Getting Away with Murder
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President Rodrigo Duterte (Source: Al-Jazeera)
Now, the focus of attention of the police and the military has clearly shifted to putting an end to the armed insurgency that has raged mainly in the Philippine countryside even as the war on drugs continues without let-up.
The national government has not only intensified search-and-destroy operations against rebels belonging to the New People's Army (NPA) in various parts of the country, but it also began a no less bloody campaign against those believed to be actively supporting the rebellion in both cities and rural areas.
In the process, reports of arbitrary arrests, human rights abuses, and outright killings of civilians by state security forces have also mounted, with critics bewailing what appears to be total disregard for the rule of law and due process guaranteed by the Constitution. There is very real fear that this dire situation is likely to continue for as long as President Duterte openly incites the police and the military to go hammer and tongs after suspected enemies of the state.
'Bloody Sunday'
The heightened campaign against the Maoist rebellion and its perceived allies and supporters in the urban areas took a more deadly turn when the police killed nine activists and arrested six others in the Calabarzon region (covering the provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon) on March 7.
Police killed 9 activists and arrested 6 people in the Calabarzon area last March 7, 2021 (Source: Rappler)
Among those killed was Emmanuel Asuncion, a known labor and multi-sectoral leader in Cavite province. He was the coordinator of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN-Cavite) and chaired the group known as Solidarity of Cavite Workers (SCW).
Another casualty was a certain Makmak, a member of San Isidro Kasiglahan, Kapatiran at Damayan para sa Kabuhayan, Katarungan at Kapayapaan (SIKKAD-K3), a legal organization that advocates housing rights in Kasiglahan Village, Rodriguez, Rizal.
Siblings Abner and Edward Esto were also members of SIKKAD-K3 and had earlier been red-tagged by the police and military.
Michael Dasigao was the president of SIKKAD-K3 who had assisted poor communities and handled concerns of local farmers in quarrying sites in the province.
Puroy dela Cruz and Randy “Pulong” dela Cruz were killed between 3 and 4 a.m. on May 7. Puroy and Pulong were both activists with the group Dumagat Sierra Madre, which advocated for the rights of indigenous peoples. The Dumagats are a major and semi-nomadic indigenous group in Calabarzon, estimated to number around 30,000.
Also among those killed were the couple Chai Lemita Evangelista and Ariel Evangelista. They were fisherfolk who worked as staffers with the Ugnayan ng Mamamayan Laban sa Pagwawasak ng Kalikasan at Kalupaan (UMALPAS KA) in Nasugbu, Batangas. The group is a peasant organization opposed to mining and land-grabbing.
The killing of the nine activists and the arrest of six others, dubbed "Bloody Sunday" by human rights groups, took place just two days after Duterte said the police and the military should "kill them all"—referring to members of the NPA, which has been waging an armed insurgency in the Philippines since 1968—and that they should simply ignore human rights.
Police version
The Philippine National Police (PNP) claimed those killed and others arrested on March 7 were members of the NPA, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
“They are indeed NPA members hiding behind the facade of being activists,” said PNP spokesperson Police Brig. Gen. Ildebrandi Usana, but he did not provide any evidence of his claim.
PNP spokesperson Police Brig. Gen. Ildebrandi Usana (Source: GMA Network)
He said the PNP had obtained 24 search warrants from the courts for the targets of their simultaneous raids. “The police just applied the law against them instead of fighting them. On the other hand, these NPA members wanted to shoot it out with our troops instead of surrendering."
Usana said that as far as the police were concerned, it did not matter whether they were communists or not but whether they violated the law, noting that the search warrants were for firearms and explosives.
Security officials' view
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana maintained that the President’s “shoot-to-kill” order was directed at communist rebels involved in armed struggle.
He concurred with National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. who said that the only way to handle armed rebels was to retaliate with force.
Esperon earlier said the President’s order was correct “because [communist rebels] are armed and it is unlikely you could even think of human rights then. We should think of how to defeat them.”
He maintained that “if you don’t shoot them first, you will get shot...So that order is just right in the name of peace, law and order.”
It was a massacre: Vice President Leni Robredo
But Vice President Leni Robredo had a totally different view. She described the March 7 killings as a “massacre” and called for an independent probe. She also urged members of the judiciary to impose safeguards when it comes to issuing search warrants.
Vice President Leni Robredo (Source: Business Mirror)
"They should make sure that those being given will not be used in order to kill. It won’t be used in abuse of power," she said, adding that "search warrants shouldn’t be issued easily" and that judges "should have personal knowledge and proper determination of the circumstances."
Lawmakers' stand
Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto was even more blunt when he called on the government to end the “dirty war” and “stop the death squads” to save democracy in the country. He said the prevailing “epidemic of unsolved killings” had rocked the people’s faith in the Philippine justice system, which was already “bleeding from a thousand wounds caused by assassins’ bullets.”
“Every time a lawyer is killed, a judge waylaid, an activist executed, a mayor ambushed, a slum teenager murdered, an agent of the state silenced, it strengthens the perception that justice is elusive and crime does pay,” he said.
Recto warned that the “mass erosion of faith” in the rule of law would “drive desperate people to take the law into their own hands,” and soon lead to the “privatization of justice” and a boom of the murder-for-hire industry. “Why would anyone still choose to sue, when a bullet can do the job faster?” he said. He said the government should not treat activists and critics as enemies because they were needed as watchdogs. “Life and liberty are precious. And activism is not terrorism,” he said.
Members of the Makabayan bloc in the House of Representatives led by Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate challenged the Duterte government to allow United Nations (UN) investigators to look into the series of killings of activists in the Philippines if it had “nothing to hide.”
Zarate said the PNP should also subject all the police officers involved in the “Bloody Sunday” killings to inquest proceedings, in accordance with its own rules pertaining to deaths during police operations. “This procedure will establish whether there is prima facie findings or none that the ones killed actually fought back,” he said.
The six Makabayan lawmakers together with Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman and Quezon City Rep. Jose Christopher Belmonte have filed a resolution calling for a congressional inquiry into the killing of the nine activists.
Protest against the “Bloody Sunday” massacre (Source: Philstar.com)
Lawyers' group speaks up
The Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP), meanwhile, urged the Supreme Court to review its rule allowing executive judges of regional trial courts (RTCs) in Manila and Quezon City to issue search warrants that could be enforced anywhere in the country.
A 2004 circular issued by the SC allows executive judges, or in their absence, vice-executive judges in Manila and Quezon City regional trial courts to issue search warrants that could be enforced anywhere in the country “in certain instances and provided that the legal requirements are met.”
According to IBP National President Domingo Cayosa, "especially for search warrants, maybe it is better if the regional trial court that has jurisdiction over the area, and not the one based in Manila, should provide it," he added.
According to reports, the search warrants for the March raids were issued by two Manila Regional Trial Courts (RTCs). Cayosa noted allegations that RTCs have become “warrant factories” for the police. He also said that in previous months, provincial courts had junked cases that were filed based on warrants issued by Metro Manila courts. The cases, he said, were junked because of lack of sufficient evidence and conflicting testimonies in requesting the warrants.
Cayosa also urged the SC to make the wearing of body cameras a requirement in serving search warrants, to deter police abuse. He added that body cameras will help secure evidence if the police will be accused of committing irregularities in serving the warrants.
"What happened was alarming because under the law, subjects of the search and arrest warrants should be alive after the operation. They are not death warrants, and police should only use reasonable force if ever there is resistance."
International condemnation
A spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said the agency was “appalled” by the “arbitrary killings” on March 7.
For its part, the EU Delegation to the Philippines expressed concern over the killings during the March 7 operation by the police backed by the military. “Reports on the use of excessive force against unarmed individuals and alleged irregularities in the law enforcement operations have raised concerns,” it said.
At the same time, the EU welcomed the government announcement that it would investigate the killings. It recalled the Duterte administration’s commitment to the Human Rights Council that it would ensure accountability for human rights violations and abuses in accordance with due process and in full compliance with its international human rights obligations.
Malacañang reaction
On March 12, Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said Philippine authorities must be given the chance to investigate the killings of the nine activists and promised that those found to have violated the law would be punished. “Impunity has no place in the Duterte administration and whoever violated the law would be held responsible and punished under the law,” Roque said.
Roque also asked the European Union (EU) to give the Philippines “a chance to discharge its obligation, to investigate, punish and prosecute those who may have breached our domestic laws...The truth has to be known, so let us give the Department of Justice the chance to conduct a fair investigation.”
All-out war on the Philippine Left
The March 7 "Bloody Sunday" killings appear to be part and parcel of the Duterte administration's all-out drive to put an end to the armed rebellion that has raged mainly in the Philippine countryside since 1968.
When Duterte assumed office in 2016, he extended an olive branch to the CPP and resumed the stalled formal peace talks with its political arm, National Democratic Front (NDF). To sweeten the deal, he even appointed a few personalities identified with the legal Left to several Cabinet-level positions.
But the talks soon bogged down and were eventually scuttled as both sides failed to agree on a bilateral ceasefire while formal peace talks in the Netherlands brokered by Norway were ongoing.
With the breakdown of the peace process with the CPP-NPA-NDF, Duterte took a hardline stance and ordered the military and the police to launch all-out war against the NPA.
Shortly afterwards, Duterte created the National Task Force on Ending the Communist Local Armed Conflict (NTF-ECLAC) tasked with implementing what has been called the "whole-of-nation" approach to out a stop to Asia's only remaining Maoist insurgency.
“Recto warned that the “mass erosion of faith” in the rule of law would “drive desperate people to take the law into their own hands,” and soon lead to the “privatization of justice” and a boom of the murder-for-hire industry.”
This approach, as its name suggests, calls for a coordinated effort by the entire government to put a definite end to armed conflict that has already exacted a heavy toll on human lives on both sides and set back efforts to accelerate socio-economic development.
The approach seeks to combine "search-and-destroy" and "take-no-prisoners" military and police operations against the NPA rebels and their mass base with economic development initiatives on the ground, especially in areas considered as heavily influenced by the NPA and its political infrastructure.
But the whole-of-nation approach implemented by the NTF-ECLAC also targets groups they consider as legal fronts of the CPP-NPA-NDF, such as the party-list groups now represented in Congress, as well as various groups of farmers, labor, fisherfolk, youth and students, indigenous peoples, and urban poor, among others.
The "Bloody Sunday" killings in Southern Luzon represent a dangerously heightened level of the Duterte administration's scorched-earth policy against what they see as the legal or the above-ground apparatus of the CPP-NPA-NDF.
Recent cases of killings by the police and the military of suspected leaders of the communist movement as well as leaders and members of legal organizations believed to be allied with the underground Left tell us very clearly that the Duterte administration is determined to decimate the CPP-NPA-NDF before its term office ends in 2022.
The crackdown on both the legal and underground Left has been taking place in the three main islands of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.
Of late, even lawyers representing clients identified as members and supporters of organizations of the legal Left have been targeted for assassination, with few cases, if any, ever reaching the courts.
Pushback against authoritarianism
All hope is not lost, however. After a police officer in Calbayog City in central Visayas asked a local court for a list of lawyers representing alleged communist fronts, he was ordered immediately relieved from his post by the PNP officer-in-charge Lt. Gen. Guillermo Eleazar.
Earlier, the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) had said the request for the list of lawyers “is unbecoming of a police officer” and “transcends all legal and statutory basis.”
Rizal 2nd District Rep. Fidel Nograles, a lawyer, said police “have no business meddling with affairs of the court...Last I checked, lawyering is not a crime, regardless of who you represent. Lawyers must not be targeted for upholding constitutionally and universally guaranteed rights.”
Rizal 2nd District Rep. Fidel Nograles (Source: facebook)
Nograles, the vice-chairperson of the House Committee on Justice, also warned heads of law enforcement agencies not to allow such “requests” to be standard procedure: “I urge our DILG and PNP leadership to quickly dispel this mistaken notion that police stations have the authority to ask for such lists...We cannot condone this overreach by the Calbayog City police, which undermines the administration of justice through intimidation, hidden behind the veil of courtesy and pseudo-legality...In a climate where lawyers are put to the sword regularly without anyone being punished, it sends a message that those who choose to defend those who are out of favor will be under close watch simply for upholding their oaths as lawyers.”
When will the climate of impunity end?
Armed with a more draconian Anti-Terrorism Law, the Duterte administration wants the "whole-of-nation" approach to armed rebellion and terrorism to produce salutary results by the time it ends its term more than a year from now, in June 2022.
But the question that begs for a clear answer is whether the State can achieve its goal of achieving peace and development in the years ahead by launching all-out war against armed rebels and their supporters and sympathizers and in the process, discarding the rule of law and due process that are hallmarks of democratic governance.
Indeed, it should be asked: if the President himself has time and again ordered the police and the military to "shoot to kill" all those who create trouble for his administration, won't this merely serve to create more killing fields in this country, perpetuate the climate of impunity that has kept from state actors from prosecution for gross human rights violations and murder most foul, and lead us deep into yet another dark era for Philippine democracy?
Ernesto M. Hilario
Ernesto M. Hilario studied Political Science at the University of the Philippines and has worked for various government agencies, NGOs and mainstream media since 1978. He writes a regular column for the Manila Standard broadsheet and also works as a freelance writer-editor.
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