PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte’s critics are having a fiesta over his jocose statement that his only fault is the beaten-to-the-pulp issue of extra-judicial-killing. It all started when the New York-based Human Rights Watch published a book entitled “You Can Die Anytime” prompting the Commission on Human Rights chaired by Leila De Lima to conduct a probe on alleged EJK victims in Davao City. This was in April 2009 a few months before elections. The undefeated Duterte and his daughter Inday Sara is emerging to be a strong political leader like his father.
Davao then was a bastion of drug syndicates that crept into the city after the CPP/NPA lost control of the urban center following a spontaneous peoples uprising dubbed “alsa masa.” Rodrigo Duterte a newly elected Mayor had to deal with the scourge of drugs, kidnap for ransom, car-napping and other vicious criminal syndicates. The most tenacious criminals however are the members of drug syndicates that peddled drugs even in the confines of school campuses.
Duterte himself led a composite team that raided a suspected shabu laboratory resulting in the death on undocumented Chinese nationals that ran the joint. CHR and HRW accounts skirted this story in what I can only surmise as their apprehension that it would diminish the credibility of their assertion that the problems of illegal drugs was not that serious and that those killed were victims of police brutalities and the Davao Death Squad which they said was organized by the Mayor.
But to Davao City residents most especially, the drug syndicates had caused nightmares as crimes related to drug addiction was getting to be worse than the crimes perpetrated by the Communist hit squads - the “Sparrows”. The intensified police operation against drug dealers was intensified. The most bloody event happened when PDEA assigned Col. Efren Alquizar in the region. In a bizarre strategy, he came up with a list of suspects which was made available to media during a presscon at downtown Mandaya Hotel.
What followed was a series of killings of drug suspects some by legitimate police operations and, as the intelligence community later bared, were the handiwork of drug lords themselves to clean the link that would lead to their identities. By some accounts about 250 plus suspected drug pushers were killed. All these were accounted for by the police and PDEA Chief Colonel Alquizar who himself was later killed by a sniper’s bullet believed to be from the drug syndicates.
Davao City was a crime capital in the country when it was under the communist control in the early 1980’s and when criminal syndicates supplanted them. This was the scenario that Mayor Duterte was confronted with when he became Mayor. Many prominent families had left Davao and opted to live in Manila or abroad. Duterte scored big against organised crime - robbery with rape, kidnap for ransom (KFR) and car-napping.
The campaign against drugs syndicates however proved to be daunting. Shabu supplies were brought to Davao City without letup. The source was later discovered to have come from Lanao and somewhere in Maguindanao towns adjacent to Lanao. Duterte personally brought his war against drugs all the way to one of the towns there following a big catch of shabu shipment loaded on board an ambulance traced later to the said municipality. From what I learned he warned the town mayor to stop the illicit activity otherwise something more serious could happen.
Hot on the trail of criminals Duterte figured too in the assault of the police detention center where the notorious Pogoy gang were detained but later raped a visiting Australian missionary. Earlier the Mayor, who was appointed by then Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as Chairman of the Regional Development Council, offered himself as hostage to the Pogoy gang which bolted the Davao Penal Colony in lieu of members of the visiting families which they held captive during their attempted escape. The Mayor then sweet-talked them to proceed to Davao City Hall for him to negotiate their demands with higher authorities. The gang agreed ending the tense situation with their incarceration at the Davao City Police detention center.
Weeks after the gang was committed to the detention center, Pogoy attempted another escape try again holding hostage and raping visiting Australian missionary and her companions. They had grabbed several weapons from the prison guards and later engaged responding policemen to a firefight. Mayor Duterte rushed to the scene and joined the police force to neutralise the armed convicts.
The accounts of the incidents involving the bloody shabu laboratory raid and the assault of the police detention cell that wiped out the members of Pogoy’s gang were widely publicised and the Mayor Duterte himself openly admitted his participation in these operations.