TEN years after he was about to become one of the most powerful and feared men in the Philippines, Sen. Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa has invoked his constitutional right to liberty and due process. It couldn’t be more ironic. De la Rosa, as chief of the Philippine National Police (PNP), took charge of the Duterte administration’s war on drugs. The constitutional rights to life, liberty and due process of thousands of Filipinos alleged to be involved in drugs were de facto suspended.
Senator de la Rosa’s claim that he is being denied these constitutional rights — in connection with the International Criminal Court’s charging him as one of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s co-perpetrators — made me remember some particularly cruel drug-war-related incidents that occurred in Cebu in 2019.
De la Rosa had retired by then, and it was his Philippine Military Academy classmate, Oscar Albayalde, who presided over the PNP. Albayalde is also charged as co-perpetrator. In Cebu, it was all the same: Debold Sinas, police regional director from mid-2018 until October 2019, oversaw a merciless war on drugs. There were massacres, ambushes, riding-in-tandem hits, assassins barging into homes in the middle of the night, and abductions. The perpetrators included both policemen and civilians. Stories that defied logic were told to the public to cover up what really happened.
Children were not spared. On March 28, 2019, four masked men barged into the home of Ricardo Avenido and Agnes Pugoy in the middle of the night, dragged them from their bed before shooting them. Six of the couple’s seven children — aged one to 13 years old — were sleeping with their parents at the time of the crime. They were in shock. On April 14, 2019, Michael and Fraldine Kate Canes and their 9-year-old child were on their way home on a motorcycle when they were waylaid by riding-in-tandem gunmen. Both parents were killed. The child crawled out from under the motorcycle and her dead parents. On May 22, 2019, Lindy Braga, a pregnant mother of two, was shot dead by an intruder in the middle of the night. Her 3-year-old child told neighbors that something had happened to his mother.
The police claimed that the victims were involved in drugs, and that the killings arose from turf war or internal cleansing. In fact, the police attributed numerous murders to “hitmen” who had themselves already been murdered and were therefore unable to defend themselves. Case closed.
What became of the children? They were not only orphaned; they were made to witness the brutal murders of their parents. What kind of society does this to its children and moves on as if nothing had happened because the parents were allegedly involved in drugs?
The victims were not only denied due process. They were murdered in cold blood, and the perpetrators walked free. It is impossible that persons in authority weren’t behind the vast majority of the killings — from identifying the targets to selecting, assigning, preparing, protecting and rewarding hitmen. There were also official law enforcement operations where “suspects” were taken to the scene against their will and shot dead. Some operations looked more like massacres. Guns were planted on the dead.
“Shit happens,” Senator de la Rosa was quoted as saying in reaction to the accidental killing of 3-year-old Myka Ulpina during a buy-bust operation in Rizal in 2019. Myka was not the only child or innocent bystander who got killed during anti-drug operations. Four-year-olds Skyler Abatayo and Althea Fem Borbon were killed by policemen in 2018 in Cebu City and 2016 in Guihulngan City, Negros Oriental, respectively. Yes, they were killed by accident, but the attempts to cover up and evade accountability were deliberate.
We don’t have to ask what became of Myka, Skyler and Althea because they died. Unlike the children of the Canes couple, Avenido and Pugoy, and Braga, who were spared death but witnessed the brutal slaying of their parents. These children, killed or orphaned, were among the collateral damage in a war whose objective may have been justified — but not the way it was waged, a cure worse than the disease.
Is Philippine sovereignty being trampled upon and disrespected with the arrest and detention of former president Duterte and — maybe soon — his co-perpetrators? Are we surrendering our citizens and our power to dispense justice in accordance with our own Constitution to a foreign entity? Our courts and other pillars of the justice system are indeed functioning. But let’s not kid ourselves. For the vast majority of the victims, obtaining even just a measure of justice through Philippine courts exists in theory only. Through the International Criminal Court, at least the architects and highest commanders of the war on drugs are facing the consequences of their acts.
We brought it upon ourselves, this international spectacle. We allowed the war on drugs to carry on in a horrific scale and in ways that disregarded fundamental principles of the Philippine Constitution, humanity and civilization. We let it go unpunished.
