Watching Du30 at Senate triggers QC mother who lost 2 sons
Llore Pasco of Barangay Batasan Hills, Quezon City, found it insulting to hear former President Rodrigo Duterte not only defending his deadly war on drugs but also exuding pride in its results.
To Pasco, who counts her two sons among the thousands killed in the crackdown, the 79-year-old man who faced the Senate on Monday, where he again unloaded expletive-laden spiels about defending the country against criminals, did not show a bit of remorse ”because he sees the poor as mere animals.”
“He has no care, no heart for us,” she said. ”In his eyes we are useless, offering him no benefit. So he thinks it’s all right to just have the us killed.”
Speaking in a press conference in Wednesday, two days after Duterte’s historic appearance in a Senate inquiry revisiting his drug war, Pasco said she was particularly struck by an exchange between the ex-president and Sen. Risa Hontiveros.
Asked by Hontiveros whether whether the drug suspects who were killed — mostly in police raids conducted in shantytowns and with no formal charges filed against them — deserved their fate, Duterte said he would rather spend money on people in need than waste it on food for jail inmates.
Pasco faced the media also as a member of Rise Up for Life and Rights, a Church-backed alliance extending various forms of assistance to families left grieving by the drug war.
Crisanto and Juan Carlos
In the hope that Duterte would soon have his day of reckoning, Rise Up has been giving a voice for the likes of Pasco, who lost her sons Crisanto and Juan Carlos in May 2017.
The brothers first went missing for several days, until she saw a TV report saying they were killed in a police operation against ”robbery” suspects.
At the time, Crisanto was a 34-year-old security guard and Juan Carlos, a jobless bachelor at 31.
”They had a witness shown on TV accusing (my sons) of being robbers and that supposedly there were police officers who passed by and saw them (committing robbery), and that the victim cried for help,” Pasco recalled in an the Inquirer interview.
The supposed ”encounter” happened at the Arboretum or the forested area inside the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines.
According to the autopsy, both brothers were shot at least seven times, she added.
The mother would hear none of the robbery allegation. Instead, she offered another explanation why her sons became targets in the drug war.
‘Tokhang’ lists
Days before they were killed, she said, Crisanto and Juan Carlos came forward to have their names ”cleared” by the village government, which had been ordered come up with a list of known drug users or peddlers in the locality.
The compilation of such barangay ”watch lists” was one of the main features of the now-notorious ”Oplan Tokhang” of the Duterte presidency.
”Every barangay had informants who knew the drug users and pushers in the area. My sons were only small-time users but not pushers,” she said. ”They went to the barangays to clear their names.”
”We later found out that those listed by the barangay later disappeared and then turned up dead,” Pasco said.
On the day Duterte faced the lawmakers, Rise Up members gathered in what may be their most emotionally charged mass action yet, holding a rally outside the Senate building.
‘Let ICC come in’
“We, the families of those who were killed, are dismayed because until now we have yet to achieve justice,” she said. “We cannot file just cases against him here (in the country) because he has a lot of allies. That’s why we are asking to let the ICC (International Criminal Court) come in and investigate. Let’s see where this pride would take him.”
Rey Cortez, a member of the National Union of People’s Lawyers, said Rise Up families still had to rely their own resources to pursue criminal cases against the police over questionable antidrug operations. For any chance of a scoring a conviction, “they have to gather their own evidence, get their own forensic expert.”
To begin with, “it is difficult to get documents from the police itself, such as investigation and autopsy reports,” Cortez added. “Worse, the prosecutor assigned to the case [would sometimes] testify in defense of the police.”
He cited a case in Caloocan City where the family members of a slain drug suspect were asked to sign a “waiver” that would allow them to take the body home if they would agree not to pursue a case against the officers involved in the operation.
