Outrage. There is only outrage.
The case for launching a campaign against drugs has long been made. We know the drug menace is upon us. We recognize the harm it does to its users and fear what it can do to the next generation. We also see the evil it breeds among those who profit from its nefarious trade.
President Rodrigo Duterte, who has been in office for a little more than a year, has acknowledged the problem is bigger and more difficult to extinguish than he had previously thought. First he said he could wipe out drugs between three and six months. And then he asked for another half a year. Now—we have lost track of what the new deadline is.
It took the death of a Korean businessman in February for the Philippine National Police to suspend the controversial operations, and not because the police force realized the folly of its excesses. It was just because it was a foreigner who was killed—an embarrassment at a time when we were wooing foreigners to visit the country or invest here.
The campaign is back—and boy, don’t we feel it. Don’t we deplore the absence of care or reason in its execution.
At least 57 drug suspects were killed over the past several days in separate operations across Manila and neighboring Bulacan province. The killings were supposedly part of a shock-and-awe approach against drug traffickers.
Horrors, the President took delight in the killings. “Good,” he said, referring to the 32 killed earlier in the week. “If we could kill another 32 every day, then maybe we can reduce what ails this country.”
The PNP spokesman, however, said the cops only carried out the killings in self-defense. The usual line is that the police only take action when the drug suspects resist arrest and put up a fight. Easy to say when your president promises protection to anybody charged with killing drug suspects, and when questions by human rights groups are met with curses.
Going viral on the Internet is the story of an 11th-grade boy, Kian Loyd delos Santos, who was one of those killed in Caloocan this week. The 17-year-old boy was supposedly only closing up the family store when he was picked up by cops and later on killed.
Palace Spokesman Ernesto Abella said Delos Santos’ case, happily, was isolated. His staff later on insisted the word was “haply.”
In expressing our outrage over the President’s cavalier disregard for the lives of the suspects, we also wonder what is being done with prominent personalities accused of involvement in drug use or drug trade. This fortunate lot can invoke due process and demand evidence from these accusers. They are lucky they sport prominent names and do not live in hovels in Caloocan or Bulacan.
One life unjustly lost is one life too many. We reject the attempt to desensitize the public to the killings and to say this is for the greater good. What good is asking, first thing in the morning, how many corpses are out on the streets?