Right, just, and necessary

The reactions to the arrest of former president Rodrigo Duterte have given rise to all kinds of debates. To name just a few: Was it right to arrest him and send him to the Netherlands? What about his right-hand men, in particular, Sen. Ronald dela Rosa? What happens if he is voted mayor of Davao City in the elections this May?

I totally agree with the need for an International Criminal Court (ICC) trial but also fear that the legalities may obscure a more urgent and overdue need. Like the martial law era, the war on drugs must be remembered, its stories retold almost as an examination of our collective conscience.

Unlike the martial law period, we have far more documentation of the war on drugs. Just check “They are slaughtering us like animals,” which appeared in The New York Times on Dec. 7, 2016, with many reprints in other international publications.

Earlier, on Aug. 3, 2016, there was a report from Australian journalist Adam Harvey “‘Reign of Terror’: Fear in the Philippines as police embark on state-sanctioned ‘killing spree,’” noting that in the first month of Duterte’s term, more than 500 drug suspects had been “executed.”

While international coverage, including photos and videos, was bloody and explicit, we had sanitized versions in the Philippines. Embalmed photos, in a sense, while the texts looked like they were cut-and-paste from templates with accounts of raids and resistance from “drug suspects” leading to fatal shoot-outs. Only the names of the latest victims would change.

The carnage continued, peaking in 2018 with a spate of executions of young teenagers. Executions became “too” random, with collateral damage. On Dec. 28, 2016, while searching for a drug suspect, armed men fired shots at two shanties owned by a drug suspect’s parents in Caloocan City, killing five teenagers, a pregnant woman, and the fetus she was carrying.

The government admits that more than 6,000 were killed in these operations; human rights groups estimate the real figure may be closer to 30,000.

Duterte’s arrest reminds us of the heavy burden of history: we now face the responsibility to tell the stories of what happened, not just from 2016 to 2022, Duterte’s term, but during a “war on drugs” extending from Nov. 1, 2011 to March 16, 2019, mentioning the Davao Death Squads that Duterte created.

The Marcos dictatorship does not have as much documentary evidence as we do today, for on the war on drugs, over time, evidence of crimes is whitewashed. For example, local forensic experts working on the death certificates of the victims have found massive tampering, making the documents useless.

We will need as well to retrieve the stories of courage—the journalists’ stories (including Patricia Evangelista’s riveting book “Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country” published in 2023) as well as short news features, editorials, columns.

There is the story of the Pateros Women’s Patrol, urban poor women who organized themselves to patrol their streets to warn people who were still out at night. Their children played a role too, shouting out “bonnet, bonnet!” whenever they saw men on motorcycles with bonnets on their heads, something many of the hitmen used.

I found out about the Pateros women in one of the finest columns written by the Inquirer’s Rina Jimenez David, appearing on Christmas 2019. Rina said that Christmas was “The First Tokhang,” when King Herod ordered the execution of all boys born in the last two years because he feared the prophecies of a Messiah’s birth: Jesus. Matthew 2:18 describes that first “tokhang” and a grieving woman named Rachel inconsolable with her weeping, “since they were no more,” they being the slaughtered innocents.

The war on drugs happened and modern-day Herods fear that truth, including the ICC in its deep search to establish culpability.

Perhaps, too, we all fear something even greater: the responsibility of having to explain why we as a nation descended into such depths of depravity.

In the Catholic Mass, we proclaim worship as “right and just.” The Spanish version is “Es justo y necesario,” “justo,” and “necessario” being stronger than “right and just.” We excavate history’s recent events with as much urgency as older events because modern technologies pose greater threats to truth.

We teach and learn from history, for generations to come because “It is right, just, and necessary.”