President Duterte enjoys high trust and satisfaction ratings from both the Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia. But I ask myself: Do the people from all walks of life agree with the killing of over 3,000 Filipinos allegedly involved in the drug trade?
It would seem so, Santa Banana!
Even at the 365 Club now based at the Holiday Inn Suites in Makati, many of my coffee shop buddies are telling me that the President has done very well during his first 100 days, especially in his war against illegal drugs. Even the waiter at my favorite restaurant shares this opinion!
Have Filipinos become so desensitized to violence that they now agree with all the killings? Or have we lost our sense of morality as Christians?
Yes, there are quite a few Filipinos who present themselves as critics of Mr. Duterte like Senators Leila de Lima and Antonio Trillanes. But they are now damaged goods.
There’s also a small group of congressmen passing themselves off as the minority, but their credibility is also questionable.
In social media, whenever somebody dares criticize the war on drugs, Mr. Duterte’s trolls immediately scramble to defend the President.
The usual militants and activists have been silenced because the President has extended his hand to the communists and Muslim insurgents in the name of peace.
It seems that the only ones alarmed about the killings are from outside the country—President Barack Obama, outgoing United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the European Union. But Mr. Duterte has either cursed at them or called them fools.
Even the International Criminal Court has warned the President that “any person in the Philippines who engaged in mass violence… within the jurisdiction of the ICC is potentially liable to prosecution by the Court.”
Considering the limited jurisdiction of the ICC—its mandate is only against genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes—I doubt that it has jurisdiction over what President Duterte has been doing.
All these boil down to two basic things happening here: First is the lack of a credible opposition. Even at the Senate, lawmakers seem to have allied themselves with the President or are simply afraid that he would go after them. Santa Banana, even the “Yellows” in the Senate have been cowed!
The second thing is that tragically, we have lost our sense of values. People laugh and even applaud when Mr. Duterte utters expletives. Have we become so depraved?
Former President Fidel V. Ramos, who still considers himself a member of “Team Philippines” of President Duterte —after all, he encouraged the former Davao City mayor to run for President—has not minced words. He says that our ship, slow-moving and with many leaks, is sinking.
If FVR were younger (he’s now 88 years old, nearing 89), he’d make the best opposition leader. Democracy can only survive when there’s asset and dissent. Without dissent, there can only be tyranny.
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President Duterte has formed a multi-government task force to rush the construction of drug rehabilitation centers nationwide. This is to accommodate the thousands of drug dependents who have surrendered.
The first of these rehab centers, at Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija, is almost finished with the help of the private sector.
In fact, local and foreign donors have pledged to help in the building of these centers. The cost is enormous. Each facility would cost no less than P10 million if we count all the doctors and nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists that would be hired.
But the President must realize that building rehab centers alone won’t solve the problem of drug addiction. I have been vice president at former priest Bob Garon’s DARE Foundation, and I know the cost of just one drug addict before he can “graduate” from the center. It would cost no less than P100,000 during the first year – and who knows what will come after? While we had donors and subsidy from San Miguel and other big businesses and from the Dangerous Drugs Board, we had to refuse more addicts because of the high cost of rehabilitation.
Drug rehabilitation isn’t simply just isolating the addict, or making them read the Bible, or getting them to undergo counseling, or do gardening or handicrafts.
The cost of a psychologist/psychiatrists, other doctors and nurses is enormous because addicts can become drug dependents for so many reasons. That “shell” that covers them must be broken to find out why they became addicted to illegal drugs in the first place.
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Ms. Liza G. Vengco, corporate head of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., wrote me to clarify what I wrote in an earlier column. I said that when some Chinese businessmen applied for a loan amounting to several millions of pesos, the bank would readily grant them the loan even without collateral. This also happens in other Chinese banks, not only with RCBC, which is a normal thing to do. Banks know and trust the Chinese borrower. I had written that’s why Chinese businessmen succeed—they have earned the trust of the banking community.
Thus, I wrote that my late good friend lawyer Leonardo Siguion-Reyna told me that when he was a member of the RCBC executive committee, he felt uneasy.
The RCBC corporate head wrote me that “the decision to lend on a clean basis is a commercial decision that all banks regularly make for clients depending on commercial reasons,” adding that “we can only assume that Atty. Siguion-Reyna may have felt uneasy to lend without collateral for purely business or commercial reasons, but certainly not for a violations of banking laws.”
I agree, and say “mea culpa.” I didn’t know that banks also gave clean loans depending on the borrower’s purpose. But I assume it depends on who is borrowing.