Connecting the dots

Rodrigo Duterte has always defended his brutal crackdown on the illegal drug scourge as legitimate law enforcement.

The International  Criminal Court (ICC) and human rights groups believe otherwise, saying the thousands killed in his bloody war on drugs when he was president and earlier as Davao City mayor warrant indictment for murder as a crime against humanity.

This accusation requires evidence or reliable testimony that the killings were systematic and state-sponsored, carried out on orders of top government officials.

Unearthing this evidence has been a tough challenge, according to Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra, who as Duterte’s last justice secretary was tasked to investigate abuses in the drug war. The probe was launched to show that there was no need for the ICC to step in. Guevarra has said eyewitnesses to the killings, cops who want to turn state witness, and even relatives of those slain have been reluctant to come out.

With only a handful of cases among over 6,000 prosecuted for extrajudicial killings, Guevarra has been accused by critics either of whitewashing the probe, or of not looking hard enough.

Now a police officer has emerged, painting a story that appears to connect the dots and may bolster the case for crimes against humanity.

Lt. Col. Jovie Espenido, testifying at a joint hearing of four committees at the House of Representatives, confirmed long-running suspicions that in Duterte’s drug war, quotas were set for drug suspects killed, with a reward of P20,000 given per kill. Espenido claimed the money came from government intelligence funds, small-town lottery, jueteng lords and Philippine offshore gaming operators.

Whether Espenido’s story will withstand judicial scrutiny remains to be seen. There is no written order related to the drug killings, although there were rumors in the first year of the Duterte presidency that such a document existed.

It will be Espenido’s word against the denials of the persons he has implicated in systematic executions of drug personalities.

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The person at the top of his list, Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, has denied ordering drug suspects to be killed when he said they should be “neutralized.” Sen. Bong Go, who allegedly doled out the rewards, described Espenido’s testimony as defamatory.

Dela Rosa has not denied being the architect of Duterte’s Oplan Tokhang – the first phase of the drug war in the previous administration. But he denies what Espenido said, that in police parlance, to “neutralize” means to kill.

Having covered the crime beat for many years, I agree with Espenido’s understanding of what “neutralize” means in policespeak. But this may have to be settled in court.

Espenido, in his testimony, confirmed widespread suspicions that mayor Rolando Espinosa of Albuera, Leyte, tagged (correctly, it seems) by the Duterte administration as a notorious drug trafficker, was neutralized when cops served a search warrant in the wee hours of Nov. 5, 2016 in his cell at the provincial jail in Baybay City.

Espinosa, who had turned himself in for fear of his life after being tagged by Duterte as a drug trafficker, allegedly shot it out from inside his jail cell with over a dozen cops.

Espenido, at the time the police chief of Albuera, claimed Dela Rosa protected Espinosa’s son Kerwin, also tagged as a drug dealer. Kerwin was cleared of drug charges by a Manila regional trial court in 2020, but in March this year, the Court of Appeals ordered the return of the charges against him.

In July 2017, Espenido was the police chief of Ozamiz City in Misamis Occidental when 15 members and bodyguards of the Parojinog clan led by then city mayor Reynaldo Parojinog were killed in simultaneous police raids. The Parojinogs had been long linked to organized crime before the clan made a successful career shift to (what else) politics. The mayor’s daughter, then vice mayor Nova Princess, is serving a life term at the Correctional Institution.

Espenido, who retires from the Philippine National Police when he turns 56 this October, is currently on floating status.

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Since Rodrigo Duterte carried out his campaign promise of exterminating those involved in illegal drugs, stories have circulated about how his war on drugs was being waged by his minions.

In those first six months when the streets were soaked with blood and jails were packed literally from floor to ceiling with drug suspects who were lucky to escape execution, there were already reports that cops were assigned “kill” quotas and received financial rewards for meeting those quotas, whether or not the targets were involved in illegal drugs.

Even in the anti-drug crackdown, connections helped. A person known to our newsroom when our office was still in Manila’s Port Area was reportedly warned by a cop to make himself scarce or he would be included in the kill quota. The person vanished, but we didn’t hear about his death so he must have escaped execution.

Rodrigo Duterte campaigned on a platform of “kill, kill, kill.” It says a lot about our society that he won by a landslide. But being a former prosecutor, he understands the concept of deniability, often saying he merely ordered cops to shoot suspects in self-defense.

Not surprisingly, police said those thousands who died in the drug war were killed for resisting arrest or fighting back or nanlaban.

Duterte had hoped to replicate nationwide within six months the “shock and awe” approach that he applied in his home city of Davao to eliminate the illegal drug scourge. The elimination is being disputed, and Duterte himself would later admit that he could not eradicate the drug menace nationwide even after six years in power.

But he has always defended his approach to the drug menace, which is underpinned by the Machiavellian idea that the end justifies the means. And he has criticized the Marcos administration for not maintaining the approach.

Jovie Espenido is narrating the evils spawned by the Machiavellian approach. We await what the government intends to do with his story.