Justice

When I think about Rody Duterte’s presidency, I am haunted by the memories, the images, the sounds and feelings of those dizzying days, and those cold, dark evenings when a surreal and labyrinthine netherworld existed while the rest of this nation of 120 million was asleep.

It’s a time when one’s senses were on overdrive, not in a pleasurable way, but in an overwhelming, perhaps even traumatic way.

To me, it was haunting and traumatic on so many levels – personal and professional. Here was a man who disregarded people’s democratic rights, mocked journalists and journalism, undermined institutions, insulted businesses and had no qualms about killing people.

On a personal level, I witnessed – and experienced for myself – the stress and trauma of covering Duterte’s bloody drug war because my partner and some colleague-friends relentlessly covered the carnage, at the risk of their safety and sanity. I can go on and on.

But this isn’t really about me or my colleagues. It is about the victims of the war on drugs.

Yesterday’s arrest of the so-called The Punisher – unprecedented and historic – was breathtaking and bittersweet all at once. It was as if we were watching a Netflix edge-of-your-seat drama.

This step toward justice is for all those who lost their loved ones because they were either suspected drug users or pushers, actual addicts or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Let me tell you about a victim I saw one night in December 2017 when I tagged along with the night beat. As I wrote about it before:

JJ’s head hung loosely out of the blue body bag. His face was smeared with dirt and covered with blood – thick, red and fresh.

The men from the funeral parlor carried his lifeless body to a waiting vehicle. It was as if they were delivering a slaughtered cow to the wet market.

They found him in a dark and cramped shanty home in the slums of Victory Avenue in Quezon City where a policeman’s bullet killed him.

The policemen cordoned off the crime scene for three hours. Not even his mother was allowed to break past the yellow line. And then he was strewn grotesquely on the decrepit multicab. It was a haunting sight – a man stripped of even the slightest dignity he might have had when he was still alive.

Lucy dela Rosa, his mother, heard neighbors screaming her name minutes after the shooting happened.

“Lucy! Lucy! Your son!”

Earlier that night, a team of police led by Police Supt. Christian Ventura dela Cruz went to JJ’s community for an anti-drug operation. JJ tried to escape and allegedly fought back with a .45 caliber pistol, Dela Cruz told me.

In this netherworld, men and women survive on odd jobs – a small-time contract today, none tomorrow; a day’s minimum wage for a month’s work or what-have-you. Yet, people take it, because they usually have no other choice.

The 32-year-old JJ was no exception. He used to sell second-hand car parts, mostly stolen side mirrors. And when he needed to earn more to feed his five children, he sold drugs.

Duterte had warned that it would be bloody. There are 3.7 million drug users in the Philippines – epidemic proportions – he once said.

Let justice be done

As I write this, Duterte’s camp is doing everything it can to bring the former president back to the country. As I write this, his plane has not landed in The Hague.

All I know is that, if all goes as planned, the ICC will try him for his crimes against humanity.

But the quest for justice must not stop there. Everyone involved in the bloody drug war must also be brought to justice.

The Marcos administration must go beyond politics and work to fix our institutions so that we do not have to run to the ICC for justice. This has to be more than a persecution of a political foe.

It must also address the drug menace in the country, the very same problem which Duterte claimed he sought to fix. It must bring back peace and order without turning our streets into a killing field.

‘No longer safe’

The other day, I hailed a motorcycle taxi to bring me to the airport.

During the long drive, the driver and I had a chat about peace and order in his community.

He said the thugs had returned ever since President Marcos took over. Petty crimes and drug use have found their way back to the place where he lives, he said.

This was not the case during Duterte’s time. The criminals were afraid, he said.

This was not the first time I had heard such sentiments.

Even some businessmen quietly agreed with Duterte’s method. One said that, back then, his construction workers did not use drugs because they were afraid.

But this is not the “peace” we should aspire to have. It is peace at the expense of people who pleaded for their lives but whose cries for help were ignored.

For the longest time, these victims were unseen and unheard by state authorities, dismissed as lowlifes who didn’t deserve a second chance. But as Martin Luther King Jr., said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

On Tuesday, their cries for justice were finally heard. I’ll take it as a win.

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Email: eyesgonzales@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.