Shepherding in the killing season (1)

This is a short version of the piece I wrote for Global Sisters Report, a project of the National Catholic Reporter. I have changed the title and deleted explanatory portions meant for foreign readers. The complete version with photographs is in globalsistersreport.org. I am sharing the piece because of the still rising spate of killings in President Duterte’s war on drugs that targets mainly the poor and kills with impunity even the young and innocent.

After emerging from a meeting with six drug users, Sr. Maria Juanita “Nenet” Daño heaves a small sigh of relief that perhaps these men will not meet a bloody end like dozens of others in the San Andres Bukid slum area in Manila, where she works. They have come forward to undergo counseling, hoping to change their ways and avoid becoming victims in the government’s ongoing antidrug war.

Still, the Good Shepherd Sister sees danger ahead for the confessed drug users because their names are on the police list. This means they are marked men, targets in massive police operations called “Oplan Tokhang” which have been in force since Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took office in July 2016.

“They are afraid they’d get killed,” Daño said of her six clients, ages 25 to 47. “They also responded to the call of the barangay head, a woman, to make the barangay drug-free.”

Depending on who is counting, the antidrug war has claimed from 2,000 to 7,000 lives (recent count: 12,000 plus), both in police operations and vigilante-style or extrajudicial killings, carried out without due process. Daily news reports carry incidents of summary execution whose perpetrators are unidentified. The killers often leave a note that the death is drug-related.

On the night of July 9, about five kilometers from Daño’s area, a man was killed in front of the Pope Pius XII Catholic Center where the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) had just finished their meeting and election of a new president for 2018 and 2019. Daño and her group of lay partners had also just ended their prayer vigil there.

Archbishop Socrates Villegas, the president of the CBCP, reacted swiftly to the recent killing: “We cannot be reconciled with this situation. Silence in the face of this horrendous deed is complicity,” he said in a Facebook post that was picked up by the media. “Let the public outcry reach all concerned, for there must be an outcry. To us all is addressed that voice from heaven: ‘The blood of the brother you have slain calls out from the earth.’”

Mr. Duterte had vowed to end the drug menace in the country and exterminate those involved in it—whatever it took. Now, drug suspects can end up as victims of the extrajudicial killings, the perpetrators of which are unknown and operate with impunity. Innocent persons, children among them, have ended up as “collateral damage.”

As early as August 2016, the Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines (AMRSP) had issued a strong statement denouncing the killings. The CBCP also issued a pastoral letter dated Jan. 30, 2017, against the “reign of terror” sweeping poor areas. On July 14, the AMRSP, in their Joint Biennial Convention Statement, expressed “solidarity with victims of human rights violations and their families, especially the victims of extrajudicial killings.”

Mr. Duterte has been hitting back harshly at human rights groups, both national and international, and the churches as well, that have criticized his drug war.

Daño, a licensed social worker, has been doing outreach work since 2011 in San Andres Bukid, said to be the second most populous area in the Manila Archdiocese. She had spent eight years as missionary in Senegal, returning to the Philippines in 2011. San Andres Bukid is a sea of patchwork houses and lean-tos made of light materials, crisscrossed by a web of narrow alleys. It is composed of 26 barangays, 11 of them headed by elected women. (More next week)

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Catch a special showing of Peta’s  “A Game of Trolls” on Sept. 2 at 3 p.m. at the Peta Theater, Eymard Street, Quezon City. Peta is one of the six recipients of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards to be honored today in ceremonies at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

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