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Thread: NSFW - Philippines war on drugs - 6000 lives taken in five months

  1. #101
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    https://www.rappler.com/nation/23571...fore-sona-2019

    MANILA, Phlippines – Three years into the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, the government's anti-illegal drug campaign has claimed over 5,500 lives, according to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).

    The PDEA’s latest count, from July 1, 2016 to June 30 this year, showed that lives of 5,526 people were claimed in the course of 134,583 government anti-drug operations. So far, 193,086 drug personalities have been arrested in that period. Majority of the operations were carried out by the Philippine National Police (PNP).

    This data showed a continuous climb in the number of deaths, with an additional 476 kills since the end of 2018. Prior to this, the government recorded 5,050 suspects killed in anti-drug operations as of November 30, 2018. (READ: The Impunity Series)

    Along with the high death toll, the government also reported 7,054 "high value targets" and 681 government workers were arrested in anti-drug operations. Among the government workers were 323 government employees, 282 elected officials, and 76 uniformed personnel.

    Aside from this, the Philippine National Police said 2,367 cops have been dismissed from service as part of its internal cleansing program.

    The PDEA's findings are part of #RealNumbersPH, which is the government's effort to counter what it called a "false narrative" on the war on drugs.

    Outside the PDEA's count, however, rights groups estimate the drug war to have claimed as much as 27,000 lives, which included vigilante-style killings. (READ: PH drug war killings reach 'threshold of crimes against humanity' – report)

    Halfway mark: In the previous SONA, Duterte vowed his drug war would not be sidelined as he dismissed international criticism over his campaign. The President vowed his anti-drug campaign would be "as chilling as on the day it began."

    Duterte amped up his actions by releasing a list tagging politicians of supposedly being involved in illegal drug operations just weeks before the 2019 midterm elections held last May.

    Meanwhile, glaring gaps in the government's anti-drug campaign have prompted certain sectors to question the operation before the Supreme Court. The petitioners were asking the High Court to declare as unconstitutional the anti-drugs campaign.

    In April 2019, the High Court ordered the release of thousands of drug war documents, despite efforts to block it by the Solicitor General.

    Recently, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in July 2019 adopted a resolution to look into drug war killings in the Philippines. It tasked the UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet to write a comprehensive report on the situation in the Philippines and present this to the council. (READ: U.N. rights chief: Deaths in PH anti-drug operations a ‘most serious concern’)

    Malaca?ang, though, has so far shown no signs it would cooperate with the completion of the comprehesive report, instead calling it an "insult" to Filipinos. (READ: On U.N. resolution vs drug war killings: What if Duterte blocks review?)


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    Not yet over: Despite this, the government has claimed the drug war is far from over with officials tagging it as a "protective measure" for "law-abiding citizens" against supposed errant drug users.

    It claimed 13,753 of the 42,045 total barangays have been cleared since June 2019. This leaves 19,215 that have yet to be "cleared."

    This is an additional 3,754 barangays cleared since the start of the year. Prior to this, PDEA reported 9,999 barangays were cleared as of December 31, 2018. – Rappler.com

  2. #102
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    https://www.gulftoday.ae/news/2019/0...ug-war-duterte

    Manolo B. Jara

    President Rodrigo ?Rody? Duterte on Wednesday said he would not face an international tribunal to be presided over by a foreigner, particularly a Caucasian, in connection the the alleged alarming rise in killings from the his brutal and violent war on illegal drugs.

    Duterte also emphasised that despite criticisms and denunciations, he was determined to pursue the campaign he launched when he took over as president three years ago in 2016 to rid the country of illegal drugs, stressing that nobody would do it.

    Duterte was reacting to the decision of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) to approve a resolution, introduced by Finland, calling for an investigation on the country?s drug war killings in an TV interview with pastor Apollo Quiboloy, a religious leader based in the president?s hometown of Davao City in Mindanao.

    ?Look, at I told you before...I will only face, be tried or face trial in a Philippine court presided by a Filipino judge. Prosecuted by a Filipino. And maybe they can impose death penalty and die in Filipino land,? Duterte said.

    He also pointed out: ?I will not allow a Caucasian asking question while there. You must be stupid. Who are you? I am a Filipino. We have our own courts here. You have to bring me somewhere else? I would not like that. I have my country. I know it is working. Justice is working here.?

    A lawyer by profession, Duterte argued that foreign entities could only intervene if there is a fatal breakdown of justice in a country where nobody is willing to prosecute.

    The Philippine National Police (PNP) earlier reported that more than 6,600 suspects were killed since the campaign started when Duterte took his oath as the country?s first president from Mindanao in July 2016 until June this year.

    However, human rights advocates and critics claimed the death toll could be higher reaching at least 20,000 due to extra-judicial killings blamed on ?vigilante? groups allegedly with close links to the police.

    Aside from the UNHCR, the UN International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague, Netherlands, earlier reported that it was looking into the cases of alleged crimes against humanity filed against Duterte in connection with the war on drugs.

  3. #103
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    https://news.mb.com.ph/2019/07/18/hu...-abusive-acts/

    Various human rights groups and the families of the extra-judicial killings (EJK) victims have called on the government to end these supposed abusive acts and cooperate with the United Nations report process.

    Policemen stand guard near the body of a man killed during what police said was a drug related vigilante killing in Pasig, February 2017. (REUTERS FILE PHOTO /Erik De Castro / MANILA BULLETIN)
    Policemen stand guard near the body of a man killed during what police said was a drug-related vigilante killing in Pasig, February 2017. (REUTERS FILE PHOTO /Erik De Castro / MANILA BULLETIN)

    Representatives of the groups Rise Up for Rights and for Life, Karapatan, Promotion of Church People’s Response, Stop Killing Farmers Campaign and several other human rights advocates have condemned the administration for the spate and alleged continuous abusive acts committed in the country through the years.

    According to the human rights groups and the kin of the alleged EJK victims, the President should act swiftly to put a stop to the alleged bloody campaign against Filipinos.



    From July 2016 to May 2019, the groups citing data from the PNP doubted the factuality that at least 6,600 persons were killed under the President’s war on drugs

    They said the figure runs contrary to the reports from civil society and media groups which revealed that an estimated 27,000 people have been killed in relation to the illegal drug trade as of March 2019.

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    However, these numbers do not include the several killings of farmers and human rights defenders since the President took office.

    According to Karapatan, at least 266 individuals have been killed in line with Duterte’s counterinsurgency campaigns Oplan Kapayapaan and Oplan Kapanatagan.

    At least 216 of them are peasants, including the farmers and farm workers killed in Negros in the course of the PNP and AFP’s implementation of Memorandum number 32.



    Karapatan claimed to have documented 155 human rights defenders killed under the Duterte administration with 11 human rights workers of Karapatan among those killed.

    “Three years under Duterte, the government showed that they remain in a killing frenzy while targeting the poor in its twisted, vigilante, and militarist campaigns. It is high time for all of us to pressure the government and to demand justice for all the victims of their bloody war – in line with the drug war and the counterinsurgency program. We need to put the perpetrators to account because of the violations of their gruesome rights against the Filipino people,” Karapatan Deputy Secretary General Roneo Clamor said.

    “It is well-remembered that these series of killings in our streets were caused by the policies, directives, and pronouncements made by the President. His words and orders either direct or indirect have emboldened state forces, mercenaries and hired killers to further violate people’s rights with impunity,” he added.



    Clamor also raised the UN HRC resolution adopted on July 11, 2019, to look at the human rights situation in the country.

    The kin of victims and advocates also called on the government to cooperate with the investigation.

    Since the news on the adoption of the resolution, several government officials including Duterte, Foreign Affairs Sec. Teodoro Locsin, the PNP, and administration-backed senators have responded negatively.

    “The government should stop distorting the principles and concepts of human rights. They must start cooperating with the investigations if they do not have anything to hide. The way that the Duterte government has reacted has been through one shameful statement after another. We challenge them to stop justifying their murderous acts and face the consequences of the policies that have led to the wholesale massacre of poor Filipinos,” Clamor concluded.

    On Wednesday, the groups held a protest action condemning the killings under the Duterte regime in front of Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City.



    The demonstrations were held a few days before Duterte’s fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) and in time for the International Justice Day.

    The protest action also comes alongside the adoption of the Iceland-led UN Human Rights Council resolution on the human rights situation in the Philippines.

  4. #104
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    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...atholic-church

    President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent crackdown has left 20,000 dead, and in a devout country, he has repeatedly hurled insults at bishops, the pope – and even God. But only a handful of Catholic activists are brave enough to speak out. By Adam Willis

    Thu 18 Jul 2019 06.00 BST

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    One of the most famous victims – and a rare survivor – of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs is a 30-year-old pedicab driver named Francisco Santiago Jr. In September 2016, while cycling through central Manila, Santiago was abducted by a Philippine national police (PNP) officer posing as a passenger. Santiago’s name was not on the “kill list” of the PNP’s now-infamous drug-sting operation known as Oplan Tokhang, or “Operation Knock and Plead”, but he had become a target, nonetheless.

    After he was taken to a police station and beaten for the better part of a day, Santiago was led back into the streets and shot multiple times, suffering wounds to his chest and arms. Thinking him dead, one officer approached Santiago and placed a pistol next to his hand. Santiago waited, barely breathing as blood pooled around him, until he heard the hurried sounds of journalists arriving at the scene. He sat up, pleading for his life and waving his blood-soaked arms in surrender. By the next morning, local newspapers had already assigned Santiago a new name: Lazarus.


    When the officers saw that Santiago was not dead, he was sent to an emergency room and handcuffed to his hospital bed. He spent the following two years in jail on myriad charges, including the illegal possession of a firearm. Last August, when he was finally acquitted, he found sanctuary with a missionary in the Redemptorist order of the Catholic church named Jun Santiago, known to most as Brother Jun.


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    Just as Jun has done for countless families of drug-war victims, he began sheltering Santiago – at Baclaran church, his parish in southern Manila, and various safe houses in the provinces surrounding the capital – offering protection and guidance to a man who had fallen into a precarious position. When Santiago appeared in a Manila courtroom last October, facing trial again for the illegal possession of a firearm (a charge refiled well after the sting), Jun was with him, a buffer against the PNP officers stalking the hallways outside the court, some of them the very same men who had tried to kill him two years earlier.

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    Occupying a vague space between activist, journalist and minister, Jun is the ragged tip of the spear in the Catholic church’s resistance to the war on drugs – a war that has been condemned by international human rights organisations and has, by some estimates, claimed more than 20,000 lives. As a brother of the Redemptorist order, Jun is not technically clergy. He lives among the priests on the forested grounds of Baclaran, but operates as a layman, and often stands out from the company he keeps. His black hair hangs down to his shoulders. His uniform comprises a pair of rustic boots, cuffed jeans and, on that day at the Manila trial court, a Nirvana T-shirt.

    Jun has taken it upon himself to perform a dizzyingly varied set of roles: from menial tasks, such as supplying candles for protest marches, to diplomatic work, such as appealing to eminent prelates for solidarity, to more dangerous missions such as patrolling Manila’s streets at night and racing to crime scenes in order to photograph the dead – hundreds over the past three years. In a political climate where many fear the impulses of a violent president, Jun lives at risk on behalf of his church and thousands of Filipinos threatened by Duterte’s war on drugs. Not yet 50, Jun’s friends joke that he is already on the path to sainthood.

    In the Philippines, where four in five citizens identify as Catholic, the church has emerged as the most prominent voice of dissent against the drug war. The church is also under perpetual assault from a president intent on contesting the very essence of Philippine Catholicism. Having framed his 2015 election campaign as a referendum on the legitimacy of the church, Duterte has forced religious leaders to choose between coveted political capital and their moral mandates. In particular, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the country’s most influential church authority, has been criticised by activists and clerics alike for his deferential approach to Duterte. Such a stance, they argue, seems blind to the country’s suffering and risks degrading the moral integrity of the church. Meanwhile, Jun and a small crop of the church opposition have reoriented their lives around a mission to document the drug war while helping to seek accountability for those carrying it out.

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    In a country where vigilante executions have become commonplace, this work is perilous at best; Catholic leaders who speak out are often inundated with death threats, sometimes from Duterte himself. Since December, 2017, three Filipino priests have been killed in mysterious circumstances. One was ambushed in his car after negotiating the release of a political prisoner; another, while saying blessings on a group of children, was shot dead by a motorcyclist; a third was murdered at the altar in front of parishioners just before mass.

    When I asked Jun whether he was concerned for his own safety, he shook his head and drew a circle around his chair, as if tracing an invisible ring of fire.

    “It’s part of our job,” he said. “Why be afraid?”

    There are three basic ways to die in Duterte’s war on drugs. “Riding in tandem” has been the dominant mode in Manila: drive-by operations conducted on motorcycle, with balaclava-clad assassins – believed in some cases to be the PNP’s hired guns. Other executions take place through so-called “legitimate police operations” carried out by large taskforces, whether for a group or just a single target. Other victims simply disappear.

    The logic of the drug war is cold and transparent. Manila’s slums have become killing fields, and police impunity compounds the horrors of extrajudicial killings. Fishermen have reportedly dumped bodies into Manila Bay at the orders of PNP officers. Women have been extorted for sex in exchange for the safety of male family members. Bodies have turned up on curbs and corners after dark, their heads wrapped in packing tape to disguise evidence of torture, cardboard messages draped around their necks: “Pusher Ako” (“I’m a pusher”).

    Such theatrical touches are common in the drug war’s crime scenes, which often show signs of staging. The website Rappler, the Philippines’s opposition-news outlet, has noted how ziplock bags of shabu (the methamphetamine at the heart of the country’s drug crackdown) turn up in the pockets of victims so frequently and conveniently as to suggest they had been planted. Nearly as often, a handgun – typically a rusted .38 calibre – rests beside the body, or in the victim’s hand. In some cases, and ominously, ambulances have arrived at a target’s home ahead of the police, portending the violence to come.

    And yet for all the carnage, and as alarming as these tactics seem, Duterte remains broadly popular. Before October of last year, the president’s approval ratings had hovered around 80%; after a slump at the beginning of 2019, they rebounded by spring. And this May, the Philippines’ midterm elections gave an unmistakable vote of confidence to Duterte: allies of the president claimed each of the 12 senate seats up for grabs. Among the new senate members is Ronald dela Rosa, the PNP chief who presided over the drug war in its first two years. Such a sweeping victory should allow Duterte to consolidate power in the second half of his presidency, and many fear that it clears the path for him to push through several ambitious policy goals, namely the reinstitution of a legal death penalty and the rewriting of the constitution to prolong his own power.

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    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...atholic-church

    It may also lead to a resurgence in the drug killings. In June, the drug war claimed its youngest victim, a three-year-old girl named Myca Ulpina, who was killed in a sting targeting her father. “We are living in an imperfect world,” the new senator Dela Rosa said of the young girl’s death. “Shit happens during operations.”

    Caloocan bishop Pablo “Ambo” David, a rare dissenter among the Philippines’s bishop class, has expressed alarm that Duterte has already succeeded in corrupting “even a basic sense of good and bad” in the minds of so many Catholics “in making it so easy for people to accept that these people deserve to die because they’re drug suspects”.

    Recently, Ambo’s public dissent prompted a counter from Duterte: the president accused the bishop of stealing from the offering plate and dealing in drugs himself. Duterte threatened to personally “decapitate” Ambo, who was then deluged with death threats from other sources. Through such direct attacks, Duterte has chipped away at a veneration of the church half a millennium in the making. Priests themselves no longer know their standing in the culture. As Father Albert Alejo, a member of the Catholic resistance, put it to me, the crisis of the drug war transcends the death toll. “In the end, they are not just killing bodies,” he said, “they are killing our logic and they are killing our moral foundations.”

    When Duterte launched his presidential campaign in November 2015, he was a little-known mayor with a reputation for violence in the southern capital of Davao, where residents referred to him as the “death squad mayor”. Six months later, his was the most famous face in the country, due mainly to a campaign that promised fantastical reforms to a frustrated and alienated electorate. “He promised them the moon and the stars,” one Catholic activist told me, with pledges to clear Manila traffic – some of the worst in the world – in just 100 days, to weed out government and corporate corruption, and to scrub the country of crime and poverty through an unforgiving war on drugs.

    Along with these bold promises, Duterte built his campaign on violent and blasphemous rhetoric that gave voters in an overwhelmingly Catholic country every possible reason to abandon him. His public appearances were marked by vulgarities and open threats, and rather than court the country’s religious leaders to take political advantage of their traditional popularity, he instead waged a relentless crusade against the Catholic church, wielding its record of sexual abuse as moral leverage, going so far as to curse Pope Francis after his 2015 visit to Manila, complaining about the nightmarish traffic caused by the pope’s mass. “Putang ina,” Duterte sneered. “Son of a whore, go home. Do not visit us again.”

    These attacks should have landed discordantly with Filipino voters, for whom Catholicism is entwined with national identity. Here, Christian scripture is as inescapable as the sun and sea; prayer beads hang from countless rearview mirrors; neon crosses cap city skylines. In the crowded networks of Manila’s vendor stalls – between sneakers and mangos and glass-bottled colas – passersby can pick up all kinds of Catholic trinkets: glossy plastic piet? statues, Crayola-coloured votive candles, floral and beaded rosaries, medallions stamped with the faces of saints. In the capital’s alleyways, chapels materialise out of stone and sheet metal, nearly indistinguishable from the neighbouring shanties, where homemade shrines glow in the windows.

    Yet the same country that is adorned in the ornaments of faith also remains broadly supportive of a misogynistic and murderous demagogue. “We will be celebrating very soon 500 years of Christianity,” said Father Flavie Villanueva, an anti-drug-war activist, alluding to Spain’s arrival in the Philippines – and with it, Catholicism – in 1521. “But look at who voted for Duterte, and the people still supporting Duterte. There are still so many Catholics on that side.”

    As antagonistic as his rhetoric was during the campaign, Duterte’s hostility toward the church has only intensified during his presidency. As if testing the limits of his own blasphemy, Duterte has aimed each curse at a Catholic dogma more sacred than the last. Addressing Filipinos during a 2016 speech in Laos, he predicted a future in which the Catholic church would be irrelevant and beckoned his countrymen into an “iglesia ni Duterte” (a “church of Duterte”). On All Saints’ day last year, he mocked Catholic saints as hypocrites and loons, and proposed himself as a proper object of worship: “Santo Rodrigo”. Last October, he aimed even higher than the pope, calling God himself a “son of a whore” and asking: “Who is this stupid God?”

    Duterte’s ascent has resurrected a dilemma for the Philippines’s Catholic leadership that mirrors an identity crisis the church has faced throughout its history: what is its responsibility under an immoral regime? Cardinal Tagle rarely speaks publicly about the war on drugs, and when he does it is through broad condemnations of a “culture of death” – vague phrasing that encompasses abortion as well as the drug war. His position is further muddied by the fact that he has been photographed in genial meetings with Duterte, whom he has yet to condemn by name. “Good luck trying to find him,” one church activist said of Tagle. “He hates having reporters corner him with questions about the extrajudicial killings.” (Cardinal Tagle did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this story.)

    This dance has frustrated secular human-rights organisations who look to the church to take the lead on any number of urgent issues. “They were very slow. They were silent,” Phelim Kine, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said of the church’s response to Duterte’s drug war. Carlos Conde, the lone Human Rights Watch representative based in the Philippines, expressed similar frustrations. He believes that the church is “the only institution that is left standing that can confront Duterte … It is just a cop-out to say that the church is not political. Of course the church is political.”

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    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...atholic-church

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...atholic-church

    Recent history supports Conde’s argument. The Philippine priesthood backed the country’s successful revolutions of 1986 and 2001, and opposed a failed counterrevolution later that same year. The first and most famous of these was the People Power Revolution, which deposed the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and brought an end to more than a decade of martial law. The church was instrumental in orchestrating the revolt. The legacy of those revolutions hangs heavy over the modern-day Philippine church, a radically different organisation than it was then. “We don’t want anything to do with politics right now,” Villanueva told me, describing a church that has shied away from the expectations established by those past revolts.

    Undoubtedly, the Catholic leadership has played a more cautious hand with Duterte than some of its strident parish priests have. But, as Guadalupe Tu??n, an Academy Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs who specialises in the intersection of religion and politics, points out, these shadow games may only reveal part of the story. “Whatever they are saying on the record is potentially less important than what they are allowing in their dioceses,” says Tu??n. Tagle himself may be quiet, but any dissidence in his archdiocese comes by his tacit permission. It is noteworthy, then, that one of the country’s handful of vocal bishops is the cardinal’s direct subordinate, Broderick Pabillo, the auxiliary bishop of Manila.

    Pabillo defends the cardinal’s approach, arguing that “there are different ways how you can respond” to accomplish the same ends. Nonetheless, there is a dissonance between Tagle’s silent approach and Pabillo’s wider view of how the church should be tackling this issue. “I don’t think we have done enough,” Pabillo told me. “Among the clergy and among the lay people, only a few are speaking out.”

    When I asked him what would happen if the church led the kind of widespread protest that he was advocating, he said, without qualification: “It would stop the killings.”

    At Eusebio funeral services in northern Manila, Brother Jun sat with Orly Fernandez, the operations manager, in the open doorway of the building’s garage, waiting for news. Jun spends many of his nights at Eusebio, one of the PNP’s “accredited” funeral homes, whose business has boomed during the drug war. When there is a killing, the police call an accredited funeral home to retrieve the body. When Fernandez gets a call, he often tips off Jun, who speeds ahead of the hearse in order to photograph the scene before the body is removed.

    For nearly three years, Jun has dedicated his after-dark hours to this ritual, which is part of his work with the nightcrawlers, a group of Filipino journalists who cover the graveyard shift, waiting for calls about drug-war killings. At the height of the war, three to five killings a night were routine. On one night in the summer of 2017, as part of what the PNP called a “One Time, Big Time” operation, 32 people were killed in less than 24 hours. Jun sees documenting this violence – through photography and the collection of police reports – as crucial to the anti-drug-war effort. The work of the nightcrawlers has helped to draw international attention to the atrocities of the war on drugs, and they provide a support network for the families of victims. Still, Jun is unusually situated between photographer and missionary, and this allows him advantages over his peers in both worlds. For one thing, victims’ families are often more inclined to talk with a representative of the church than the media; and as an activist brother, rather than a priest, Jun has some agility within the church’s rigid structure.

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    It was a quiet night at Eusebio. Jun mentioned going to a province north of Manila where many of the killings were concentrated. “You don’t need to the provinces,” Fernandez told him. “There are enough killings here.” Fernandez estimated that, the week before, he had recovered 10 bodies in northern Manila. While the group loitered on the curb outside the garage, Fernandez retrieved three printouts from inside and laid them out on his bench. The word “missing” was printed in large letters across the top of each, with pictures of three faces below. This had become the norm: with declining media coverage and wilier evasions by the police, the dead tended to disappear.

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    Recent history supports Conde’s argument. The Philippine priesthood backed the country’s successful revolutions of 1986 and 2001, and opposed a failed counterrevolution later that same year. The first and most famous of these was the People Power Revolution, which deposed the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and brought an end to more than a decade of martial law. The church was instrumental in orchestrating the revolt. The legacy of those revolutions hangs heavy over the modern-day Philippine church, a radically different organisation than it was then. “We don’t want anything to do with politics right now,” Villanueva told me, describing a church that has shied away from the expectations established by those past revolts.

    Undoubtedly, the Catholic leadership has played a more cautious hand with Duterte than some of its strident parish priests have. But, as Guadalupe Tu??n, an Academy Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs who specialises in the intersection of religion and politics, points out, these shadow games may only reveal part of the story. “Whatever they are saying on the record is potentially less important than what they are allowing in their dioceses,” says Tu??n. Tagle himself may be quiet, but any dissidence in his archdiocese comes by his tacit permission. It is noteworthy, then, that one of the country’s handful of vocal bishops is the cardinal’s direct subordinate, Broderick Pabillo, the auxiliary bishop of Manila.

    Pabillo defends the cardinal’s approach, arguing that “there are different ways how you can respond” to accomplish the same ends. Nonetheless, there is a dissonance between Tagle’s silent approach and Pabillo’s wider view of how the church should be tackling this issue. “I don’t think we have done enough,” Pabillo told me. “Among the clergy and among the lay people, only a few are speaking out.”

    When I asked him what would happen if the church led the kind of widespread protest that he was advocating, he said, without qualification: “It would stop the killings.”

    At Eusebio funeral services in northern Manila, Brother Jun sat with Orly Fernandez, the operations manager, in the open doorway of the building’s garage, waiting for news. Jun spends many of his nights at Eusebio, one of the PNP’s “accredited” funeral homes, whose business has boomed during the drug war. When there is a killing, the police call an accredited funeral home to retrieve the body. When Fernandez gets a call, he often tips off Jun, who speeds ahead of the hearse in order to photograph the scene before the body is removed.

    For nearly three years, Jun has dedicated his after-dark hours to this ritual, which is part of his work with the nightcrawlers, a group of Filipino journalists who cover the graveyard shift, waiting for calls about drug-war killings. At the height of the war, three to five killings a night were routine. On one night in the summer of 2017, as part of what the PNP called a “One Time, Big Time” operation, 32 people were killed in less than 24 hours. Jun sees documenting this violence – through photography and the collection of police reports – as crucial to the anti-drug-war effort. The work of the nightcrawlers has helped to draw international attention to the atrocities of the war on drugs, and they provide a support network for the families of victims. Still, Jun is unusually situated between photographer and missionary, and this allows him advantages over his peers in both worlds. For one thing, victims’ families are often more inclined to talk with a representative of the church than the media; and as an activist brother, rather than a priest, Jun has some agility within the church’s rigid structure.

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    It was a quiet night at Eusebio. Jun mentioned going to a province north of Manila where many of the killings were concentrated. “You don’t need to the provinces,” Fernandez told him. “There are enough killings here.” Fernandez estimated that, the week before, he had recovered 10 bodies in northern Manila. While the group loitered on the curb outside the garage, Fernandez retrieved three printouts from inside and laid them out on his bench. The word “missing” was printed in large letters across the top of each, with pictures of three faces below. This had become the norm: with declining media coverage and wilier evasions by the police, the dead tended to disappear.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...atholic-church

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    https://cebudailynews.inquirer.net/2...ted-with-drugs

    CEBU CITY, Philippines — Police Brigadier Debold Sinas, the director of the Police Regional Office in Central Visayas (PRO-7), said that Talisay City had continued to be infested with illegal drugs even with the continuous anti-illegal drug operations in the city.

    Sinas said that even with the change of leadership in the Talisay Police, with the Police Major Orlando Carag Jr. taking over the city’s police force, they could not loosen their grip on the city because of the continuous scattered drug trade.

    “Giampingan na namo ang Talisay nga dili gyod mamalik. (We are cautious so none of the big time drug traders will return to Talisay City),” said Sinas.

    Drug users rampant

    Sinas said the main problem of Talisay City was that drug users were still rampant in the area, and even if the police would continue to go after the traders, they would find a way to come back because users were still willing to buy illegal drugs.

    Despite the wellness and rehabilitation programs conducted by the police, local government unit, and other agencies, he said there were still many drug users in the city.

    He said the anti-illegal drugs operations in the city might have weeded out the high-level and notorious pushers, but the recent drug traders that had been caught, and even died in buy-bust operations, were new names to the drug trade.

    The most recent deaths were the three individuals who died after resisting arrest in Barangay Biasong on Thursday afternoon, July 25, 2019.

    Talisay City Police identified those killed as drug suspects, Vernabe Suello, Aniceto Daug daug and Julie Daug daug.

    Sinas said that most of the drug suspects, who had been caught or killed in drug busts had been in and out of prison.

    He said they had been monitoring closely previously jailed drug traders because they would often build new links inside the jail.

    Vigilantes

    Yet, Sinas said he was also worried that the intensified anti-drug operations had been encouraging vigilante killings such as that of an alleged robber who was found dead hanging at the Mananga Bridge on July 22.

    Reynante Otero was found suspended from the Mananga Bridge with a rope tied around his neck, and his face covered with a cloth.

    “We do not tolerate it (vigilante killings) really. We will not be checking. We don’t encourage vigilantes. Kung vigilante ka, dakpon gihapon ka namo. (If you are a vigilante, we will still arrest you),” said Sinas.

    Also in early Thursday, July 25, a man was found dead in Sitio Ilang-Ilang, Barangay Lagtang, in Talisay City.
    Jimbo Gadiano, 33, who hails from Barangay Lawaan III, in Talisay City, was shot multiple times in the body and was left to die.

    Residents of the area said that gunshots had been heard around 4 a.m.

    Talisay Police are still investigating the cause and motive of the killing./dbs



    Read more: https://cebudailynews.inquirer.net/2...#ixzz5ujVLKCrk
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  9. #109
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    https://www.rappler.com/move-ph/2360...r-as-president

    MANILA, Philippines – As the nation marked President Rodrigo Duterte’s third year in power, various groups, on Monday, July 22, called for an end to the many issues faced by the country under his administration.

    This came the same day that President Duterte delivered his 4th State of the Nation Address (SONA). (READ: IN PHOTOS: From Luzon to Mindanao, thousands cry 'Atin ang 'Pinas!')

    Bayan-Southern Mindanao Region (BSMR) council member and labor leader Carlo Olalo called to put an end to the Duterte regime.

    “We are determined today to express our call that we had enough of Duterte’s fascist rule. Despite the continuing attacks to our ranks, we remain steadfast. Our protest action today is a testament that the abuses and atrocities of the Duterte regime unfolds, that even in his home city protest action is happening,” Olalo said in a statement.

    In a press statement, the Promotion of Church People’s Response expressed its "commitment as a community of disciples, embracing our prophetic duty to rise for peace and justice and resist lies, treachery and killings."

    "Enough of the lies, traitorous seeout of national patrimony, widespread killings, and violations of people's rights," the group urged.

    Pro-China?

    The group also expressed its grief for the state of the nation because of the government's response toward the sinking of a boat with 22 fishermen onboard by a Chinese vessel – arguably the biggest issue faced by the Duterte administration by far.

    “We are outraged by the government’s feebleness and impotence in protecting and defending our seas and our people, as manifested in its kowtow (bending knees) to China, when this imperialist power bullied our poor fisherfolk in our own territory,” the group said.

    For them, such response stressed and spoke volumes “on the Duterte government’s treachery against our national patrimony and sovereignty.”

    Other Stories

    President Rodrigo Duterte’s 2019 State of the Nation Address
    NEWS, FEATURES, ANALYSES, IN-DEPTH REPORTS, VIDEOS

    [OPINION] The ‘cinemafication’ of Duterte’s State of the Nation Address
    These attempts at ‘picture perfection’ replaces the President’s address. Our country’s woes cannot be cured by a manicured picture, image, and video with fancy camera works.

    FULL TEXT: President Duterte’s 2019 State of the Nation Address
    The first thing the President asks Congress in his speech is to restore the death penalty for heinous crimes related to illegal drugs and plunder

    Olalo also expressed the group's outrage over the administration’s pro-China policies. (READ: Duterte asserts PH sovereignty to others, except China – analyst)

    "Duterte betrayed us, he promised us for an independent foreign policy but what he did in the past 3 years is a total sell-out of our country’s patrimony and sovereignty to China," Olalo stressed in a statement.

    Duterte is yet to assert the Philippines’ victory over China’s claim to the West Philippine Sea. (READ: Duterte Promise Checklist: Major accomplishments, failures)

    Drug war

    Meanwhile, human rights advocates led by the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA) and In Defense of Human Rights and Dignity Movement (iDefend) condemned the widespread human rights violations under President Duterte’s anti-illegal drugs campaign.

    PAHRA Secretary-General Rose Trajano described that the state of the nation as “slow, painful death for the Filipino people who are suffering chronic poverty and widespread violence and impunity.”

    Trajano also insisted that Duterte must be made accountable for these violations.


    Advertisement
    Promotion of Church People’s Response echoed this as the incessant lies, treachery and killings perpetuated by the Duterte administration puts our national integrity and dignity in peril and called to stop this impunity.

    “Those who have lost their loved ones continue to suffer the burden of financial debt, emotional trauma, and the terror brought about by this war on the poor in urban communities,” the group said in a statement.

    At least 5,000 suspected drug personalities killed in police operations of Duterte’s violent war on drugs. Human rights groups meanwhile pegged more than 20,000 including those killed vigilante-style. (READ: The Impunity Series)

    In a joint statement, Let’s Organize for Democracy and Integrity (LODI), Altermidya, Concerned Artists of the Philippines and National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) emphasized how the victims of the rampant human rights violations have become mere statistics. (READ: PH drug war killings reach 'threshold of crimes against humanity' – report)

    Freedom of Expression in peril

    Groups also stressed how the freedom of expression has been affected in the time of his presidency. (READ: IN PHOTOS: Groups hit Duterte admin’s performance ahead of SONA 2019)

    “Merely voicing out concern and reporting on the aggravating human rights situation in the country puts one at risk. The attacks were sustained and targeted all fronts: from the red-tagging of activists and organizations, to the harassment and even killing of journalists,” the joint statement from media groups read.

    The Freedom for Media, Freedom for All Network has monitored at least 128 attacks and threats against members of the press since President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office. (READ: Over 100 attacks vs journalists since Duterte assumed office – monitor)

    “In a nutshell, the last 3 years drastically shrunk the space for free expression,” media groups continued, showing how the administration wields its entire machinery to hide the truth in its bloody “war on drugs." – Rappler.com

  10. #110
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    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...ante-president

    In his final year in law school at a Catholic men’s college in Manila, Rodrigo Duterte shot a classmate who made fun of his thick accent. The young “Rody,” as Duterte was then known, was the son of a provincial governor on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. Like many of the progeny of the Philippine political elite, he had enjoyed a privileged upbringing. He grew up surrounded by guns and bodyguards, flew his father’s plane when he was in his hometown, and hung out with the sons of local notables in his Jesuit-run boys’ school. In Manila, however, Duterte’s accent, typical of those from the country’s southern periphery, marked him as an unsophisticated provinciano. Hence the classmate’s teasing.

    “I waited for him,” Duterte would recall nearly 45 years later, when he was running for president and speaking before an enthusiastic crowd. “I told myself, ‘I’ll teach him a lesson.’” The classmate survived the shooting, he recounted, and presumably learned the lesson. And although he was banned from attending graduation, Duterte got his law degree. “The truth is, I am used to shooting people,” he said. The audience lapped it up.

    It was a typical Duterte story, with Duterte cast not as the aggressor but as the aggrieved, resorting to a gun to defend his honor. Sure, he took the law in his own hands, but by doing so, he earned the grudging respect of his tormentor. The telling, too, was classic Duterte: boastful while also self-deprecating. It was crass, hyperbolic, transgressive. And its conclusion—“I am used to shooting people”—could be construed as a joke, a fact, or a threat. Its power, and its beauty, lay in its ambiguity.

  11. #111
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    https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3966531

    A review of President Rodrigo Duterte's fourth year in office included a damning UN Human Rights Council report on widespread extrajudicial killings, the passage of a widely contested anti-terrorism legislation and a bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic.

    In the Philippines, the head of state holds office for a six-year term but is barred from running for reelection.

    Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council chief Michelle Bachelet released a report that characterized Duterte's rule as "heavy handed," which resulted in killings that are "widespread, systematic and on-going."

    Read more: Philippine anti-terrorism law triggers fear of massive rights abuses

    "Laws and policies to counter national security threats and illegal drugs have been crafted and implemented in ways that severely impact human rights. This has resulted in thousands of killings, arbitrary detention and vilification of those who challenge these severe human right violations," said Bachelet, who presented the report findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland.

    Citing open source documents, media reports and testimonials from victims and their families, the report detailed how extrajudicial killings were carried out with near impunity.


    Police operations and vigilante killings
    Since Duterte was elected to the presidency in 2016, more than 27,000 suspected drug peddlers have been killed in a mix of police operations and vigilante killings. Additionally, almost 250 human rights defenders — including unionists, lawyers, journalists and environmental rights defenders — have been killed.

    Responding to the report findings through a video message played during the UN session, Philippine Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said that the Philippines had set up an inter-agency panel that would investigate the claims of extrajudicial killings and "judiciously review" the more than 5,600 police operations where deaths occurred.

    Cristina Palabay, secretary-general of human rights watchdog Karapatan, is skeptical of Guevarra's claim. "We have been on this road before. Task forces and commissions were created but do not deliver justice and accountability. These were used as tools for whitewashing," said Palabay in a statement.

    Read more: Philippines: Maria Ressa's cyber libel verdict 'a method of silencing dissent'

    Meanwhile, Philippine National Police (PNP) spokesperson Bernard Banac denied the claim of widespread killings.

    Citing police data, Banac said that since the start of the state's crackdown on illegal narcotics, police arrested more than 330,000 suspected drug users while 7,673 died in shootouts with law enforcement.

    "One death for every 43 arrests does not add up to widespread killing. Rather, it implies the real intention of law enforcement to arrest the offender and uphold the law," Banac told DW.

    Making dissent a crime
    The release of the UN report coincided with Duterte's signing of a counterterrorism bill into law over the weekend. The legislation has been widely contested for its vague definition of terrorism and the wide powers its gives security forces to arrest suspected terrorists without a warrant and detain them without charges for a longer period of time.

    Critics warned that with the administration's track record of disregarding human rights and civil liberties in enforcing law and order, this new law would be used to further quell legitimate dissent.

    "With Duterte's signing into law of the Anti-Terrorism Act, we find it hard to be hopeful that things are going to get better for human rights under this administration," Llore Pasco said in a press conference. Pasco's two sons were killed in a police operation.

    Read more: Maria Victoria Beltran: Filipino artist confronts Duterte on COVID-19 response

    Citizens broke quarantine regulations to take to the streets in protest when the law was signed last Saturday.

    "With the anti-terrorism act as part of the law of the land, it is as if the Philippines is permanently under a situation worse than martial law," said retired Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio.

    Carpio is among the lawyers and human rights defenders who plan to contest the implementation of the law by filing a petition before the Supreme Court to question the law's constitutionality.

    A 'great' four years
    However, the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps the biggest test of the Duterte administration's performance. The government has been criticized for employing a militarized approach to a public health crisis. The COVID-19 response team appointed by Duterte is headed by former generals and the focus has been on law and order, resulting in thousands getting arrested for violating quarantine protocols.

    The country now has the highest number of COVID-19 infections in the southeast Asian region. Authorities have also been criticized for low rates of testing and a weak contact-tracing mechanism.

    Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque, however, said that "it has been a great four years" and that the only glitch was the COVID-19 pandemic, which is affecting all sectors.

    "It was actually a great performance as far as the economy is concerned. Unfortunately, we were hit by a pandemic. But surveys show that many Filipinos approve of the president's actions," said Roque in a press conference.

    The Philippine economy recorded rapid growth over the past couple of years but contracted in the January-March quarter this year, marking the economy's first contraction since 1998.

    An estimated 7.3 million have been rendered jobless because of lockdown restrictions that closed businesses and ravaged the economy.

    Public opinion polls released last month showed that as much as 43% of Filipinos said they expected their quality of life to worsen in the next 12 months.

  12. #112
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    https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/10/17/...icial-espenido

    MANILA—President Rodrigo Duterte said Thursday that he told Police Lt. Col. Jovie Espenido that he is “free to kill everybody” in Bacolod, which the chief executive claimed is “badly hit” by the drug problem.

    Espenido, who has just been promoted to lieutenant colonel from major, assumed the post of deputy city director for operations of the Bacolod City Police Office last Tuesday.

    “Bacolod is badly hit now and I placed Espenido there, ’yung kinatakutan nila na pulis. Sabi ko, ‘Go there and you are free to kill everybody.’ T*ng*n* start killing there, dalawa na lang tayo pa-preso,” Duterte said during a business conference at the Manila Hotel.

    (Bacolod is badly hit now and I placed Espenido there, the police officer that they fear. I said “go there and you are free to kill everybody. Start killing there. Let’s just go to jail together.)

    Espenido gained prominence for leading the anti-narcotics operation that resulted in the death of Ozamiz, Leyte, city mayor Reynaldo Parojinog and his wife in July 2017.

    He was also the police chief of Albuera town, Leyte, when former mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. was killed in his jail cell after supposedly engaging policemen who served a search warrant in a firefight.

    Malaca?ang earlier hailed Espenido for his ability to bring down drug syndicates amid the reported proliferation of narcotics in Bacolod.

    "Ang reputasyon ni Espenido 'pag nandoon sa isang lugar ay bumabagsak ang sindikato ng droga. Ibig sabihin talagang masigasig siya," Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said earlier this month.

    (Espenido is know for his reputation that drug syndicates are destroyed wherever he is assigned to that place. It only means he is relentless.)
    Holy Shit the president is ordering Police Brutality to take place.

  13. #113
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    https://news.abs-cbn.com/halalan2016...ist-kidnappers

    This is one of the trigger points that made President Duterte and his police force implement systemic brutality originally in Davao City before the rest of the Philippines.

    MANILA - Killing criminals who commit heinous crimes is not a crime, especially if they are armed and resist arrest, at least for presidential aspirant Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.

    In an interview on radio dzMM's "Ikaw Na Ba? Para Sa Pamilyang Pilipino" Wednesday, Duterte admitted that he has actively participated in the execution of several criminals in his city ever since he was elected mayor.

    "Ay susmaryosep, marami na," said Duterte, who was first elected mayor of Davao City in 1988.

    Duterte, who filed his certificate of candidacy (COC) for president under the Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) replacing Martin Di?o, again recalled during the interview the instance when he shot to death three men who abducted a Chinese girl.

    He said he was just three months into his first term as mayor in 1988 when the suspects kidnapped a girl and brought her to a neighboring province where they repeatedly raped her, before they went back to Davao City supposedly to get the ransom money from the victim's family.

    Duterte, accompanied by three men, said that after he was assured that the victim had already been safely secured, he did not think twice about shooting the kidnappers, who, he said, were holding carbines.

    undefined
    "Hinintay ko na lang. Nung bumaba sila, wala na ako, basta pinagbabaril ko na lang. May hawak na carbine e," he said.

    "I was part of it," he admitted. "Actually, I was the most active kasi nakaubos ako ng dalawang magazine ng .45."

    He said they were then able to retrieve the ransom money, which, he said, was smeared with blood.

    In the interview, Duterte said he does not believe his act of killing the three rapist-kidnappers can be considered a crime.

    "Hindi crime yun because they were committing a crime in my presence and I was the person in authority under the law...Pagsabi ko 'Taas ang kamay', walang tumaas ng kamay. Binira ko na," he said.

    OTHER INCIDENTS

    He also recalled how he shot "at a distance" suspects in the kidnapping of the wife of a landed gentry in Davao.

    He said the suspects were stopped at a police checkpoint after the kidnap victim's spouse spotted them.

    "Ako, I took a shot. Maybe pam-practice rin, kung makatama," he said.

    Duterte was also asked if reports that he killed a drug dealer by dropping him from a helicopter are true.

    Duterte was initially silent for a few seconds before saying: "Wala naman nakatingin noon."

    READ: Duterte warns outlaws: 'I can eat your heart in front of you'

    READ: Enrile: Duterte challenging roughness, smoothness of PH society

    'SARCASM'

    Despite his admission, the tough-talking mayor said he is not in favor of extrajudicial killings "in the sense na yung nakatali yung kamay sa likod tapos nakaluhod."

    "Ayaw kasi maniwala ng tao, pati yung [Commission of] Human Rights, na itong mga kriminal, may armas ito. Most of them, if not all, pagdating niyan may armas talaga yan, lumalaban yan. And that is really the insanity caused by drugs," he stressed.

    "At ang sinasabi ko naman sa mga pulis, 'Palabanin mo. Please naman, lumaban ka, kriminal, para mapatay ka na namin,'" he said.

    The 70-year-old mayor also said it was "pure sarcasm" when he said he had already executed a total of 1,700 people.

    Speaking to reporters at the Commission on Elections (Comelec) Tuesday, Duterte said: "700 daw ang pinatay ko? Nagkulang ho sila sa kwenta... Mga 1,700."

    "That's pure sarcasm," he said in the dzMM interview. "Parang binabastos mo ako eh, 700, eh saan yung death certificates? Ipakita mo nga. Pati yung malaria diyan na bumagsak, sa akin."

    He, however, did not deny that there were cases of extra-judicial killings in Davao, especially during the martial law period, when there was a "war" between the government and the New People's Army (NPA).

    "We used to lose about, on the average, 3 to 5 soldiers a day sa Davao," he said.

    "Kaya yang death squad na yan, nadagdagan na nga ng 'D,' naging DDS. During my time, since it was repeatedly used against me, pulitika, 'Sige, I accept it, totoo yang DDS.' May spin. That is what I used, Davao Development System. O, nakita mo, maganda na tayo."

    READ: Duterte backtracks on death squad 'admission'

    Asked how many he has actually killed, he just said: "Yung iba, baka sa panaginip ko lang."

    The Human Rights Watch earlier denounced the more than 1,000 killings committed by the so-called Davao Death Squad (DDS) since the late 1990s.

    Amnesty International (AI) Philippines has likewise said it is "bothered" by the presidential candidacy of Duterte. "Yes, we are bothered. Naaalarma kami when he said that when he becomes president, he will impose the death penalty on a weekly basis," AI Philippines chairperson Ritz Lee Santos said.

    READ: Probe Duterte over death squad links - group

    READ: Amnesty International 'bothered' by Duterte candidacy

    'BAKIT AKO MATATAKOT?'

    Duterte, who has time and again warned lawbreakers, especially drug traffickers, not to go to his city or else they will be killed, said he is not afraid of any criminal.

    "Bakit ako matatakot? Sila yung masama, ako yung nagsasabi sa kanila na gobyerno ito, tumahimik sila."

    According to Duterte, he will also not think twice about killing members of the police force when they commit any "wrongdoing."

    He cited two separate instances when cops involved in kidnapping incidents in Davao ended up dead.

    "Sinasabi ko sa mga pulis, 'Pag gumawa kayo ng masama, mauuna talaga kayo. You have to go first,'" he said.

    Duterte, meanwhile, admitted that there are still many incidents of crime in Davao. But, he said, "As long as yung namatay, yung dapat mamatay. In protecting the community... I do not care if we were the highest in the country, kung lahat naman ng napatay diyan eh kriminal, eh di maligaya ako."

    The mayor said he is in favor of restoring the death penalty, especially for drug-related and other heinous crimes.

    "There are about 1,000 pwedeng i-execute, dapat i-execute but because it was put off maybe because of the strongest influence of libertarians in the Church, the previous president decided not just to implement it," he said.

  14. #114
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    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53762570

    Capital punishment opponents expect a steep battle to prevent President Rodrigo Duterte from reimposing the death penalty, as he renews calls for the law as part of a "drug war" that has already killed thousands of Filipinos.

    Few were surprised when Mr Duterte last month pushed, once again, to reintroduce the death penalty for drug offenders.

    Since coming to power in 2016 he has waged a brutal crackdown on suspected drug users and dealers, issuing police with shoot-to-kill orders while encouraging citizens to kill drug users too.

    Officially the police say they shoot only in self-defence and data shows more than 8,000 people have been killed in anti-drug operations. The nation's human rights commission estimates a toll as high as 27,000.

    The piling bodies have been documented by photojournalists whose images of dead suspects face-down in pools of blood after a police raid, or strewn on streets in suspected vigilante murders, have shocked the world.

    "The death penalty would give the state another weapon in its ongoing war against drugs," said Carlos Conde, Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch.

    Mr Duterte was restrained, at first, by the upper house of parliament. But last year's mid-term elections saw his allies win control of the senate and many fear the law could now be passed.

    Twenty-three bills have been filed across both houses to reinstate the death penalty for drug crimes, including possession and sales. Committee deliberations began last week.

    Nuanced views
    Mr Conde says he would like to be proved wrong but senses the law "is as good as passed". He points to the swift recent passing of the controversial anti-terrorism law, and the speed at which ABS-CBN, a broadcaster critical of the president, was forced off air.

    The move would be a breach of international human rights law.

    But this is unlikely to faze Mr Duterte, who frequently expresses his disdain for human rights checks. Last year the Philippines left the International Criminal Court as it was probing accusations of crimes linked to his drugs campaign.

    Surveys by the Social Weather Stations, a pollster, have shown the war on drugs remains popular among Filipinos despite experts saying the signature policy has failed to curb drug use or supply. A majority are also in favour of reinstating capital punishment.

    But a closer look at the results shows an alternative picture, says Maria Socorro Diokno, secretary-general of the Free Legal Assistance Group, a network of human rights lawyers.

    When presented with alternatives to capital punishment for crimes linked to illegal drugs, for instance, most favoured other options.

    "They begin to think that death is not always the answer," said Ms Diokno.

    Ms Diokno, who leads her group's anti-death penalty task force, has been braced for a battle with Mr Duterte ever since he vowed to bring back the death penalty as part of his election campaign.

    She knows that minds can be changed because she was part of the movement that succeeded last time.

    The death penalty has been abolished twice before - first in 1987 and then again in 2006 after being reinstated in 1993.

    The last push for abolition was led by the Catholic church, which holds considerable influence over Filipinos in the largely Catholic country while Mr Duterte is an open critic.

    Last week the Clergy of the Archdiocese of Manila condemned the "lack of independence and imprudence" of some lawmakers in supporting the president on the issue.

    "We see such acts as betrayal of the people's interests and an implicit support to the creeping authoritarian tendencies exuded by this administration," it said.

    Mistaken convictions
    In his annual address to the nation last month Mr Duterte claimed reinstating the death penalty by lethal injection would "deter criminality".

    But there is little evidence to prove that the death penalty can be a deterrent. Instead research has shown the punishment frequently affects the most disadvantaged.

    In the Philippines alone the Supreme Court said in 2004 that 71.77% of death penalty verdicts handed by lower courts were wrong.

    By imposing the death penalty for drug offences, the Philippines would also be moving away from what Harm Reduction International has identified as a downward global trend in using the penalty for such crimes.

    It says 35 countries and territories retain capital punishment for drug offenders but only a few carry out executions regularly. Five of the eight "high application states" are in South East Asia.

    Raymund Narag, an assistant professor of criminology at Southern Illinois University, knows firsthand the problems of a flawed criminal justice system.

    He spent nearly seven years jailed in the Philippines as a pre-trial detainee before he was acquitted of a campus murder that took place at his university when he was 20.

    The death penalty was still intact at the time and prosecutors had sought it for the 10 men charged.

    Worse than his overcrowded cell and frequent prison riots, he says, was the "agony of waiting" for hearings.

    It was traumatic thinking that you can be put to death for a crime you did not commit," said Dr Narag, speaking from the US.

    Now 46, he was one of five men eventually acquitted, while the others were sentenced to life imprisonment.

    The experience has shaped his career. He now researches prolonged trial detention in the Philippines, while advocating for criminal justice reform.

    Dr Narag says that if he hadn't managed to track down a key witness, an overseas worker, to return home and testify, proving he wasn't at the crime scene, he may have been convicted.

    Through his advocacy he wants Filipinos to know the consequences of mistaken convictions, which could become mistaken executions if the law changes, in an already struggling justice system.

    The scope of and timeline for the eventual death penalty bill put to vote in parliament is uncertain, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some have argued the bill should not be a priority.

    Gloria Lai, Asia director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, says the death penalty has not solved the drug-related problems of any country.

    "It is the poor and vulnerable who bear the harsh punishment of criminal justice systems in grossly unjust ways," she says.

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    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53762570

    Capital punishment opponents expect a steep battle to prevent President Rodrigo Duterte from reimposing the death penalty, as he renews calls for the law as part of a "drug war" that has already killed thousands of Filipinos.

    Few were surprised when Mr Duterte last month pushed, once again, to reintroduce the death penalty for drug offenders.

    Since coming to power in 2016 he has waged a brutal crackdown on suspected drug users and dealers, issuing police with shoot-to-kill orders while encouraging citizens to kill drug users too.

    Officially the police say they shoot only in self-defence and data shows more than 8,000 people have been killed in anti-drug operations. The nation's human rights commission estimates a toll as high as 27,000.

    The piling bodies have been documented by photojournalists whose images of dead suspects face-down in pools of blood after a police raid, or strewn on streets in suspected vigilante murders, have shocked the world.

    "The death penalty would give the state another weapon in its ongoing war against drugs," said Carlos Conde, Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch.

    Mr Duterte was restrained, at first, by the upper house of parliament. But last year's mid-term elections saw his allies win control of the senate and many fear the law could now be passed.

    Twenty-three bills have been filed across both houses to reinstate the death penalty for drug crimes, including possession and sales. Committee deliberations began last week.

    Nuanced views
    Mr Conde says he would like to be proved wrong but senses the law "is as good as passed". He points to the swift recent passing of the controversial anti-terrorism law, and the speed at which ABS-CBN, a broadcaster critical of the president, was forced off air.

    The move would be a breach of international human rights law.

    But this is unlikely to faze Mr Duterte, who frequently expresses his disdain for human rights checks. Last year the Philippines left the International Criminal Court as it was probing accusations of crimes linked to his drugs campaign.

    Surveys by the Social Weather Stations, a pollster, have shown the war on drugs remains popular among Filipinos despite experts saying the signature policy has failed to curb drug use or supply. A majority are also in favour of reinstating capital punishment.

    But a closer look at the results shows an alternative picture, says Maria Socorro Diokno, secretary-general of the Free Legal Assistance Group, a network of human rights lawyers.

    When presented with alternatives to capital punishment for crimes linked to illegal drugs, for instance, most favoured other options.

    "They begin to think that death is not always the answer," said Ms Diokno.

    Ms Diokno, who leads her group's anti-death penalty task force, has been braced for a battle with Mr Duterte ever since he vowed to bring back the death penalty as part of his election campaign.

    She knows that minds can be changed because she was part of the movement that succeeded last time.

    The death penalty has been abolished twice before - first in 1987 and then again in 2006 after being reinstated in 1993.

    The last push for abolition was led by the Catholic church, which holds considerable influence over Filipinos in the largely Catholic country while Mr Duterte is an open critic.

    Last week the Clergy of the Archdiocese of Manila condemned the "lack of independence and imprudence" of some lawmakers in supporting the president on the issue.

    "We see such acts as betrayal of the people's interests and an implicit support to the creeping authoritarian tendencies exuded by this administration," it said.

    Mistaken convictions
    In his annual address to the nation last month Mr Duterte claimed reinstating the death penalty by lethal injection would "deter criminality".

    But there is little evidence to prove that the death penalty can be a deterrent. Instead research has shown the punishment frequently affects the most disadvantaged.

    In the Philippines alone the Supreme Court said in 2004 that 71.77% of death penalty verdicts handed by lower courts were wrong.

    By imposing the death penalty for drug offences, the Philippines would also be moving away from what Harm Reduction International has identified as a downward global trend in using the penalty for such crimes.

    It says 35 countries and territories retain capital punishment for drug offenders but only a few carry out executions regularly. Five of the eight "high application states" are in South East Asia.

    Raymund Narag, an assistant professor of criminology at Southern Illinois University, knows firsthand the problems of a flawed criminal justice system.

    He spent nearly seven years jailed in the Philippines as a pre-trial detainee before he was acquitted of a campus murder that took place at his university when he was 20.

    The death penalty was still intact at the time and prosecutors had sought it for the 10 men charged.

    Worse than his overcrowded cell and frequent prison riots, he says, was the "agony of waiting" for hearings.

    It was traumatic thinking that you can be put to death for a crime you did not commit," said Dr Narag, speaking from the US.

    Now 46, he was one of five men eventually acquitted, while the others were sentenced to life imprisonment.

    The experience has shaped his career. He now researches prolonged trial detention in the Philippines, while advocating for criminal justice reform.

    Dr Narag says that if he hadn't managed to track down a key witness, an overseas worker, to return home and testify, proving he wasn't at the crime scene, he may have been convicted.

    Through his advocacy he wants Filipinos to know the consequences of mistaken convictions, which could become mistaken executions if the law changes, in an already struggling justice system.

    The scope of and timeline for the eventual death penalty bill put to vote in parliament is uncertain, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some have argued the bill should not be a priority.

    Gloria Lai, Asia director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, says the death penalty has not solved the drug-related problems of any country.

    "It is the poor and vulnerable who bear the harsh punishment of criminal justice systems in grossly unjust ways," she says.

  16. #116
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    Yes the new leader of Phil Health is a Duterte Appointee with allegations that he was with the Davao Death Squad. Yes this is equivalent if the President appointed a CDC and FDA chief accused of Police Brutality in a previous job.


    https://rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/thi...-dante-gierran

    UPDATED) If elected by the PhilHealth board, the CPA-lawyer and former National Bureau of Investigation director will lead the state health insurer as it faces allegations of widespread corruption



    President Rodrigo Duterte announced late Monday, August 31, that he is eyeing former National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) chief Dante Gierran to lead the embattled Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).

    He still needs to be elected by the PhilHealth board before assuming the position of CEO and president of the state health insurer. Section 14 of the Universal Healthcare Law states that the PhilHealth board cannot recommend a president and CEO unless he or she is a Filipino citizen, and has "at least 7 years of experience in the field of public health, management, finance, and health economics, or a combination of any of these expertise."

    Duterte?s decision to nominate Gierran comes after former chief Ricardo Morales, a retired general, resigned on August 26 amid allegations of corruption in PhilHealth.

    PhilHealth oversees the country?s national health insurance program that aims to provide ?affordable, acceptable, available, and accessible? health care services for Filipinos. It subsidizes in part or in full medical expenses of its members in time of need. This is especially critical during a health crises like the coronavirus pandemic.

    In a speech, the President said he told the former NBI chief to devote the next two years to fighting corruption. In the middle of a pandemic that has left more than 220,000 positive COVID-19 cases nationwide and over 3,500 dead as of August 31, Duterte has chosen Gierran to lead PhilHealth.



    Responding to Duterte, Gierren admitted that what lies ahead is a difficult job, but said that he's "also a good soldier." He faces a tough challenge of cleaning up the agency while helping Filipinos with medical needs in a landscape where the Philippines has emerged one of the hardest hit by the coronavirus in Southeast Asia.

    Long career in NBI
    Gierran was appointed NBI director by Duterte in 2016, a position he held for almost 4 years.

    Like Morales and many of Duterte's appointees, Gierran has a deep connection to Davao City. He is also a fraternity brother of Duterte at the Lex Talionis Fraternitas.


    Prior to joining the Duterte administration, he headed the regional office of the NBI in Davao for 3 years.

    He retired from the bureau in February 2020 upon reaching the mandatory age of 65, ending almost 3 decades of work there.

    Gierran first entered government service as an NBI line agent back in 1990, according to a profile by the Rotary Club of Manila published in 2017.

    He was assigned in Manila from 1990 to 1991, in Davao City from 1992 to 2001, and in Vigan City from 2002 to 2003.

    After at least 13 years as a line agent, Gierran rose from the ranks and occupied high-ranking positions within the NBI, including training director. He also worked in the office of then-NBI director Nonnatus Rojas.




    In between his stint at the NBI, Gierran also briefly worked as chief investigator of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources? Environmental Law Enforcement Task Force in 2009.

    Working student to CPA-lawyer
    Gierran is a certified public accountant and a lawyer.

    According to the lawyers' list of the Supreme Court, he joined the Bar on May 8, 1997 with roll number 41898.

    Before joining government, Gierran was a credit investigator and accountant at the Manila Banking Corporation in Davao City. He worked there for 11 years, from 1979 to 1990.

    Gierran obtained his accounting degree from Rizal Memorial Colleges in Davao City in 1978, and his law degree from the University of Mindanao and the International Harvadian University in 1993.

    Gierran was a working student, assuming several roles in Tardal Security Guards Service in the 1970s.

    NBI under Gierran
    Then-PNP chief Ronald dela Rosa and then-NBI chief Dante Gierran during the Senate probe into Jee Ick Joo's death.



    Gierran?s stint as NBI director for almost 4 years since 2016 saw many controversies.

    During his first few months, self-confessed Davao Death Squad (DDS) former member Edgar Matobato linked him to a 2007 killing of a man who was allegedly fed to crocodiles. Gierran denied this claim.

    The NBI under Gierran also flip-flopped on the cyber libel complaint against Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former researcher-writer Reynaldo Santos Jr. The bureau initially dismissed the complaint but eventually recommended the filing of a case.

    How did this story make you feel?


    Gierran, however, said ?there was no reversal.?

    The NBI launched investigations into high profile cases under Gierran, including the killing of Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo and the kidney treatments of ?ghost patients? ? among the controversies faced by PhilHealth.

    If elected by the PhilHealth board, Gierran will be taking the helm of an agency that has been caught in a vortex of deep-seated and widespread allegations of corruption.

    On August 28, a few days before Duterte announced his choice, PhilHealth workers urged the President to ?stop appointing (people) who are not qualified.?

    In an interview with ANC's Headstart on Tuesday, September 1, Gierran said he's "scared because I don't know the operations of PhilHealth."

    "I don't know about public health. I don't know about that," he admitted.

    What will Gierran?s experience in NBI and as a CPA-lawyer bring to the table? The public will soon find out. ? Rappler.com

  17. #117
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    https://www.bulatlat.com/2020/09/03/...community-doc/

    MANILA – Critics are far from impressed by President Rodrigo Duterte’s marching order to his newly-appointed PhilHealth chief to eradicate corruption in the long-beleaguered public health insurance system. But more than this, community doctors and health advocates fear this may put people’s lives in peril – with the new chief’s admission that he does not know public health.

    The appointment of the new PhilHealth chief – Dante Gierran, former director of the National Bureau of Investigation – came after the Aug. 26 resignation of Ricardo Morales amid investigations on the reported anomalies on COVID-19 response.

    However, with 226,000 COVID-19 cases and 3,600 deaths at hand, Gierran’s mere appointment, according to the Citizens Urgent Response to End Covid-19 (CURE Covid), shows the “president’s lack of understanding of the workings of the state health insurance firm and the chronic problems plaguing it.”

    “The law says the PhilHealth CEO should have seven years experience in public health, management, finance and health economics. Gierran might be an accountant, but his experience is in criminal investigation and law enforcement. He simply is not qualified to lead PhilHealth,” said community doctor and CURE Covid Spokesperson Julie Caguiat.

    Gierran himself admitted to media interviews of being “very scared” with the new tasks ahead as he does not know public health. Putting another retired military or NBI officials with little or no experience, said Caguiat, may put people’s lives in peril.

    Gierran was appointed as NBI director under President Duterte. Like many of his appointees, Gierran has long known the president way back when he was still Davao mayor. He denied his involvement in the death squads in Davao, where one case allegedly involved feeding a man to crocodiles.

    “I’m sure there are many more persons more qualified than Guierran out there. It’s just that President Duterte is still treating COVID-19 and other health issues as a peace and order problem, appointing law enforcers in positions that are better suited for health professionals and experts,” she said.

    But can Gierran truly put an end to the seeming endless cases of reported anomalies in PhilHealth? This is unlikely, it seems, as health secretary Francisco Duque III and former chief Morales are still getting the president’s proverbial seal of approval.

    In a statement, Migrante International Chairperson Joanna Concepcion noted that “Malaca?ang has even allowed Morales to gracefully tender his resignation instead of getting sacked from office. Making him fully entitled to back pay benefits. Meanwhile, Duque continues to cling to his position despite public clamour for his resignation.”

    Cases should push through

    Migrante International said they are fully supporting the proposed filing of charges against reported erring Philhealth officials “to clear the way for the public in finding out the extent of their consent or participation over widespread corruption and irregularities in the government firm.”

    The Filipino migrant rights group brought attention to the P500-million diverted funds of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, which was allegedly used to produce Philhealth cards that bore former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s photo in the months leading to the 2004 elections under Duque’s watch as the latter’s chief. This resulted in major financial loses for Philhealth but charges against those involved were dismissed by the Ombudsman.

    In a separate statement, the Alliance of Health Workers also expressed its support to the senate findings, which include recommending charges against Philhealth executives.

    The group said that ensuring that Philhealth is free from corruption is of public concern as it would play a big role in the implementation of the Philippine law on universal health care.

    “How can we entrust our hard earned money to an agency with 5,000 plus ‘ghost’ members over the age of 130? There is no basis for supporting a government agency that reimburses funds to hospitals based on profitability and not on concrete needs,” Concepcion said.

  18. #118

  19. #119
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    https://www.benarnews.org/english/ne...020140833.html

    Philippine police said Friday they were investigating the brazen killing of a drug suspect by a gunman inside a hospital where the victim was taken after being shot hours earlier, apparently by vigilantes.

    Vincent Adia, 27, was being treated and had been stabilized at the Angono Annex of the Rizal Provincial Hospital, east of Manila, after being shot three times in a local street early Wednesday morning, the Philippine Human Rights Commission said.

    But later that day, a gunman walked into the ward and finished off the victim by firing two shots ?in front of? medical staff, according to a statement from the commission.

    Philippine National Police chief Gen. Camilo Cascolan said he had ordered a probe into Adia?s murder.

    ?We are investigating the killing,? he said in a terse statement Friday without adding anything more.

    According to a police report, unknown assailants shot Adia three times in the head and left him for dead early Wednesday in an Angono street.

    They left a cardboard sign that simply said ?pusher? ? similar to many unsolved killings of suspected drug dealers who allegedly have been killed by vigilantes during the President Rodrigo Duterte administration?s bloody crackdown on illegal drugs that has been going on since mid-2016.

    Motorists spotted Adia, then notified the police and local village officials, who rushed him to the hospital, where medical personnel managed to save him, the police report said.

    A gunman, however, slipped through the hospital?s tight security before noon Wednesday and finished him off. Shocked hospital personnel told police that the gunman casually walked toward Adiya?s bed and fired two bullets into the patient, killing him instantly, the police report said.

    According to a report by CNN Philippines, the shooting inside the hospital took place after police personnel left Adia alone in his bed. The news service quoted the national police chief, Cascolan, as defending the actions of the officers who allegedly left Adia unguarded.

    ?There was really no threat anymore. I think our policemen did the right thing. But we will have to investigate why they did not leave any other guard,? the police chief said, according to CNN.

    The Human Rights Commission condemned the killing as it called on Duterte?s government ?to concretely address the continuing atrocities and vigilante killings? in its war on narcotics.

    ?The brazenness of the attack is utterly reprehensible, a desecration of the very facility where the sick and wounded are supposed to be treated and saved,? Jacqueline de Guia, spokeswoman for the commission, said in a statement.

    ?Amid the suffering in this period of pandemic, it is disheartening that extra-judicial killings still persist,? she added.

    Vigilantes: meting out ?hate and vengeance?

    During his campaign for the presidency in 2016, Duterte pledged that, if elected, he would wage a war on drug traffickers and dealers as well as end corruption in government.

    His administration?s counter-narcotics crackdown has targeted several alleged high-profile narco-politicians, but a majority among the thousands of people killed in the unrelenting drug war have been small-time drug peddlers and addicts.

    Faced with two murder charges filed against him at the International Criminal Court, Duterte, 75, last month sought to distance himself from the drug-related killings. He blamed warring criminal gangs for them.

    On Wednesday, Cascolan released updated figures on counter-narcotics operations. He said 234,036 operations had been carried out since mid-2016 that led to the arrest of some ?357,069 suspects, 7,987 deaths and the surrender of 1,290,768.?

    The deaths include homicide cases, which police call ?deaths under investigation.?

    ?We continue to enhance our operations (against) anti-illegal drugs,? Cascolan said in a statement on Wednesday.

    The updated figure on deaths marks an increase of nearly 1,500 compared with the 6,500 deaths from the entire drug war reported by police last month.

    On Friday, Karapatan, a Manila-based human rights advocacy group, condoled with the family of Vincent Adia.

    ?How can such a brazen killing occur if we indeed have a professional, reliable and pro-people police force,? Cristina Palabay, head of Karapatan, told BenarNews, adding that Adia?s killing ?was the most vivid example of the level of impunity? in the country.

    Chel Diokno, of the Free Legal Assistance Group, which provides pro-bono assistance to victims of rights abuses, said the killing of Adia was not surprising.

    ?When vigilantes take the law into their own hands, they don?t mete out justice but hate and vengeance,? he said. ?That?s not the right foundation to build a nation.?

  20. #120
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    https://www.benarnews.org/english/ne...020142326.html


    A town mayor tagged by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte as a narco-politician was gunned down Monday night in the capital Manila, authorities said.

    Police Lt. Col. Samuel Pabonito, a local police commander, said the victim, Abdul Wahab Sabal, 45, mayor of Talitay town in the province in Maguindanao in the southern Philippines, was about to enter Mannra Hotel in downtown Manila when he was attacked.

    “His companion told investigators Mr. Sabal disembarked from his vehicle and was walking toward the entrance of hotel when he heard gunshots,” Pabonito said Tuesday.

    Sabal, who was rushed to a hospital, was declared dead upon arrival by attending physicians. His wife and security staff were unhurt in the incident.

    Capt. Henry Navarro, chief of the Manila Police District homicide section, said Sabal’s killing could be linked to illegal drugs or politics.

    “Those are angles we are looking at in our investigation,” he told reporters.

    Sabal was among the politicians allegedly linked to the drug trade included in a list Duterte had made public. He was the 22nd local official killed since Duterte took office in 2016 and launched his bloody crackdown on illegal drugs.

    In October 2019, David Navarro, 50, mayor of Clarin town in the southern Philippine province of Misamis Occidental, was shot and killed as he was traveling to the city prosecutor’s office. One day earlier, he had been arrested on allegations he beat up a massage therapist in the central city of Cebu.

    About 6,000 suspected dealers and addicts have been killed since then, according to police official figures while local and international rights groups claim the figure could be five times greater. The majority of those killed were poor people in urban areas and despite the crackdown, drug trafficking has continued, according to officials.

    Duterte previously released the names of 35 mayors, seven vice mayors, one provincial board member and three congressmen he alleged were involved in illegal drug trafficking. Included in that list was Sabal and his brother, Montasir.

    Duterte faces two murder complaints before the International Criminal Court in The Hague filed by relatives of some of those killed and by two men who claimed to be ex-members of Duterte’s hit squad.

  21. #121
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    https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2...fest-countries

    MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday evening said he was elated to learn that the Philippines had placed among the top 50 safest countries in the world.

    Findings by the US-based analytics group Gallup Inc. recently showed the Philippines scoring 84 in the 2020 Global Law and Order Index. The country had tied with other nations such as Australia, New Zealand, Poland and Serbia.

    "I was very surprised [and] we're lumped with countries that are ideally peaceful," he said. "It only shows that we have to credit the police and military and other uniformed services of government who toil to make this country this very peaceful."

    Social media users had since disputed the results, as they said human rights violations -- particularly under Duterte's controversial war on drugs -- continues and administration critics continue to receive threats and intimidation.

    Also this week, the Philippine National Police revealed harrowing figures on the number of persons killed in Duterte's 'Oplan Tokhang' which is almost at 8,000

    Human rights groups have since disputed government figures, putting the estimate to actually at over 30,000 if counting deaths carried out by paid killers or vigilante groups.
    Duterte banking on an anti-crime and corruption platform catapulted him to the presidency in 2016 from then being a mayor of Davao City, where allegations had since hounded him of operating a vigilante group known as the Davao Death Squad targetting criminals in the city.


  22. #122
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    https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/136850...ssage-to-sinas

    MANILA, Philippines — A son of recently slain National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) peace consultants on Saturday said his elderly and ailing parents could not have exchanged gunfire with the police and that he could have have fought for them in court had they been taken alive.

    VJ Topacio, son of Agaton Topacio and Eugenia Magpantay, both 68, was responding to a statement made earlier by Philippine National Police chief Gen. Debold Sinas who said the couple, who spent many years in the communist underground, would not have given up quietly.

    The police said they were to serve a search warrant on the couple at their home in Angono town, Rizal province, at 3 a.m. on Nov. 25 when they were met by gunfire.

    Col. Joseph Arguelles, Rizal police provincial director, said the couple “resisted arrest” and were killed in an ensuing shootout. Police said they recovered from the house two rifles, two .45-caliber pistols and two grenades.

    It was unclear if the couple were charged with any specific crime.

    Sinas said in an interview with ANC on Thursday that the family could seek an investigation if they believed the PNP committed wrongdoing, but he urged people “not to jump to conclusions.”


    Responding to Sinas in a Facebook post on Saturday, VJ, a human rights lawyer, said his parents would have called a lawyer instead of fighting.

    “You do not fight fair,” he told Sinas. “I would have asked that you arrest them. I could have fought for this in court. When they were killed, I wish you had allowed us to retrieve their bodies. But you hid them and you didn’t turn them over immediately.”

    PNP chief explains
    The Communist Party of the Philippines said the couple were sickly and had already retired as peace consultants to the NDFP.

    But age had nothing to do with it, Sinas said.

    “They were leaders and spent a lot of time in the underground movement. They were properly trained,” he said.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Sinas defended the police action and said the warrant was served at that time of day to prevent Magpantay and Topacio from learning about it.

    “If it was served during daylight hours, everyone would have seen, they could have spotters or contacts who could warn them and they’d likely have escaped,” he said.

    But another son, Tony Topacio, said in a separate Facebook post on Thursday called the killing “an execution, murder in the highest degree possible, an assassination.”

    “Overkill would be a huge understatement,” he said.

    Tony described his father as “an artist throughout his life,” who spent his time making bonsai.

    He said his mother was “sickly and feeble … who was a teacher all throughout her life, in her last hours, would have been found armed with ‘pointed sticks’ that could be used for puncturing the eyes of ugly enemies but generally used for writing.”

    ‘Simple, elderly retirees’
    VJ earlier said his mother suffered from diabetes and recently went into a four-day coma, while his father was in constant pain due to enlargement of the heart, a knee injury and frozen shoulder.

    “There is simply no way that the elderly couple was even able to put up a resistance, let alone an armed one, against dozens of policemen,” he said.

    Tony described his parents as “simple, elderly retirees who just [wanted] to be left alone in peace after a life of championing the oppressed, the farmers, the peasants, the workers, and the Filipino.”

    “They could not have, overnight, summoned their inner Keanu Reeves and downloaded all the necessary skills to repel the ‘tokhang’-like maneuvers popularized early in the Duterte regime but was birthed much earlier down in the South back in the day,” he said.

    Reeves is a Hollywood actor, popular for his action movies.

    The brothers also said the police gave them the runaround before they were able to retrieve the remains of their parents.

    VJ said they learned about the death of their parents only from their neighbors, not the police.

    When the brothers sought to recover the remains, the police directed them to go from one place to another—from a Rizal police station, to other stations in Angono and Antipolo and to as far away as Camp Vicente Lim in Laguna province.

    “Fortunately, my brother was able to locate them at Antipolo Memorial Homes where he was able to identify our parents,” VJ said.

    Still the police did not immediately release the bodies, demanding that his brother produce identification for their parents.

    When they finally recovered the remains, the police gave them no documentation regarding their deaths such as an investigation, a medicolegal or even just a spot report, VJ said.

    “We literally got zero [papers]. We were only able to recover the bodies,” he said.

    He told the Inquirer on Saturday that his parents’ remains had already been cremated.

    The brothers had already sought the help of the Commission on Human Rights in probing the killing.
    Topacio and Magpantay were the latest NDFP consultants killed this year.

    Randall Echanis was beaten and stabbed to death in Quezon City in August. Another consultant, Randy Malayao, was shot to death while sleeping inside a bus in Nueva Vizcaya in January.

    President Duterte terminated talks to end the 52-year-old insurgency in 2018, saying the rebels continued attacking soldiers and police despite the ongoing negotiations.



  23. #123
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    https://www.rappler.com/nation/human...-list-cowardly

    MANILA, PHILIPPINES

    'For Duterte to now claim that he had no hand in these lists is the height of hypocrisy,' says Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday, December 8, said President Rodrigo Duterte cannot wash his hands of the blood from his controversial ?narco list? that includes politicians allegedly involved in illegal drugs.

    In a statement, HRW deputy Asia director Phil Robertson said Duterte has used the list as a ?public, political prop? to fuel his rise to the country?s top government seat, even during his days as Davao City mayor.

    According to a 2009 HRW report on the Davao Death Squad killings, then-mayor Duterte often recited the names of alleged criminals on local television and radio.

    ?For Duterte to now claim that he had no hand in these lists is the height of hypocrisy,? he said. ?For him to disavow how these lists were used by law enforcers to violate the civil liberties and human rights of those listed is not only disingenuous ? it is cowardly.?

    On Monday, December 7, Duterte tried to distance himself from the so-called narco list after the recent killing of Los Ba?os Mayor Caesar Perez, who was one of the government officials the President had publicly accused of involvement in the drug trade.

    The President admitted that there are individuals on the narco list who ended up dead, but said his office is not responsible for the killings.

    Violence unleashed
    Groups have sounded the alarm over the public accusations of drug involvement ? from Duterte?s speeches to the watch list in barangays. The lists? accuracy are often challenged as they are often marred with inconsistencies and lack of transparency.

    The President has also consistently publicly threatened alleged narco politicians.

    International mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court and the United Nations, only need to look at the list and the resulting violence to see the extent of Duterte?s war on drugs.

    ?The proof of violence unleashed by these lists can be counted in the bodies lying on the streets,? Robertson said. ?There is no denying that listing people on such target lists results in the violation of the rights of these people.?
    Government data shows that at least 5,942 suspected drug personalities have been killed in police operations as of October 31. This number doesn?t include victims of vigilante-style killings, which human rights groups estimate to have reached at least 27,000 since 2016.

    Only one conviction have been made so far ? the cops responsible for the death of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos. ? Rappler.com
    https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/137005...-of-town-mayor

    MANILA, Philippines ? President Rodrigo Duterte?s distancing from the so-called narcolist that is being blamed for the killing of Mayor Caesar Perez of Los Ba?os, Laguna, is ?the height of hypocrisy? and a way to steer clear of any responsibility, international observer Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement issued on Wednesday.

    Phil Robertson, HRW deputy director for Asia, said Duterte could not deny having a hand in the narcolist ? which consists of the names of government officials with alleged links to the drug trade ? as had relied on it to fuel popular support for him even when he was mayor of Davao City.
    ?Throughout his entire political career? President Duterte has used his target lists as a political tool to intimidate people, including politicians opposing him. During his Davao years, he would read out on TV the names of people he accused of involvement in illegal drugs. Many listed were later killed by the Davao Death Squad,? Robertson said.

    ?For Duterte to now claim that he had no hand in these lists is the height of hypocrisy. For him to disavow how these lists were used by law enforcers to violate the civil liberties and human rights of those listed is not only disingenuous ? it is cowardly,? he added.

    During his pre-recorded televised briefing on Monday, Duterte said that the narcolist was not his creation but was based on intelligence reports from the military, the police, and other law enforcement agencies.

    According to Robert Lavi?a, the Los Ba?os municipal administrator, Perez started getting death threats in 2019, months before the midterm elections, after Duterte read on live television his name as one of the officials in the narcolist.



    Perez was shot in the back of the head twice, just a few steps away from the Los Ba?os municipal hall. He was rushed to a hospital where he died while being revived.

    Duterte condoled with the Perez family, insisting that the narcolist was not his.

    ?I?m sorry that your father died the way it happened,? Duterte said. ?But if you tell me about that list ? that?s not mine. It?s a collation? all of it ? of the intelligence reports from drug enforcement agencies and the intelligence of the military, police.?

    Still, relatives and close aides of the mayor insist that the narcolist was partly to blame for his killing.

    And the HRW stressed that international rights groups and other watchdogs should look into the matter.

    Duterte has been the subject of international scrutiny due to rights issues arising from his war against illegal drugs.

    ?Duterte?s lists and the resulting violence are part of what international accountability mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court and the UN Human Rights Council must investigate,? Robertson said.

    ?The proof of violence unleashed by these lists can be counted in the bodies lying on the streets. There is no denying that listing people on such target lists results in the violation of the rights of these people,? he added.

    Duterte?s critics had been suggesting that an investigation be conducted by the United Nations Human Rights Council. But UN members eventually opted instead to call for greater cooperation among themselves to strengthen efforts to protect human rights in the Philippines.

    Damn Its insane that the President of the Philippines started out as a person who killed rapists, pedophiles, harassers has went on to killing drug dealers, opposing militants and now opposing politicians. That's the price of being like Macbeth power and yes killing your enemies will lead you into paranoia as in the case of Duterte and to a certain extent dictators all over the world.

  24. #124
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    Judging by the sparse review population, there continues to be hardly any broad public interest on two biographies of Rodrigo Duterte that came out in the past two years. The first, Duterte Harry: Fire and Fury in the Philippines (Scribe Publications, London, 2018), was written by the Irish-born author Jonathan Miller, Asia Correspondent for the London-based Channel 4 News. He boasts of some accolades: Royal Television Society awards for his brand of shattering journalistic reportage and four Amnesty International TV News awards. At least one review was published in the Manila Times, written by the London-educated Filipino scholar and columnist Rachel A.G. Reyes.

    The other bio, Beyond Will and Power, A Biography of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, was self-published by its author Earl G. Parre?o in 2019. It presents Parre?o as a freelance writer who had written in 2003 the book Boss Danding, the unauthorized biography of the late Marcos crony Eduardo Cojuangco. A review was published online by blogger Emmanuel Alejandro, who identifies himself as a former officemate of Parre?o in a non-government organization. Reyes also wrote a review of Parre?o’s book published in Vera Files.

    In the Philippines, political campaigns begin illegally, and stealthily, – long before the filing of candidacies commencing October 2021 for the 2022 elections. Today, each presidential aspirant claims to have a hotline with God, waiting for the Burning Bush appointment to run. If we are not yet lost in the inertia of the hypocrisy, both books should serve as acute cautionary tales reminding us that, soon, we will be voting in a political system laboring under damning corruption and impunity that have even worsened since 2016.

    The Laud Quarry: The Dark Secrets of Duterte’s Modus Mortis

    The Miller book is written as a field narrative, a pastiche of the Duterte pace and style of life: meandering, loquacious, tautological, ribald. Replete with myriad sources, he interviewed DDS and non-DDS, Duterte family members, cabinet secretaries with their glorifying hosannas, SunStar Davao editor in-chief Stella Estremera, who he styles as “not impartial” (“an acolyte in decoding Digong-speak,” a “cheerleader”). He also pored over Duterte’s school records, read transcripts of rambling speeches, and interviewed sources who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions, including an ambulance driver horrified at the rising death toll of extrajudicial killings in Duterte’s early years as mayor. He interviewed as well senator Leila de Lima, Chel Diokno, and known Marcos apostle Ranhilio Aquino the priest. Robustly mining the field provided contrasts.

    He was in a Pasay City shantytown where a young son had been killed collaterally with his father at the nadir of Duterte’s drug war. He joined the “night crawlers,” the night shift of freelance Filipino photographers documenting EJKs right on the scene of death squad killings. He also sourced opinions from academics, one an Ateneo de Davao University political science professor who spoke in essentialist reductionist language to generalize how jokes are important to Bisayan people, acquitting Duterte as “a playful old guy.” Miller tells the excoriating story as is, quoting presidential son Paolo Duterte in his very public tiff with his daughter: ‘FIX YOUR FU___NG LIFE FIRST before I will stop “fu___ng up” your Christmas every year.’ There is no sugar coating.

    But there is one place in Davao city that alone holds the Duterte secret, Miller writes. This is the killing field known as the Laud Quarry. It is not just an execution site but also a burial site. What secrets of the macabre were in those graves at Laud Quarry? In 2005, a man named Edgar Avasola testified before a Manila court that he helped bury six bodies at the Quarry. That was the first opening of the Pandora’s box of skeletons, prompting visits from UN special rapporteur Philip Alston, international human rights organizations, and a US embassy WikiLeaks document that Miller had accessed. By March 2009, nearly 50 witnesses testified before the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) for 206 deaths attributable to the Davao Death Squad. Some of these witnesses pointed to the abandoned limestone quarry as the site of execution and burial of those summarily killed. The CHR and PNP crime forensics exhumed a total of 4,000 dismembered human bones discovered at all three sites specified by Avasola.

    In 2017, the Laud Quarry was also corroborated by retired police officer and DDS hitman-turned-whistleblower Arturo Lasca?as, confirming it as the execution ground and that he could point to burial sites. Lasca?as enumerated his victims: “an entire family killed with a silenced .22 calibre pistol: a suspected kidnapper, his Muslim-convert wife (who was seven months pregnant), their four-year-old son, her 70-year-old father, an elderly male relative, and the family maid. Having abducted them from a neighboring town, the DDS had held them for hours in a building inside the quarry before their executions. The personal belongings were removed and burned, including the wife’s Koran,” he testified.

    Miller is not the first to expose the Laud Quarry to the world. Witness testimonies that Leila de Lima gathered in the Davao city hearings she conducted in 2009 for the CHR had unmasked the secret execution site, later retold in the Senate by whistleblowers Lasca?as and Edgar Matobato.

    For the exhumations, de Lima and a joint CHR-PNP task force were also armed with a search warrant to enter the Laud Quarry and the three caves on Langub Hill. Unknown to de Lima, her life would have ended there. In September 2016, Matobato testified in the senate that they were positioned for an ambush when she entered the cave. “We waited for you. We were in an ambush position.” De Lima did not reach the site inside the cave where the assailants were lying in wait. The assassination was foiled. Miller narrates: “The startled senator asked the hitman who had ordered her assassination. Matobato responded matter-of-factly: ‘It was Mayor Duterte, Ma’am.” For the record, Miller was one of the very select few able to interview Matobato in his hideout after his senate testimonies.

    Miller depicts the opposite ends of Duterte’s temperament spectrum. Law classmate and fraternity brother Vitaliano Aguirre, who lawyered for quarry owner Bienvenido Laud by successfully juggling with the courts to keep the CHR away from the quarry (the court later revoked the search warrant), was rewarded with a cabinet portfolio. Miller hits the apposite perspective: –Duterte used his presidency as payback time against Leila de Lima for “humiliating him in his own city, in front of his own people,”

    The Laud Quarry caper is only one chapter of the Miller book, but is one of its high points of research and fieldwork that laid bare the Duterte template for vengeance and murder. It is the cogwheel around which the spokes of Dutertismo revolve. It clears and yet it confounds. Is it really a war against drugs? Why did Duterte release the 10 Chinese nationals arrested in the city whose shabu lab was busted, yet would swagger with an order to the armed forces to shoot female NPA warriors in the vagina? Why did the Davao city hall website claim the city was “almost a Utopian environment” even as it remains the “murder capital” of the Philippines, first among 15 cities with more than 1000 recorded murders committed between 2010 and 2015 and ranked second for rape? Miller poses the existential conundrum.

    .

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    Parre?o gives the context of the economic status of the Vicente-Soledad Duterte family, but leaves the rest to reader discretion. Neither of the couple came from elite families but from working class backgrounds. The cue to their economic rise appears to coincide with Vicente’s term as governor. Soledad retired as public school teacher in 1962 and established the Mindanao Institute for Radio Electronics, a technical school for radio mechanics. The capital did not come from her. On the third year, her business partners who infused the capital could no longer sustain supporting the school. Somehow, she was then able to shift to logging, a capital-intensive enterprise that involves trucks, machines, manpower, and a tugboat to haul the logs to port. She diversified into processing via a sawmill that produced 21,000 board feet of lumber per day, only a year after her radio school had floundered. When not hauling logs, the tugboat was used for deep-sea fishing. She also opened an ice plant.

    The family then bought a 400-square-meter residential property in Juna subdivision and a Chevrolet Impala to augment the trusty Willy’s Jeep that served as the family car for years before Vicente became governor. At this point, the reader is confronted with a curiosity: When was the young Rodrigo Duterte exposed to the politics of Vicente Duterte? Rodrigo relates to a former staffmember when he was vice mayor an incident with his father: “We were together in a car with his bodyguards and boxes full of money” as they were driving to a municipality.

    The history of the family’s politics was anything but reformist. The tendency for dynastism was already there: Soledad herself ran for vice mayor in 1967 when her husband was in the Marcos cabinet, although she later withdrew her candidacy. And while she is sometimes credited today for the anti-Marcos Yellow Friday Movement in Davao city in the 1980s, she had later called for Cory Aquino’s resignation. This was a family with the typical run-of-the-mill turncoat politics. When Rodrigo first ran for city mayor in 1988, it was the local Marcos loyalists group of Almendras that propped up his candidacy. A decade later, during a reelection run, he would coalesce with Joseph Estrada’s Laban ng Masang Pilipino.

    The 2001 elections became even more complicated as the Duterte family fissures finally burst in full force before the Davao city public. Brother Emmanuel opposed him for city mayor. Sister Jocelyn ran for city councilor in a rival party. She would later announce to media that her brother Rodrigo had hidden wealth. Emmanuel, in his rallies, would regale the public with the annulment case of Rodrigo and Elizabeth Duterte. In 2001, after she had secured her annulment, Zimmerman ran as a candidate for city councilor in an opposing party. The open sibling fights, the election rivalries where they would all gang up on Rodrigo, which the national electorate did not know in 2016, indicated that this was a dysfunctional family. The book’s family tree also shows that, save for the eldest Eleanor who remained unmarried, all the rest of the four siblings had failed marriages.

    Miller had a more expressive description of the two sisters. In an interview at a chic caf? in Bonifacio Global City, Jocelyn and her two bodyguards left Miller to foot the bill for the food they gobbled up (after calling the Duterte brand the “Calvin Klein of Davao city”). In his interview with Eleanor, the sister lashed out at the top of her lungs against De Lima and senator Antonio Trillanes, calling them embodiments of Satan, in “typical Digong derisive fashion.”

    In his introduction, Parre?o replies to questions on whether the book is pro- or anti-Duterte. “Be forewarned: it is neither,” and his thesis is immediately demolished by his own hand. He betrays that neutrality in the prologue when he relates how he and his group met Duterte after announcing his candidacy in late 2015 and they behaved like political supporters. Levito Baligod, the lawyer who had withdrawn as counsel for whistleblower Benhur Luy in the Janet Napoles pork barrel scam, was part of the group. Duterte told Baligod – “Sa akin ka, Atty. (You be in my senatorial slate).”

    Many of Parre?o’s accounts are not supported by sources. This line, for instance: “The governor’s son sometimes discussed with mayors, barrio captains and other local officials strictly confidential matters at a time when Rodrigo was 18 years old in the 1963 elections.” References in the endnotes are so few and far between that one is left to wonder where he got his information.

    After the testimony of the psychologist who examined Rodrigo Duterte in the annulment case filed by Zimmermann, Parre?o saves the unfavorable quotes by ending with anecdotes from Zimmermann praising her former husband. Jarring. This is not the “neither pro nor anti” presentation the author promised. Parre?o relates how Duterte buckled down to work as mayor by hiring contractual employees. The book was published in 2019, after the pre-2016 Commission on Audit report that red-flagged the Duterte city hall for 15,000 ghost employees. In fact, Matobato would testify in the Senate that he drew his salary as a ghost employee. Parre?o’s silence is palpable.

    One chapter is almost devoted entirely to Leoncio Evasco’s lionization of the so-called Duterte charisma, but with no opposing points of view. Meanwhile, Jose Calida was allowed to recount his legal prowess in arguing for the Marcos burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, the extensions of martial law in Mindanao, and the quo warranto case that removed Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, without a single contrasting interpretation. And yet Parre?o said he wanted to avoid “the trimmings from publicists” to “truthfully paint the man beyond what they read in the newspapers.”

    Parre?o’s problem is the failure of subjecting his sources to source criticism that could have saved him from simply accepting what they say hook, line and sinker. In today’s fake news lingo, source criticism is akin to fact checking. Does the source corroborate, contradict other sources? What was the historical context? For instance, Jesuit priests in the Soledad Duterte autobiography were named “Bechman Cupin, Consunje,” in contrast to archival sources that identified them as “Berchmans Cupin, Consunji.” Parre?o gives a detailed history of Soledad’s father, Eleno Fernandez, who had changed his name to Roa. But in one televised speech, Rodrigo Duterte said Soledad was not a Roa because her father was a naturalized Chinese surnamed Lam. In fact, the Chinese epitaphs for good fortune accompany the tombs of the grandparents in Davao city’s public Wireless Cemetery. Over the years, this writer and the American culture history scholar and Cebu history expert Michael Cullinane have pieced together the genealogy of the Roa clan of Cagayan de Oro, Cebu, and Manila, of which this writer serves as gatekeeper. Soledad Duterte’s father is not in the bloodline as he had used the name only for adoptive reasons. The author is therefore wrong to say (Cebu governor) Manuel Roa was “said to be related to Eleno Roa.”

    Miller is equally deficient on the Roa ancestry that he claims wholesale as “Maranao descended.” As the son of Roa cousins who had intermarried, I have the complete genealogy beginning from the 1700s and the origin of the family has been definitively established as Chinese based on numerous archival sources that Cullinane has pursued. Parre?o, indeed, quotes Cullinane on the Duterte origin in one footnote, and for which reason he should no longer have mentionedthat the name Duterte is “French-descended” as Cullinane had established its Chinese roots.

    Source criticism could also have been applied when using sources from blogs, which could have been written from highly interpretive perspectives. Parre?o used blog sites for Alejandro Almendras’s aunt Matea. He also referenced a blog site statement of the anti-EJK fighter Redemptorist priest Amado Picardal. But the priest tells me Parre?o never interviewed him.

    The Holy Cross Academy of Digos was not operated by the Benedictine Brothers, but by the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. Wrongly used were such places, names, and words as Cataluna (for Catalunan Grande), Bibong Medialdea (it is Bingbong), and Lex Taliones fraternity (it is Talionis, which means Law of Retaliation). I can concede to the possibility that these were typographical erros. But that is the problem with self-published books. It does not go through the rigors of scholarly publishing: perhaps no proof reading, if at all, no fact checking, no indexing (very important!). And worst is the absence of a blind referee system that subjects the work to a battery of questions, revisions, and more fact checks from independent scholars not known to the author.

    Reading the two bios makes a clean conclusion: Rodrigo Duterte, whom many had thought as an anti-corruption and good governance reformist, was voted in office for the wrong reasons. Miller proceeds from a framework: a curiosity at the collective Filipino insouciance over an iconoclastic dictator in the making and its emerging signs of distress on Philippine democracy. He does not discriminate among sources because he sieves the alt-facts from the real. Parre?o’s is written as a descriptive biography sans a critical lens. He posits it is up to the reader to make a verdict. That would have posed no problem had its sources been numerous, but the few sources it has are mostly sanitary. The effect on the reader is exactly how his blogger friend reviews the book: sympathy for Duterte. Parre?o falls under the category of a hagiography.

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