MANILA: What made the Duterte administration’s so-called “war on drugs” so lethally effective that it ended up with 6,000 Filipinos dead according to official police records, and perhaps up to 30,000 according to independent human rights watchdogs?
The chief factor, of course, was that it was greenlighted, encouraged and backstopped from the top. Rodrigo Duterte was a public official with decades of experience in government who certainly knew his Constitution and its centrepiece Bill of Rights—but as he himself declared, “I don’t care about human rights.”
His extremist philosophy about law and order—that “addicts,” petty criminals, and other eyesores of society could be put to death for the betterment of all—became state policy when he piloted it as mayor of Davao City and then made it his administration’s flagship domestic programme after becoming president in 2016.
Another crucial plank of the programme was its executioners. Duterte had a loyal henchman in his first police chief, the now-fugitive Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who unquestioningly implemented the deadly contempt of his boss toward drug suspects, the majority of them coming from impoverished communities.
Extraordinary number
Under Dela Rosa were the foot soldiers who took to heart Duterte’s assurances that he had their back in case of legal troubles, and that the most efficient way to handle suspects was to make them resist arrest (the infamous “nanlaban”) so police had the excuse to shoot them down.
Following one of the deadliest episodes of the drug war when 32 people were summarily killed in various raids across Bulacan in one day in August 2017, Duterte chillingly intoned: “That was good. If we could kill another 32 every day, then maybe we can reduce what ails this country.”
Duterte bankrolled his rhetoric with vast sums of taxpayer money, and not just through official means by way of publicly allocated budgets for police operations, intelligence work, firearms, and logistics. Even at the beginning of the drug crackdown, speculation was widespread that some form of reward system for the killings had been put in place for the police.
That would explain the extraordinary number of suspects killed, with state forces seemingly in a race to rack up the highest tally of drug targets “neutralised” (Dela Rosa’s term).
More powerful posts
A police officer recalled recently that, in a meeting in 2018 between key police officials in Northern Mindanao and Dela Rosa, the then-police chief “was so mad that there were only a few drug suspects killed in anti-drug operations.”
It would take Congress’ sweeping hearings on the drug war in 2024 under the Marcos administration to help unravel the sordid inner architecture of Duterte’s legacy policy. The House Quad Committee publicly confirmed—from testimony by the likes of retired colonel Royina Garma and Lt. Col. Jovie Espenido—the existence of a reward and quota system.
Cash payouts for killing drug suspects—modeled after the “Davao template”—ranged from P20,000 (US$317) to P1 million per target, supplemented by local official funds and operational “tips.”
But more than the cash incentives for killing hapless Filipinos, many police officers got something else cushier and more rewarding—promotions and assignments to more powerful posts. Mass extrajudicial killings (EJKs) were in effect the stepping stone for some law enforcers to secure higher posts and advance their careers.
The Philippine Truth and Reconciliation Commission, launched in May this year by civil society groups to create an independent comprehensive record of the drug war killings, has asked the Marcos administration to launch an inquiry into police commanders whose high EJK counts under their jurisdiction were instead rewarded by the Duterte administration with higher positions.
Lack of accountability
There was Lito Patay, for instance—his name a macabre commentary on his record—the head of the Batasan police station in Quezon City when its officers killed 108 people in drug operations between July 2016 and June 2017. Just months later, he was named chief of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group in Central Luzon.
“Any inquiry must look at promotions as closely as it looks at cash payments,” urged Dr. Christopher Magno, the Truth Commission’s executive director. “No police officer should gain in any way from the blood of people killed outside the law.”
The Marcos administration would do well to consider that call. Even as Duterte is now in The Hague, on trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity for his drug war, and Dela Rosa is on the run from an ICC warrant, many police officers involved in EJKs have yet to be brought to justice, except for a tiny fraction such as the officers convicted in the Kian delos Santos case.
After proper inquiry, stripping the worst of them of lofty posts earned from murdering their fellow Filipinos should go some way toward rectifying that reprehensible lack of accountability. - Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN
