SCUM OF THE EARTH

April 13, 2025 Opinion

The infamous reign of power of former president Rodrigo Roa Duterte saw the deaths of over thousands presumed to be drug addicts. The former president hated drugs and promised death to all who used the illegal substance; his mantra was seen, felt, and feared throughout his 6-year term. By the end of his term in 2022, it is estimated that some 30,000 people were killed by police and unidentified individuals, with state forces reporting 7,000 deaths during official operations, omitting those killed by unknown actors. The deaths were described as vigilante killings of those who deserved to die.

The haughty justified the violent deaths, saying the scum of the earth ought to have died as they prey on humanity, and drugs are a danger to society, as the narrative was crafted. This justification was made for over 30,000 deaths, day in and day out. If these people have become the scum of the earth, useless members of society, cockroaches to our existence, do we kill them? For the families of the tagged scum of the earth, there was no solace, no comfort, just a sigh and afterthought that they ought to have died—serves them right—as they blindly mourned their death.

As the deaths grew and the people’s discontent mounted, the so-called scum of the earth turned out to be Kian delos Santos, Carl Arnaiz, and Reynaldo de Guzman, the tragic trio whose lives were brutally cut short between August 16th and 18th, 2017, in the bloody theater of the Philippine drug war. Who could forget the Pietà-like photo by Raffy Lerma of the widow, Jennelyn Olaires, as she cradled her husband
Michael Siaron, a pedicab driver and alleged drug pusher, who was shot and killed by motorcycle-riding men in Pasay City.

Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus after the
Crucifixion, and Lerma’s photo was on the front page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, mocked by the president himself as he scoffed at the
attribution to the beloved Catholic piece. “Why would the Pietà be linked to the death of a drug dealer?” the haughty asked. A societal indifference, even a perverse sense of righteousness, seemed to prevail. The peddled narrative dictated these lives were disposable, their loss a mere subtraction of undesirable elements.

The families were expected to mourn in silence, accepting the brutal finality as a deserved consequence, but despite this, the photo did its rounds in national and international newspapers, said to encapsulate the grief of the families robbed of justice, the families of the scum of the earth, so to speak. Those were dark days for the insignificant group who valued justice, drowned out by the haughty majority who
marveled at the deaths and thanked the president for the murders. Duterte, now an international spectacle, is detained at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity in The Hague, Netherlands, where the “scum of the earth” are put on trial.