Kill culture

All the horrific stories coming out of the congressional investigations point to two basic and intractable problems in our country: disregard for human life, and corruption.

Both are difficult to address through legislation, the first even more so.

The culture of violence in our law enforcement and security agencies, and even in the civilian government, is planted early – at the Philippine Military and Philippine National Police Academies, which produce the officer corps in the two organizations, and in school fraternities that count politicians and members of the judiciary among their members.

Blind loyalty and obedience to authority, even when the order is unlawful and inhumane, are also inculcated early in the PMA, PNPA and the fraternities. That recent statement of Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, a PMAyer and Duterte’s first PNP chief, says a lot about the state of our nation: “My loyalty to president Duterte is forever and ever!”

Even girls are not spared from the culture of violence. Sororities even in top medical schools also engage in violent and humiliating initiation rites, including beatings and pouring of hot candle drippings on thighs (where burn scars, like bruises from paddle beating, can be hidden from parents).

When youths enter adulthood believing that humans are intrinsically evil, they bear the psychological scars for life, and it is reflected in society.

It has to be among the reasons why our country has one of the highest homicide rates in this part of the planet.

Aggravated by corruption and the weakness of the criminal justice system, the abuses committed in the name of fighting crime are not surprising. And the abuses could happen again, depending on the political leadership.

As for corruption, we already have enough tough laws against a wide range of offenses, from petty graft to large-scale plunder. But how can the laws be enforced properly when the justice system itself is hopelessly corrupted, and the big fish get away?

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I’ve asked some of the lead congressional probers about the laws that they envision to pass, considering what they know about the drug war at this point. So far, the common answer is a need for general reforms – still no specifics – in the PNP.

In this land of sorrow, extrajudicial killings are hardly new. Growing up as a martial law baby under Marcos 1.0, I knew EJKs as “salvaging.”

Sunken ships are salvaged from the water. In the case of the martial law-era “salvage” victims, the bodies were fished out of the Pasig River, trash-filled creeks, Dagat-Dagatan before it was reclaimed – any spot where it was easy to dump a dead body in the dark, in the days before street surveillance cameras became ubiquitous.

Victims who were meant to never be found were placed in drums sealed with concrete and then thrown into the deep part of Manila Bay. The explanation was whispered in the police halls – that this form of body disposal was preferred over burning, because it took a long time to burn a cadaver to unrecognizable ashes, and the smoke and stink could attract attention. And I guess dissolving corpses in acid, as the South American drug cartels do, was deemed to be too grisly.

I learned about these gruesome details in my days as a crime reporter. In the final years of the Marcos dictatorship, there was a spate of salvaging cases in Metro Manila, which was also portrayed as an anti-crime initiative. Those executed were found with gunshot wounds, with cardboard signs hanging from their necks declaring, “huwag tularan, magnanakaw” – don’t emulate the thief.

Officially, those killed were tagged as victims of vigilantes, but suspicion always focused on the police. A police officer who developed a reputation for carrying out the “huwag tularan” operations even had a movie made about his life.

People power and the restoration of democracy in 1986 did not put an end to the summary executions. Rodrigo Duterte was not implementing any original idea in his bloody campaign against illegal drugs, which he launched when he became mayor of Davao City. He just carried it to the extreme.

He believed the brutal crackdown to be so effective in his home turf (his critics say otherwise) that he sought the presidency in 2016 on a platform of replicating nationwide this so-called Davao model of iron-fist law enforcement – and he would do it, he promised, within six months.

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Duterte and his minions undoubtedly considered his landslide win (never contested) and his sustained high survey ratings throughout his term as blanket authority from the people to carry out his bloody “war on drugs.”

Today, under a new administration led by someone that Duterte’s clan openly accuses of being a cokehead, the campaign against illegal drugs has become more humane, with a focus on catching the drug dealers while curbing demand and addressing addiction through multisectoral interventions.

But even administration officials have admitted that drug-related killings continue, including in legitimate law enforcement operations. Who knows how many of the killings are extrajudicial?

Drug trafficking is big business, and drug dealers can be as vicious as the narcos of South America. They are typically heavily armed and ready to kill anyone who gets in their way. There are genuine armed encounters between drug dealers and police, during which the cops could legitimately claim self-defense in shooting to kill.

Even curbing the demand side of the problem is challenging. Drug addiction is a public health and social problem, and even the most advanced economies have a problem addressing demand.

Duterte campaigned on a promise to kill, kill, kill, and he won by a landslide. This is partly because there are many Filipinos who have experienced first-hand how drugs ruin lives and endanger their communities. They agree with Duterte when he says shabu fries the brain.

His problem is that he opted for a Machiavellian approach to address the problem, while Philippine and humanitarian laws do not support the end justifying the means.

But the violence and corruption remain deeply ingrained, along with a measure of public support for short cuts to justice. So I’m curious about what the two chambers of Congress can come up with, by way of legislation, to end the kill culture in law enforcement.