The dramatic, months-long House of Representative investigation into extrajudicial killings during former president Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war has much in common with the 2023 Senate probe into the massacre that killed Negros Oriental governor Roel Degamo and eight followers.
Both have opened a Pandora’s box of abuse and oppression, providing official acknowledgment of dirty secrets.
Both have highlighted how powerful, corrupt politicians can co-opt the law enforcement community, turning the police into a pillar of injustice.
Both probes happened as a result of elite political feuds.
The “unity” that swept President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte to power unraveled less than two years after the 2022 elections. Without that, none of the legislators leading the investigation would have trained their sights on the former leader; most of them had cheered or kept silent as Duterte’s “war on drugs” snuffed out tens of thousands of lives in just six years.
The government’s swift response to Degamo’s murder was partly due to the brazen nature of the attack that occurred in broad daylight at an aid-giving event. But it was also because Degamo had campaigned for Marcos Jr. while the suspected mastermind, ousted congressman Arnie Teves, backed boxer and senator Manny Pacquiao.
But there is a third common thread to these probes: the sin of omission, and the one responsible for the country’s never-ending cycle of abuse.
Roots of silence
In the Degamo probe, more than 60 families stepped up to seek justice for unsolved killings and botched assassination attempts in the central Philippines province. Most cases stemmed from political squabbles; around a dozen involved agrarian or business disputes.
Senator Ronald dela Rosa described the situation in the province as a “reign of terror” that killed about 100 people over five years. Dela Rosa, who served for two years as Duterte’s national police chief, urged residents to break their silence.
That call was earlier made by Dumaguete Bishop Julito Cortes and San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alminaza, whose dioceses witnessed the terror.
While both prelates welcomed the sudden display of a backbone in a province well-known as a bastion of impunity, they said the failure to call in human rights and activist groups weakened efforts at finding long-term solutions to violence.
“In Negros, they have been killings activists, church workers, and human rights workers to enforce silence among the common folk,” said Alminaza.
Negros is divided into the Oriental and Occidental provinces. At the time of the Senate probe, human rights groups had recorded 78 activists killed on the oriental side and at least 90 on the other side. These figures were on top of the Degamo cases.
The 2023 and the current probe into extrajudicial killings highlight recurring complaints about police efforts to ignore tasks — from making and releasing blotter reports to hounding witnesses and even turning victims into perpetrators.
That there are families in attendance at the probe is a testament to the Church and rights workers, including lawyers, who aided them even in the face of Duterte’s threats.
Blended tactics
Rights defenders from the legal profession, churches, and activist groups paid a very high price for their advocacy under Duterte.
The former president called rights defenders friends of drug lords when they protested against the mounting drug war killings.
Later, he would call them terrorists as he scuttled peace talks with Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency.
More than 400 activists died under Duterte’s watch.
Cristina Palabay, the executive director of rights group Karapatan said almost all victims had been red-tagged, their faces displayed on street and social media posters before their deaths.
At least 66 were killed in the first five years of the Duterte administration. Military and civilian officials vilified prosecutors and judges when they dismissed what activists claimed were trumped-up cases.
The last probe hearing on Oct. 22 dragged up a name that once sent shudders through rights defenders.
Lawmakers hinted that the next hearings could delve into the use of Oplan Sauron, an anti-insurgency program focused in the central Philippines, to mask covert drug war killings.
It’s the flip side of what human rights lawyer Neri Colmenares called the adoption of drug war tactics in anti-insurgency operations.
The central Philippines became the guinea pig for a tactical shift that soon spread nationwide.
Joint army-police operations conducted simultaneous late-night raids with all the hallmarks of Duterte’s Tokhang operations: armed men barging into homes, marching out all residents other than their targets, who died begging for their lives.
“Riding-in-tandem killers” — responsible for two-thirds of an estimated 30,000 drug-related killings — soon became a refrain among witnesses to activists’ murders.
Debold Sinas, the regional police chief in Central Visayas during Oplan Sauron, would later become head of the national capital region police office and, eventually, director-general of the Philippine National Police.
As he moved up the ladder, Sinas expanded his theater of horror, often with the help of complicit judges, who issued defective warrants to give police an excuse to attack.
If legislators want this investigation to go beyond a proxy fight, they should expand their lens and address the largely unsolved killings of rights defenders who refused to be silenced while the rest of the country bowed to Duterte.
*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
