EDITORIAL — Systematic killings?

When Royina Garma was named general manager of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office in June 2019, people wondered what qualified her for the job. Garma was a colonel in the Philippine National Police, but with a decade still left in her service, she opted for early retirement from the PNP to accept the PCSO top job.

A graduate of the PNP Academy Class of 1997, Garma became the first female director of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group in Central Visayas. Possibly more significantly for her career, she served for two years as head of the Santa Ana police station in Davao City, where she must have impressed Rodrigo Duterte. When Duterte was president, he plucked Garma out of her post as Cebu City police chief and appointed her to the PCSO.

Today Garma faces scrutiny for her supposed role in the killing of three Chinese drug traffickers inside the Davao Prison and Penal Farm just two months into the Duterte presidency. Inmates Leopoldo Tan Jr. and Fernando Magdadaro told the House of Representatives’ quad committee over a week ago that they stabbed to death the three Chinese on orders of a police officer. Magdadaro claimed they agreed to execute the Chinese after they were promised their freedom along with P1 million per person killed.

The quad committee is looking into reports that 29 other Chinese drug convicts were also executed as part of the war on drugs waged during the Duterte administration. Last week, an incarcerated former policeman, Jimmy Fortaleza, corroborated the inmates’ testimony and implicated his PNPA classmates Garma, Col. Hector Grijaldo and Chief Inspector Roland Vilela in the killings of the three Chinese convicts.

There are people in this country who won’t mind seeing convicted drug traffickers permanently eliminated. Extrajudicial killings, however, can be habit-forming for the perpetrators. Left unchecked, the habit leads to egregious abuses that destroy the social fabric and weaken the criminal justice system.

The quad is currently trying to determine if EJKs were carried out systematically in the campaign to eradicate the drug scourge, with “kill” quotas set and rewards – sourced partly from state coffers and partly from illegal activities  – given to the law enforcers who met the quotas. Perhaps Garma and her other former colleagues can help unearth the truth.