Death squad culture

ITS TONE of calibrated caution and its carefully reasoned argument must have resonated with many voters worried about next week’s elections, because “A vote for our future,” Ramon del Rosario Jr.’s commentary of May 3, was not only read hundreds of thousands of times online, but was shared—less than 48 hours after it was published—over 124,000 times on Facebook.

READ: A vote for our future

“As we consider our final choices, my appeal is that we pause to fully appreciate the implications of our vote. Whatever others may say, the choice of our next president does matter, very much.” Del Rosario, the chair of the Makati Business Club, began with a reference to Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s speech at a recent joint meeting of the MBC and the Management Association of the Philippines. He did NOT describe the controversy that the mayor’s rambling, lewd, and jokey remarks ignited, but he did ask voters to consider the import of Duterte’s own words, said on other occasions.

“As the mayor is the frontrunner, he deserves close scrutiny.  And the best way to know him is to go by what he has said throughout the campaign.” For instance: “The mayor said months ago that there would be a lot of fat fish in our waterways because he will dump there 100,000 suspected criminals whom he will order to be killed. He repeated before the business groups that his standing order to his law enforcers when suspected criminals resist arrest is to kill them—and he will arm the enforcers with presigned pardons so that human rights do-gooders cannot get in their way.”

On the same day Del Rosario’s commentary appeared in these pages, Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, SJ, of Cagayan de Oro issued an impassioned pastoral letter addressed “to the People of God in the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro and all persons of good will,” reminding Catholic voters that “as your pastors, we have the duty to remind voters to vote according to your conscience, and to make sure that your conscience is well formed and informed in accordance with the Gospel values that the Church proclaims.”

Much of the pastoral letter from one of the most senior and most-admired prelates in Mindanao can be understood as a warning against Duterte making good on his killer rhetoric. “We urge you to vote for candidates of conscience with a consistent pro-life ethic and reject candidates who promote the culture of death. The choice you make will determine whether we live in the light and progress as a nation or bring back the darkness that we have experienced and rejected in the past—an autocratic regime characterized by violence, human rights violations and corruption, and a reign of terror and greed.”

In particular, he cited the documentation prepared by Redemptorist priest Fr. Amado Picardal, which showed that the so-called Davao Death Squad had killed at least 1,424 persons in Davao City, including 132 children. Ledesma noted ruefully: “None of the perpetrators … have been apprehended. The prime responsibility for the inaction over these unsolved crimes must rest squarely on the mayor and local government officials. A city with such a high rate of unsolved killings cannot be called a city of peace and order.”

Yesterday, the Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference for Human Development issued a statement and released an advertisement, appealing “to our people to think deeply about their choices and discuss these with your families, your friends, your co-workers.” In particular, the BBC said: “Clearly, we cannot vote for anybody who is tainted with corruption or who belongs to a dynastic family. Neither can we vote for anyone who has done nothing to apprehend the perpetrators of more than 1,400 extrajudicial killings under his city administration.”

The issue, then, is clear. Granting, for the sake of argument, that the tough-talking Duterte has nothing to do at all with the death squad, then he must be held to account for his failure to stop it. We must all insist that Duterte, “who has done nothing to apprehend the perpetrators,” must shed light on his “prime responsibility for the inaction”—which threatens, once again, to bring back the darkness.