Threats

I can’t let it pass without comment. That is Rodrigo Duterte demanding to know: “Is there a law preventing a public official from threatening criminals? My threat is only against criminals, not against innocent civilians.”

I heard this straight from the horse’s mouth, or ass, on TV. This was after Duterte asked for Leila de Lima’s head—metaphorically speaking, though you never really know with Duterte where metaphorical ends and literal begins—on the ground that she had been remiss in her duties. Specifically, that she has to date not arrested one Davidson Bangayan, alias David Tan, the country’s biggest rice smuggler. He had already exposed Tan before the world, Duterte said, Tan and Bangayan were one and the same. They had the same face, the same address, the same bank accounts. How come he remained free?

If the Department of Justice wouldn’t do anything about it, he said, he would. He would kill the rice smugglers in Davao City.

Which got him the ire of his other favorite tormentor, Human Rights Chair Etta Rosales, who said he himself and not anybody else could be arrested for saying things like that. Which was what prompted him to demand to know what law prevented him from threatening criminals.

First off, a couple things.

One, does Duterte know a thing or two about cleaning up a city? Yes. His constituents seem to think so and have given him and his daughter the keys to the city for many years now. They have been mayor of the place alternately for as long as Davaoeños can remember and look nowhere near to being dislodged in the near future. For reasons that do not owe merely to people being scared of him, they owe as well to his constituents having great respect for him. He is not an Ampatuan by any means. My Davaoeño friends tell he may even be loved by some of his constituents who are thankful for the way he has reduced criminality in the place.

Two, do we want smuggling stopped? Yes. Rice may seem a lot more benign compared to guns, drugs and people, but it is not when you realize, or buy Duterte’s contention, that the smuggling of it costs the government P7 billion a year. Again that may mean nothing if, as most Filipinos do, you think that that’s just government’s loss, not ours. But not if you realize that that is a fortune that really ought to go to us, the taxpayers, in goods and services. Such as roads, bridges and, well, rice. Quite apart from things like the rehabilitation of Tacloban.

Does this give Duterte the right to say the things he does? Does this give him the right to act the way he does?

No.

Demanding that the justice secretary resign because she hasn’t yet done what one has told her to do is silly. However compelling the task. In this particular case, De Lima has not exactly been twiddling her thumbs, she has earned her reputation as being one of the Furies, along with Commission on Audit chief Grace Tan and Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, hounding the wicked to the ends of the earth. It’s all a

matter of priorities, and Duterte is not in a position to dictate priorities. He is not the president, he is the mayor of Davao, and however sprawling Davao is, it’s still just a small city compared to the nation, and even at that compared to Metro Manila. Quite incidentally, Alfredo Lim, Duterte’s look-alike, or sound-alike, or act-alike, shows what happens when Dirty Harrys run the show: They only succeed in making things dirty.

More than that, there’s his question: Is there a law that prevents him from threatening criminals?

But of course there is.

You don’t know where to begin to appreciate the startling perversity of that question. At the very least, rice smuggling is not rape or murder. On the ground of the relative lightness of the

offense alone, proposing that the offender be punished by death is mind-boggling. The infinitely bigger crime is not rice smuggling, it is proposing—and carrying out—the murder of rice smugglers. Because it is murder any way you slice it. Even Ferdinand Marcos confined his executions to one presumed big-time drug-dealer, a Filipino of Chinese origin, to stack up the cards against him. And he did it only once.

Duterte’s threat is all of a piece with offering P4 million for the head of a suspect who has eluded him, with an additional P1 million if that very literal head is separated from its body and packed in ice. It’s all of a piece with suspected car thieves being rubbed out when accosted in checkpoints in his favorite city.

At the very most, to say that you are threatening only criminals—and with nothing less than death—and not so innocent civilians is to presume to know who the criminals and who the innocent civilians are. It is to be judge, jury, and executioner. It is to invest yourself with omniscience. It is to know, like the hero of an action movie, the evil men, the people who are  halang  ang  kaluluwa, on the basis of which he can defy the rules and become the one-man savior of an oppressed community.

Frankly, I don’t know why Duterte stops at calling for the resignation of the justice secretary. I don’t know why he doesn’t go on to ask for the abolition of the justice department itself, or indeed the courts.

I grant the justice system is the most deeply flawed thing in this country. I grant that if you are rich and powerful here, you are almost beyond the pale of the law. But it’s as Churchill said about democracy: It’s a bad system, except that everything else is worse. Why should the right to threaten “only criminals and not innocent civilians” lie only with Duterte, why not with every tinhorn mayor who presumes himself a godsend to law and order? Why not with the Ampatuans?

There are infinitely worse threats than criminality. Tyranny is one of them. Madness is one of them.

Duterte is one of them.