Fear of killing fields sparked by Duterte claims

CANBERRA—President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s plan to reinstate the death penalty has set his administration  on a collision course with Vice President-elect Leni Robredo, as well as with the politically  influential Catholic Church.

It has also sparked an early realignment of political forces, foreshadowing a turbulent transition. Duterte takes office on June 30 amid growing criticism of his impulsive and authoritarian tendencies. The issue of the reinstatement of capital punishment has become the focus of public debate with just days to go before his inauguration.

Duterte has run into a storm of controversies not only over the death penalty but also over two separate inaugurations for him and for Robredo, who appears to have become a pain in the neck and who is being marginalized by him from the center of power—Malacañang. Robredo ran for the vice presidency on the ticket of the Aquino administration’s Liberal Party, and narrowly won over Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. Duterte is wary of offering Robredo a portfolio in his Cabinet because he is friends with Bongbong.

Robredo has taken issue with Duterte on the question of the death penalty. She told reporters in Naga City last week that reinstating capital punishment was not the solution to the high crime rate. “I have been very vocal about this [and] I will continuously voice my opposition to its imposition even though it will be Congress that will decide whether or not to bring it back,” she said. She does not believe that the death penalty will be a deterrent to heinous crime, citing the experiences under the Marcos and

Ramos administrations.

After the execution of a number of death convicts by lethal injection in 1999-2000, the Philippines abolished capital punishment. Duterte wants its reinstatement for drug trafficking, rape, murder, kidnapping for ransom, and other grievous offenses.

The Catholic hierarchy has denounced Duterte’s stand on the matter and said that the Church’s position is not based on popularity “but on simple moral principles.” In a statement, Fr. Lito Jopson, head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ Office of Communications, said: “…We do not have the right to decide who should live or die.”

Despite these injunctions from the Church, Duterte has stoutly defended the extrajudicial executions carried out by his cohorts in Davao City, which he had run with a mailed fist as its mayor for 23 years.

The New York Times (May 12, 2016) reported that for years, human rights groups had called for an investigation into whether Duterte was complicit in the killing of hundreds of people in Davao City since the 1980s by what they described as government-sanctioned death squads.

According to the New York Times, the Davao police say they have found no evidence that such groups exist. But investigations by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights uncovered evidence that they do exist and that police and other government officials had been involved in the killings. The victims, the investigations found, included children, crime suspects, and, in some cases, people who had been mistaken for someone else.

While Duterte has denied any direct knowledge of the alleged death squads, he has long called for the killing of criminals as a means of addressing the Philippines’ severe crime problem. In 2009, he said suspected criminals were “a legitimate target of assassination.”

During the election campaign in May, says the New York Times, Duterte issued “a running barrage of murderous boasts” in which he claimed to have personally killed armed criminals while he was mayor, though no evidence has emerged to support those stories. Asked to respond to a report that he had killed 700 people, he replied, “No, its not 700, but 1,700.” He said that if elected president, he would deploy the police and military in an all-out assault on criminal gangs.

“It is  going to be bloody,” he told a business group in April. “I will use the military and law enforcers,  whom I would task for a job to do. I will simply say, ‘Kill them all and end the problem.’”

The claims may strike some as outlandish, but the New York Times reports that the evidence on killings during Duterte’s watch as mayor of Davao City has led to fears of “a nationwide explosion of extrajudicial killings during his presidency.”

Amando Doronila was a regular columnist of the Inquirer   from 1994 to May 2016.