POINT OF REFLECTION

March 30, 2025 Opinion

As former president Rodrigo Duterte remains in incarceration in the Hague, Netherlands, awaiting trial for allegations he committed crimes against humanity one wonders whether he would now have sufficient opportunity to ponder the ramifications of his actions
both as mayor of Davao City (2013-2016) and president of the Republic (2016-2022) when his so called war on drugs was at its full height.
Tatay Digong as he is fondly called in his bailiwick in Davao must be given credit for at least trying to stem the flow of illegal drugs in the
Philippines.

A crusade that was both brutal and bloody that resulted in the deaths and murder of thousands of Filipinos, in his hubris he even bragged that he will end the drug menace in just a couple of months once he became the president only to backtrack a little later and admit, after the passage of some years, that the drug problem is still around, which obviously means that he was not able to get rid of illegal drugs in the country. So now that he is alone in his cell in the Hague the former president can finally come to the realization that for all his best efforts he actually failed in his mission to stamped out illegal drugs in the Philippines.

But what his drug war produced as a result is that his nine year campaign successfully terminated the lives of thousands of people who are
criminals, addicts and pushers who were killed extra judicially, meaning without due process as provided by law. In other words for several years as a mayor and president, this country had a leader that organized and directed the largest vigilante group that executed Filipino people without the benefit of the courts of the law. That is why all the killings attributed to the war on drugs of the former
president was called extra judicial because it never underwent the process of law.

The majority of the Filipinos then who might have initially felt sick about the drug situation in the country wholeheartedly voted for a
leader whose mantra was “kill,kill,kill” and who cursed and voiced expletives as he encouraged authorities to exterminate with extreme
prejudice those suspected to be involved in drugs and other criminal activities. But as a point of reflection those who voted for Duterte and who have now become his ardent supporters should ask themselves how in the world during the entirety of the drug war the majority of
those killed were Filipinos and not some foreigner, say Chinese nationals who are involved in the illegal drug trade?

Aren’t there a lot of those Chinese nationals who are imprisoned in jail with lengthy sentences and who are convicted because they are deemed as the drug lords? If reports are true, these Chinese drug lords even while languishing in prison were able to continue their nefarious drug trade. If Duterte then was hell bent on ending the spread of illegal drugs, such as shabu, then he should have started with all of those Chinese drug lords who were already in jail during his administration or were operating in society peddling their illegal wares.
During his presidency he could even have re-instituted the death penalty through in electrocuting those convicted big time drug lords to once and for all end their criminal lives.

These are drug personalities who are already in jail after being convicted by the courts for drug crimes. These drug convicts are usually big
time peddlers and distributors of illegal drugs. Why then did former president Duterte hesitate to wipe out these drug convicts and their whole lot from the face of the earth while allowing his vigilante groups in killing low level or street level drug addicts and pushers by the
thousands. If former president Duterte began his war on drugs inside the jails and prisons around the country and directed the authorities to silently and systematically put an end to the lives of all those incarcerated drug lords and members of drug syndicates would he be
charged now with having committed crimes against humanity?

Sure some heads will roll for the deaths of these convicted drug prisoners and the infidelity caused while in the custody of the law but over-all and in hindsight better that they were the ones on the receiving end of the war on drugs instead of those killed just because they were suspected of using or selling drugs. For ‘Tatay Digong’, who already confessed previously to having personally killed a suspected criminal, subscribing to such method mentioned above would have been too easy and might not have fully reflected his avowed personality as an exterminator. Well he had done his best and obviously his best was not good enough, and so now he must face the music and be made to answer for taking the law into his own hands.