imposed numbers to be “neutralized,” evaluating performance of law enforcement units on the basis of deaths scored.  

Every kill chalked a generous sum from the anti-drug chest. Painted first to be a patriotic crusade, the war on drugs degenerated into bounty hunting by agents of the law feigning self-defense, or themselves as hooded vigilantes along with plain criminals meting death sentences to mere suspects for reward money.

The mass murders compared to nothing in the past in atrocity and impunity. Towards the second year of Duterte’s watch, deaths already hovered at 16,000. Prodded by his public pronouncements and prompted by cryptic orders down the police hierarchy, gun-for-hires and uniformed cops just snuffed lives with no regard to rights, due process, and the rule of law.

But basing on demographics, Digong’s war showed more and more to be a “massacre of the poor,” dismayed watchers pointed out. Almost all of the EJK victims came from the lower strata of society, a big portion of them innocent children and teenagers waved off as collateral damage. All were helpless with no means to resist or defend themselves or bring a case to court.

The rampage may have cowed the populace into submission to Duterte’s evident fascist tendencies. But it has not substantially dented illegal drug use and drug dealing in the country. The climate of fear has had no effect on the powerful drug rings that would be found out to smuggle at will tons of crystal meth through the Bureau of Customs and distribute it from the country’s foremost penitentiary, the National Bilibid Prison.

The war on drugs ran into a wall when it came to the lords of the narco ring. This was queer. The suspected poor street traffickers and users fell dead. But the big bosses and high stakes traffickers reigned free.

The senate investigation on the P6.4-billion shabu smuggling across the BOC’s green lane implicated Duterte’s son Paolo Duterte, who was the incumbent vice mayor of Davao City. On questioning by senators, a custom’s broker and fixer traced cellphone text messages to him as head of a Mafia-like ring called the Davao Group that runs big time smuggling and facilitated BOC capers. Its latest racked up P28 billion worth of illegal drugs.

The presidential scion was also exposed by Senator Antonio Trillanes to be a dragon-tattooed member of the Chinese Triad which supplies the bulk of the drug shipments to the country. Pictures presented in the senate hearings showed him romping with tagged drug lords.

Paolo got a lawyerly advice from his dad Digong to keep mum and invoke his right against self-incrimination in the senate questioning. The presidential father challenged accusers to produce a single affidavit that involves his son in drug traffic. Because it is his son, he now calls on the same due process denied to victims of bloodletting by his war on drugs.

The case of Paolo brought home the point that human rights advocates and organizations including the Commission on Human Rights have been voicing, but which Duterte condemned and threatened. Suspects even if they are alleged to have committed a capital offense should be hailed to court, not slaughtered. Yet, not even the ones convicted of heinous crimes can be killed, because the constitution and statutes do not sanction punishment by death.

But the Duterte rule overrules the rule of law. In one of his bragging spells, he taunted God by saying that if He really exists, what he does would make Him cry. The tyrant and his supporters think that a landslide election victory gave him all the right to play God, kill at will, and have himself obeyed as the law.