While human rights lawyer and Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) Chairman Chel Diokno should be commended for revealing that a total of 20,322 people were killed from 2016 to December 31, 2017 based on the 2017 yearend report from the Office of the President (OP), it should come as a huge surprise that Duterte executive secretary Salvador Medialdea claimed he had not seen such a document.
Yes, he is the same Salvador Medialdea who insisted that the shameless “gentleman’s agreement” between China and the Philippines regarding the conduct of the Philippines in Panatag and Ayungin Shoals was hatched by former defense secretary Voltaire Gazmin and the Chinese Embassy but could not recall who his second-hand sources were, who in turn failed to name their principal sources for a verbal deal. Of course, lies have short legs and it didn’t take long for Medialdea’s testimony at the House of Representatives to lose traction.
So, Chel Diokno is now dealing with an OP report that the Duterte executive secretary did not see but which the Supreme Court (SC) saw and invoked in an en banc resolution issued on April 3, 2018, in GR 234359 (Almora v de la Rosa) and GR 234484 (Dano v de la Rosa) that denied the motion of then Solicitor General Jose Calida to be spared from providing the SC with all the information regarding the bloody “war on drugs” by the Rodrigo Duterte administration on the basis of administrative orders and regulations, nixing the 1987 Constitution and running roughshod over due process of law.
Unbeknownst to Calida, the OP Report only admitted a conservative estimate of the number of people killed in police operations at 3,967 from July 1, 2016 to November 30, 2017, a period of nearly 18 months, or 220.4 persons killed per month, or 7.38 each day. This period was covered by Operation Tokhang or Command Memorandum Circular 16-216 (CMC 16-216) implemented by then Police Director General Ronald de la Rosa. Diokno noted that the same report showed 16,355 people targeted by the anti-drug war were murdered by riding-in-tandem assassins, meaning these death squads were more efficient in achieving the goals set by Duterte to make turn the waters of Manila Bay turn red.
All told, 20,322 people were killed. Taking that figure for the 18-month period to be accurate, the total number of drug war victims should fax exceed the estimates of human rights advocates that only 30,000 people were eliminated under the Duterte regime. It is time for the SC to demand that the Marcos Jr. government be truthful and release the complete report on the brutality and mayhem of Duterte’s bogus drug war. Diokno and FLAG should commit themselves to search for the six-year death toll of the drug war as well as Duterte’s bloody campaign against human rights activists, national minorities, workers, peasants and dissenters.
Parsing the SC’s 52-page April 3, 2018 resolution, which was a damning indictment of Calida for invoking administrative rules and regulations as well as “national security” in refusing to provide the information sought by the justices, the OP Report itself practically showed that the death squads deployed by the Duterte regime were far more efficient in summarily killing their targets. If underworld chatter in Davao City were to be believed, hitmen were paid up to P20,000 for each confirmed kill. That amount, multiplied by 16,355 victims, gives you P327.1-billion, a lot of money that could have been sourced from confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs.)
The Duterte report on the drug war was a haughty attempt to report a bloody accomplishment but the Filipino people are not interested in the twisted thinking of Duterte and the clowns that he maneuvered into winning in 2019 and 2022. Adding the true figure of the 100,000 or more Filipinos who were murdered to pad up the PNP’s and the DDS “accomplishment report” from 2018 to 2022 to the victims of Covid-19 (remember it was “nakahihiya” to China if the country barred the entry of Covid-19 virus donors from Wuhan), you have a pretty accurate picture of the criminal culpability of Duterte and his henchmen.
Now that the Duterte regime is gone for good, and the Dutertes themselves are squabbling on how to deal with the Marcos Jr. dispensation, the time is ripe for Malacanang to start using shovels to dig up the Medialdea graveyard to find the skeletons in the warehouse and the damning evidence in the closets of the Palace, and prevent the criminals from returning to the scenes of their crimes. There is no sense pretending that the Marcos-Duterte unity team is still intact. Lust for power and pelf destroyed it. Meanwhile, the economy is not getting any better, the peso is going south and the plutocrats are busy maneuvering to snatch private water rights after grabbing precious land.
