Garma’s time of reckoning
The hour of reckoning has come for Royina Garma. This week, a Mandaluyong court issued warrants of arrest against the former police colonel and trusted Duterte aide, as well as retired police officer Edilberto Leonardo, and three others on charges of murder and frustrated murder.
The five are accused of being behind the 2020 assassination of former Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) Board Secretary Wesley Barayuga. Garma was Barayuga’s boss as general manager of the PCSO from 2019 to 2022, appointed to that position by former President Rodrigo Duterte after her early retirement from the police force with the rank of police colonel.
From those once lofty posts, she is now facing interminable days in jail, because the charges against her are nonbailable. Once Garma is brought back to the country from Malaysia where she had flown reportedly to meet with representatives of the International Criminal Court (ICC), she would go straight to a cramped prison cell. There, she’d have more than enough time to contemplate, and perhaps rue, how her past life choices led to the current state of existence she’s enduring now.
In her heyday, Garma most likely thought the happy days would last forever. She had seemingly hit the jackpot, after all—or what counted for it in a country still ruled by powerful political warlords and kingpins: proximity to power.
Most trusted
As a long-time top cop in Davao City (and later in Cebu City), Garma became one of then Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s most trusted foot soldiers, such that, according to the affidavits filed at the ICC by self-confessed former Davao Death Squad (DDS) hitmen Edgar Matobato and Arturo Lascañas, Garma was among those with direct knowledge of and participation in the killing sprees carried out by the DDS in the name of Duterte’s “war on drugs.”
Per Lascañas, Garma—and Leonardo, now his co-accused in the Barayuga case—allegedly took direct orders from Duterte. In 2016, three Chinese drug lords detained at the Davao Prison and Penal Farm were summarily killed. The suspects were two prisoners who, in 2024, submitted affidavits to the House quad committee looking into extrajudicial killings that it was a cop named Arthur Narsolis who gave the order to kill the Chinese detainees.
Narsolis was not only a subordinate of Garma at that time; he was also her boyfriend. A jail officer would also tell the House that Garma had warned him against “interfering” in the operation to kill the three Chinese. More damningly, Garma allegedly told him it was part of Duterte’s drug war.
Lucrative post
In Cebu City where she became police chief beginning 2018, Garma’s name struck fear and loathing in impoverished communities targeted by the brutal antinarcotics campaign of her boss. A victim’s mother testified at the House how, at the wake of her son who was gunned down by cops in an alleged drug raid, Garma arrogantly barged in, angry that such a wake was being held for a drug suspect and demanding why “there is only one dead, when there are many of them” killed during the operation.
Garma had a full 10 years left to her career as a cop, but apparently, she was promised much bigger things, because she opted to retire early. Just days after chucking her uniform, she was installed as PCSO chief by Duterte. The state gambling regulator turned out to be a lucrative post not only for Garma, but also for her family. She hired seven family members to various PCSO positions and set up a party list led by relatives and associates that, according to House lawmakers, profited from its connection to Garma as PCSO chief.
But it was also here, at the peak of her power and influence propped up by the iron hand of a strongman, that Garma’s sense of impunity appeared to have made a fatal overreach. In July 2020, Barayuga was killed in a shocking vigilante-style shooting in Mandaluyong.
Bare minimum
Nothing came of the investigation into his killing until, four years later, yet another cop would disclose to the House that Garma and Leonardo had allegedly masterminded the assassination, to prevent Barayuga from delving into irregularities in the PCSO.
Confronted with the barrage of incriminating information against her, the once swaggering, untouchable Garma was reduced to a sputtering mess before lawmakers, at one point begging not to be detained for contempt because she supposedly needed to take care of a sick daughter at home—the one she had previously placed in the PCSO’s payroll as a “confidential agent.”
Now that the moment of reckoning has come for Garma, she must make amends and pay back for her actions on two nonnegotiable fronts: one, by serving time in prison if she is found guilty of Barayuga’s murder; and two, by testifying at the ICC, fully, and without dissembling, about the extent of the mass killings done by the DDS under Duterte’s command.
That is the bare minimum Royina Garma can do for the society and country she had helped brutalize.
