Bolder by the day

In this July 21, 2016 file photo, President Rodrigo R. Duterte is welcomed by officers of the Western Mindanao Command during his arrival at Edwin Andrews Airbase in Zamboanga City. KIWI BULACLAC/PPD

On Monday, President Duterte will deliver his first State of the Nation Address with some very real numbers to back him. From July 1 to 19, or the first three weeks of his centerpiece campaign against crime and the scourge of illegal drugs, police reports say some 103,375 suspected drug users and pushers have surrendered, about 30,000 of them in Central Luzon alone; nearly 3,000 persons have been arrested; and 194 drug suspects have been killed in purported legitimate operations. Philippine National Police Director General Ronald de la Rosa has also said that “crimes against property and persons, like physical injuries, theft, robbery, rape, [car theft have] significantly gone down.” Doubtless, that assertion will come with its own supporting figures when the President once again delivers a ringing endorsement of his tough crime-fighting methods in his Sona.

But the picture will not be complete if the Duterte administration fails to acknowledge the other numbers that his war on crime has spawned: As of Thursday, according to the list compiled by this paper, 331 killings have been recorded since June 30, the President’s assumption to office, and 378 since May 10, when he won the presidency. Most of the dead have been identified, but: “To date, the list includes 90 dead who remain unidentified and 30 who are identified only by an alias.”

The manner of death is almost always one of three ways: killed by police in an alleged shoot-out, drug raid, or buy-bust operation; terminated by gunmen, many in broad daylight; or found dumped somewhere, the body wrapped in packing tape and adorned with a crude cardboard sign announcing the deceased’s alleged involvement in drugs.

Take the case of 20-year-old Jefferson Bunuan, who, police said, was killed along with his 18-year-old cousin Mark Anthony Bunuan in an operation that targeted a suspected drug pusher, Jomar “Totong” Manaois. Jefferson Bunuan’s relatives say he was merely sleeping over in Manaois’ place because there was no space at his own family’s house with a sister having just delivered a baby. The police insisted that Jefferson Bunuan was a lookout for Manaois, who shot it out with them—a claim that people who knew Jefferson find incredible because the young man was, by all accounts, a straightlaced criminology student on scholarship who dreamt of becoming a cop. Jefferson Bunuan died in a hail of police bullets.

Another young man, Edmund Moon, was shot dead along with his mother and three friends on Thursday night at the Malabon public cemetery. Before fleeing the scene, the gunmen tossed a sign branding the fatalities as “drug pushers.” But settlers in the area are not buying it, especially in the case of Moon, who was reportedly in the vicinity only because he was visiting his mother on his birthday. The police, which had an outpost merely 30 meters from the crime site, later produced a report that linked only two of the victims to drugs.

The killings have become bolder and more brazen by the day. Ateneo High School math teacher Emmanuel Pavia was inexplicably murdered by a lone gunman in Marikina. And in Makati, on busy JP Rizal Street, 27-year-old Lauren Kristel Rosales was shot dead aboard a jeepney by a fellow passenger. The gunman allegedly first alighted then circled back when the vehicle stopped for a red light, and fired at Rosales through the jeepney window.

The current atmosphere of unchecked violence is neither random nor incidental. It is the direct result, first of all, of the Duterte administration’s exhortation to the police to be ruthless against all criminal suspects—most of them identified only through crude, easily manipulated profiling at the barangay level—with the promise of carte blanche pardon for such actions in case the cops are haled to court. And because the top cop himself has said he is not keen on investigating vigilantism, believing it to be the work of members of drug syndicates liquidating one another, guns for hire have exploited the all-but-undeclared open season by going on a merry killing spree. The victims’ families, meanwhile, suffer the double blow of not only seeing loved ones murdered but also having to fend off knee-jerk suspicions of being linked to drugs—which is now the go-to rationale for summary killings.

The alarming body count deserves urgent, honest investigation—or many more innocent people will die in this willy-nilly “war.”