Duterte’s biggest sin

The Senate hearing held last week confirmed what we have known all along. Former president Rodrigo Duterte and his cabal of police executioners were responsible for the mass murder of thousands of our fellow countrymen during his reign of terror. He unashamedly claimed responsibility for it, pointed to his former police chiefs as his death squad leaders, and spewed profanities to silence his critics.

No measure of value can ever quantify the worth of each life lost. How can we place a price on the lifetime grief of every parent who lost a child, and of every child who lost a parent? How can we quantify the damage done to a child who will grow up amputated of one parental limb?

The cold-blooded killing of thousands of our countrymen by Duterte and his death squad is the biggest crime committed by any Filipino, against fellow Filipinos, and on Philippine soil. However, the killings may not be the biggest sin of Duterte, because he is responsible for an even worse form of depravity.

Duterte had the whole country hypnotized when he sounded off the battle cry that all drug personalities are maniacal rapists, brutal murderers, and vicious thieves. It didn’t matter if a drug suspect has no history of violence, and who only relied on drugs to get by with back-breaking work or as a cheap form of leisure. Without exception, every drug personality was pigeonholed into the same box that contained the worse kind of drug offenders.

To Duterte, there was only a single type of drug personality—brutal killer, sexual pervert, and violent robber. By brainwashing the entire nation with such indiscriminate guilty verdict, he hoodwinked the whole country into believing that all drug personalities deserved to be extrajudicially killed because they are no longer human beings but savage animals.

Duterte systematized the killing of drug suspects. He created his own drug list, and his police force maintained a drug list in every community. He gave license to the police to extrajudicially kill drug suspects by supposedly goading the latter “to fight back.” Duterte declared that “If Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have …,” then he pointed to himself. “Hitler massacred three million Jews … there’s three million drug addicts … I’d be happy to slaughter them,” he added.

By indoctrinating the Filipino people into believing that killing is a justified and legitimate solution to the drug problem, Duterte destroyed the most fundamental moral standard not only of our country but of the whole human race—that killing is unlawful because every person has the right to life. In fact, our country has been at the world’s forefront in upholding this most basic moral standard—more advanced even than the United States—because we abolished the death penalty.

At the height of Duterte’s bloody drug war in 2017, the Center for International Law (CenterLaw), a group of human rights lawyers which I serve as chairperson, filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking protection for all the residents of 26 barangays in San Andres Bukid, Manila—one of the most depressed communities in our country—where killings of drug suspects were rampant.

During oral arguments in the high court, I argued that the right to life is one of the most hard-fought rights that had been won for our people in our history. It’s a priceless bequest paid for with the blood of our ancestors and heroes who fought for our people’s right to life against Spain, the United States, Japan, and the Marcos Sr. dictatorship. It is a hallowed right enshrined in our Constitution’s bill of rights. All those battles to assert our people’s right to life were completely laid to waste by Duterte when he institutionalized killing as state policy.

With the most vital moral standard of all—killing is unacceptable—thrown out the window, all other forms of our moral standards were also tossed aside. Duterte made it fashionable to spew vulgar language in public. He degraded women without qualms. He bamboozled any outcry of opposition with threats. He dismissed the Constitution as a mere “toilet paper,” ridiculed the Catholic Church as “full of shit,” and even called God “stupid.”

It’s true that our country’s moral standards are seriously dysfunctional, because our norms perfectly fit the hypocrisy described by writer Anatole France when he said: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” It’s also true that our display of civility, religiosity, and good manners are stained by the snobbery and callousness of the haves against the have-nots.

But the solution to all these imperfections is not to throw away the little moral standards that we have, but to work on improving and purifying them. To throw away whatever imperfect moral standards that we have, as Duterte did, is to drag the country back to the Dark Ages.

The biggest sin of Rodrigo Duterte is his destruction of our country’s moral compass.

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