Reversals of Fortune

In 2009, then Chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, Leila De Lima, commenced with the investigation of alleged extra-judicial killings in Davao City. She ordered the closure of an important road fronting Hotel Mandaya in Davao City. The hotel was to be the venue of her four-month probe of EJK which she claimed was carried out by the Davao Death Squad which she suspected was organized by then City Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte.

De Lima came with a retinue of investigators which made up her probe team. She was armed with search warrants too obtained from a Regional Trial Court in Manila because, in her own language, she cannot trust the judges in Davao City as they are scared of Duterte. That could be the same reason why members of her probe team were all recruited from their respective national headquarters.

Duterte was not insensitive to those preconceived judgment. He went on leave, gave up his supervisory power over the police and for four months, which started in June up to September 2009, the mayor was a plain citizen Rodrigo Roa Duterte.

Over a dish of 'inun-onan nga bolinaw' (steamed anchovy wrapped in banana leaf) for lunch after filing his leave, he asked me who could be his spokesman in the duration that he is out of public sight. I came out with some names but advised him that maybe he should be consistent and follow the track he started: giving the probe team their absolute freedom to investigate.

I must have made sense because Duterte weathered the grand inquisition conducted by De Lima. She and her team had lined up several witnesses to make the mayor and the Davao City police force accountable for the mind-boggling death statistics she and her team attributed to DDS which she believed was the handiwork of the mayor.

The CHR along with the local human rights watch organization presented a shocking figure of 814 victims of summary killings carried out by DDS.

Unknown to many, Davao City was virtually under control of the New People's Army in the 1970s to mid-1980. We have lost count of the number of thousands of casualties who were summarily killed by the hit squad of the Sparrow Units earning the city a moniker 'Nicaragdao' in obvious semblance of Agdao, a densely populated impoverished district in the City, where about five to eight local thugs, policemen and bullies were executed by the Sparrows on a daily basis.

The CPP/NPA lost control of Davao City almost overnight when the Sparrows executed three of its own (tax collectors) one of whom is a nephew of one of its top urban commanders. The commander, whose name I will skip here, organized his own men and aided by an anti-communist radio commentator, the late Jun Pala, agitated the residents of Agdao and neighboring coastal ghettos which served as the mass base of the insurgents to rise against the NPAs. This phenomenon was dubbed 'alsa masa' literally meaning mass uprising. It is absolutely wrong to describe this as a vigilante group although there were vigilante groups organized by barangay leaders who were threatened by the NPAs.

The counter revolutionaries waged 'operation zombies' resulting in many casualties from the NPA side. Towards 1986 the urban center of Davao City was virtually cleared of Sparrows.

But what about the Davao Death Squad which CHR Chair and now Senator De Lima and her prevaricating witness Edgar Matobato was bruiting about? DDS was nothing but a phantom conceptualized by the Integrated National Police Regional Director Dionisio Tan-gatue 'organized' sometime in the early 1980's at the height of the atrocities of the Sparrows. It was made popular by Pala.

In fact aside from DDS, the INP General also conceptualized 'Christian Soldiers for Democracy' and later 'Contra Force'. None of these three 'forces' had warm bodies. These were nothing but ghost soldiers. Matobato and Delima's assertion that DDS existed and was organized by then Mayor Duterte is therefore nothing but figments of their fertile imagination. Duterte for one was as thin as a stick trying to eke a living as an assistant city fiscal.

So how do we make out of the story of De Lima? Her bloated death statistics is as farcical as her allegation of the existence of DDS. But let me help her and some of my readers reconcile with the truth.

When the NPAs left Davao City, drug syndicates crept-in their pushers brazenly peddling drugs inside school campuses with impunity. Just when they were almost out of control, a newly assigned PDEA chief, Col. Efren Alquizar, came out with a list of about 300 suspects.

What followed later was the series of execution which, just like what happened in the total war waged by Thailand, resulted in the death of as many as 2,000 drug pushers in a matter of two months. It was Time Magazine I think which described the killing as 'cleansing process' to expunge the link that would have revealed the identity of the drug lords.

The casualties in the drug campaign in Davao however was not as many as what New York-based HRW and CHR De Lima and later Etta Rosales were crowing about. Truth to tell, NYC HRW even published a book entitled 'You Can Die Any Time'. They moreover succeeded in bringing in a United Nations Rapporteur named Philip Alston to Davao City to conduct his own probe. But Alston just stationed himself in the air-conditioned confines of Davao five-star Marco Polo Hotel and questioned some witnesses brought to his presence by local HRW. I do not know what happened but UNCHR in the aftermath even officially came out with a denial that it has something to do with the NYC HRW booklet.

The problem of De Lima was that she took the allegations of pan-handling HRW and the political adversaries of Duterte as the gospel truth. When De Lima's probe team failed to produce witnesses they went ahead digging for what they suspected were common graveyard of victims of extrajudicial killings carried out by the fabled DDS.

They went around digging almost like eternity. Her team also illegally pulled out a detainee in nearby Panabo City jail. They suspected that the detainee had knowledge of burial grounds of DDS victims. The poor guy, Jonathan Balo, cannot point at anything because he was in fact as ignorant as the probe team.

But finally they were able to dig a skeletal remain along with two pairs of license car plates. While the skeleton was so deteriorated however, the car plates had barely had any sign of rust. De Lima exhibited this in her Manila-based Regional Trial Court but threw out the pieces of evidence for what the court said as 'inadmissible'. In the language of my lawyer friends, it is a classic case of 'planted evidence'.

So there goes the story, my best recollections of events that weaved Davao City and Duterte's past and present.

Duterte, is now President and busy repairing the damage on government institutions left by previous administration and restoring the dignity of the Filipinos in the community of nations. He is waging war against the still menacing drug syndicates and winning friendship and respect from leaders of advance economies who have committed to help the Philippines catch up and recover lost opportunities.

Next week, a little bird told me, that China and the Philippines shall firm up the first 15 priority infrastructure projects that consist of roads, railways, bridges and irrigation. Russia, just like China, has opened its doors for Philippine agricultural products. Should Duterte opt to buy military hardware from Russia, Pres. Vladimir Putin says 'buy one take one'. Our fishermen are back to their traditional fishing grounds in Scarborough.

What about Leila De Lima? She is now senator. She still hounds Duterte with DDS and EJK and is consumed with what looks like her life time goal to bring Duterte to the New Bilibid Prison. It never occurred to me that she herself had been in and out of NBP when she was Secretary of Justice. She had a fibbing Matobato to help her in that unending crusade to pin down Duterte. Failing in that, she made one more attempt: making Duterte answerable for the more than 3,000 casualties in the President's drug war, this time accusing him of excessive human rights violation that could bring Duterte to the International criminal Court.

It's wishful thinking at best, but she succeeded to bring the issue for a full-blown investigation and covered in nationwide TV in living colors.

For riding the tiger, De Lima is now in a serious dilemma on how she can dismount. I will skip the mundane and her 'woman frailties' for I think the nation is now having an overdose of eroticism.

In the meantime, Duterte is waiting for winter in Russia to ebb then he flies for yet another journey to make Philippines great and greater. What a reversal of fortune. (

Mr. Jun Ledesma is a community journalist who writes from Davao City and comments from the perspective of a Mindanaoan)