Biglang may nagbabasa ng 2017 post na ito. While the ICC confirmation of charges hearings reminded painfully of Duterte’s horrible drug war, this piece zeroes in on a specific point in time, soon after the killing of Kian, when it was all just too heartbreaking, infuriating, and scary, and all we could do was despair for nation. Good to be reminded. #BeforeCovid
Duterte’s drug war & the “hearsay” divide
Recently President Duterte admitted na nagkamali siya when he promised to rid the country of shabu in six months, imposible daw pala, even in the next five years, it just cannot be done, he says, by a single president over just one term.
I thought it might mean a CHANGE in strategy, from killing killing killing alleged addicts and pushers without due process to finally policing customs and coastlines and preventing the smuggling of shabu and it’s component chemicals into the country. But no.
He [said] having a long coastline to watch over and thousands of islands to guard make it difficult to prevent the entry of illegal drugs.
“We do not have the equipment, kulang man (It’s not enough). And you know the coastline,” he added.
He made us a new promise instead:
“I assure you, by the time I make my—kung buhay pa ako (if I am still alive)—five years from now, drugs will be at its lowest,” he said.
Too soon Bato’s police were back on the streets big time, in multiple synchronous operations across Bulacan, and later in Manila. Killing alleged addicts and dealers without due process, puro hearsay, mostly info solicited from barangay peeps and neighbors, atbp., as if we didn’t know how easy it is to point fingers, especially if under duress of authorities with quotas to meet. Hearsay, sabi-sabi, is good enough in this environment, and once you’re on that list, it is said, you’re on the list forever, never mind if you’ve been rehabbed or you were clean to begin with at napagdiskitahan lang, which may have been the case with Kian.
In an unusual move, allies of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Senate on Friday condemned the killing of a 17-year-old senior high school student in Caloocan City, with some pushing for a probe into the boy’s death and those of scores of suspects in the past bloody week described as the deadliest since the start of the government’s drug war in July last year.
This is one of the rare instances during which senators who belong to the majority caucus in the Senate have publicly spoken against the killings related to Duterte’s brutal and unrelenting war on drugs.
The policemen who shot to death Kian Loyd Delos Santos on Wednesday night were not only abusive but also “killers and criminals,” according to Sen. Francis Escudero. “The CCTV footage and eyewitness account clearly show that the boy was killed.”
Five more years? We cannot have five more years of this. It is too painful for the body politic, Mr. President, sir. And it is dangerous: what monsters are we turning our police forces into? And we the people, do we really want to become desensitized to inhumane treatment by government? Read Yen Makabenta’s It’s not fun waking up in a ‘narco-state.
When Duterte absolves the police of wrongdoing in the drug war, no matter what the abuses, I believe he is crossing a red line in constitutional government. It is dangerous to himself and to his presidency.
It is not explained away by protesting against due process of law and human rights.
The presidential rhetoric is both inflationary and demoralizing.
Believe it or not, the police profession is supposed to exercise intellectual leadership in the criminal justice system. The police must take the lead in the fight against crime and violence.
Not all shabu addicts are bad people who get violent and criminal under the influence and who deserve to be eliminated just like that. And even addicts who do get violent and criminal do not deserve to be killed without due process and rehab options. We are better than this.
But yeah, our world would be a better place without shabu, and it’s weird that the president isn’t trying harder to turn off the supply. The real job is to stop both the manufacture here and the smuggling-in of shabu and its components. The customs shabu fiasco was the perfect opportunity for the president to demonstrate that all his tough talk vs. drugs and corruption is not just talk and empty threats. Instead he chose to prop up and make excuses for Faeldon.
“But Faeldon, I will stand by him. He’s really honest. Kaya lang nalusutan siya because lahat diyan sa Customs, corrupt. My God,” Duterte said on Wednesday in his speech in Malacañang during the celebration of the 19th anniversary of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption.
“I hope I would not offend any particular person but almost all [are corrupt]. Sila ‘yong magagandang bahay…magaganda ang kotse [They are those who have beautiful houses and beautiful cars] ,” he added.
He hopes he would not offend anyone in particular? I am aghast. Seriously? Ayaw niyang maka-offend ng mga corrupt? Hindi siya nagagalit nang bongga sa mga corrupt na ito na tone-tonelada kung magpasok o magpapasok ng shabu?
It’s bad enough that hearsay is acceptable only in cases against the poor and powerless, not in cases against the rich and powerful. What Is worse, when they do have enough evidence and/or search warrants on the rich and powerful, the suspects end up dead. As in, silenced forever.
In the Bureau of Customs naman, a different kind of silencing is going on. In Have we truly become a full-blown narco state? Kit Tatad wonders what Faeldon knows.
…something DU30 may not blithely ignore. Analysts close to this issue, however, believe Faeldon may be in possession of certain sensitive information, which makes it hard for DU30 to get rid of him, unless he volunteers to step down. …Amid the apparent efforts of some quarters to link DU30’s son Paolo, the vice mayor of Davao City, to the dangerous drugs shipment from Xiamen, Faeldon has not said one word clearing him of any suspicion. If Faeldon knows Paolo is not at all involved in any monkey business at the pier, shouldn’t he have come to his defense after the customs broker Mark Taguba mentioned his name, quoting wild rumors, in a congressional hearing? He did not.
…The problem is, a photo has surfaced in the social media showing Paolo in a friendly pose with Kenneth Dong, the alleged middleman in the illegal P6.4 billion drug shipment. And some people are giving undue importance to it. No one is saying the young man has any fascination for any narco king—whether it be Burma’s late opium king Khun Sa, or Colombia’s Pablo Escobar, or Mexico’s Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. But by linking him to Kenneth Dong and the rest of his narco chain, his enemies clearly want to show his guilt by association.
The president himself has minced no words about how much worse the corruption is than he thought, shabu-related corruption in particular.
He [said] that the war on drugs had exposed so many people involved in the business of illegal drugs, it was like pressing “worms out of a can.”
“I didn’t have an idea that there are hundreds of thousands of people already in the drug business. What makes it worse is they are cooperated now by people in government, especially those in elected positions. So, it will be government versus government,” he added.
There’s the rub. Government vs. Government. Big shots vs. big shots. Tila nga napakaraming very-important-people and their networks ang tatamaan. Napakaraming mawawalan ng trabaho (kawawa naman). At magkakaalaman, mabubuking (sa wakas), kung sinosino nga ba sa mga honourable na iyan ang sinasandalan at dinadatungan ng mga drug lord. Sinosino ba sa mga honourable na iyan na nagmamalinis ang mga kalaban pala, mga kaaway pala, ng taong-bayan. Clear lines would finally be drawn, and that would be oh so good for nation.
I’d have thought that a showdown was right up Digong’s alley. I thought he might be the anti-hero hero who would end narco rule and institute systemic changes, set things right, no matter what. Alas, our astig prez seems to be intimidated out of his wits. Too much baggage?
“I have to stop drugs, really stop. And it will stop,” he said in a speech during a tourism event in Davao City Friday night. “I will kill you if you destroy my country and you start f****** with my children,” he added.
“My children”? Slip of the tongue? Or just another bad joke.
MARLEN V. RONQUILLO: “FYI, Kaufman: Filipino elites genuflected before Duterte”
… Contrary to Kaufman’s desperate and clearly losing effort to portray Duterte as an unconventional leader who banged heads with the Filipino elites to favor the huddled masses, who, in turn, triggered the elites’ animus toward the masses-loving Duterte, the truth is: members of the Filipino elites, with the exception of one or two families, genuflected before Duterte. Then, in their own words, they became “fast friends” with the autocratic leader.
The sycophancy of the elites was duly rewarded.
In exchange for their acquiescence, Duterte gave them free rein to further tighten their grip over choice sectors of the Philippine economy. The greatest gift came via a Duterte-initiated law that reduced the corporate income tax (CIT) in stages until it reached the rock-bottom 20 percent. No one from the equally slavish Congress raised a spirited, full-throated opposition to the measure when Duterte urged the two chambers of Congress to pass it.
The sycophantic Congress, remember, also passed during Duterte’s term the law on retail trade liberalization that gave corporate-owned deep discounters free rein to defenestrate “sari-sari” owners. That same Duterte-era Congress ruthlessly scrapped quantitative restrictions, which held for a generation as a policy on rice importation, then removed the cap on rice imports. Those twin moves rendered small rice farmers into dead men walking.
Did you know of a single instance during the Duterte years that the Philippine Competition Commission reined in corporate greed and overkill to protect small corporate players from the giants?
The Filipino economic elites were so coddled by the Duterte administration that even the Covid-19 pandemic hardly dented their yearly corporate earnings. At one point, the Philippine economy suffered an almost 10-percent drop in growth, making the country the worst performer among the 20 top economies in the Asia-Pacific. The giant corporations hardly suffered a setback because of the pampering and coddling of the Duterte administration.
Exhibit A is the Villar family, led by Manuel “Manny” Villar Jr., who, during the Duterte regime, started his ascent on the list of the wealthiest Filipinos until he became, wealth tracker Forbes said, the richest man in the country. The Villar family is legendary for its pro-Duterte zealotry, and Villar’s son Mark was the all-powerful secretary of the Department of Public Works and Highways during the entirety of the Duterte administration.
Had Kaufman bothered to check the list of the 40 wealthiest families during the Duterte administration, whose combined wealth was — and still is — more than what is owned by the poor at the bottom 50 percent — he will find out this tie that bound: servility and silence as Duterte’s war on drugs turned into a killing spree of innocents like Kian delos Santos.
Who protested the killing spree, then gave sanctuary to the families of the drug war victims? Priests, mostly, and I am proud that three of the five bishops charged with sedition during the administration’s peak cruelty came from my province: now-Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, Teodoro Bacani Jr. and Honesto Ongtioco. Fr. Flavie Villanueva, who kept a tally of drug war fatalities so that their names will not be forgotten. The nuns who embraced those widowed and orphaned by the war on drugs. Then-senator Leila de Lima, who protested from her prison cell. And her erstwhile Senate colleagues, all with the Liberal Party. At the House of Representatives, it was mostly the Makabayan bloc. Antonio Trillanes IV.
The often-overlooked voices of protests came from us, ordinary Filipinos. Laborers, farmers, fishermen, human rights lawyers, media workers and people from the slum areas were at the nexus of the killing spree.
The voiceless raised their voices and refused, as Dylan Thomas wrote, to go gently into that good night, in contrast to the servility of the elites.
https://www.manilatimes.net/2026/03/01/opinion/columns/fyi-kaufman-filipino-elites-genuflected-before-duterte/2290442