Not a few friends of mine were genuinely outraged by the killing of Kian Loyd delos Santos in the beginning. And I think that’s because I don’t have a lot of politician-friends.
Kian’s was, indeed, a heart-wrenching story. Grade 11 student, 17 years old, apparently executed by overeager policemen who could no longer tell who the drug dealers and the innocent bystanders were—who wouldn’t be angered by that?
But as the politicians started to jump on the “justice for Kian” bandwagon, especially those of a certain anti-Duterte persuasion, the tide started to turn. In the face of a coordinated assault that was no longer about justice for a slain young man, but which morphed into a campaign to get the president using his now-famous previous statements defending the police and vowing to kill drug pushers, the popular support began to wane.
As politician after politician started visiting the young man’s wake, as the media started reporting on the killing 24/4 in screaming headlines and everyone from misguided diplomats to Catholic Church leaders started to condemn the incident, people began to wonder if this was not really about justice. It was propaganda overkill—and even the people who were originally outraged wondered if the noise was not really a diversion intended to make us forget about, say, the travails of a certain Andy Bautista.
Of course, the other too-obvious reason for this turn of events was the declaration by President Rodrigo Duterte that he was not going to back the three Caloocan City cops believed to have killed the young man. In fact, Duterte ordered the three lawmen arrested, detained and convicted, if they had violated the law.
And so, the wind was knocked out of the sails of the politicians who wanted to use Kian’s killing as yet another weapon to bring down Duterte. The president nimbly avoided the trap set for him by his political enemies, leaving the would-be avengers with what they really had in the beginning: the case of a young man apparently killed by a bunch of trigger-happy cops, nothing more, nothing less.
But the politicians had already scheduled a Senate hearing yesterday and could no longer back out without declaring to everyone that they were really in it to get the president. So they went through the motions of trying to get to the bottom of the incident, but it was clear that their heart was no longer in it.
This was why senators like Risa Hontiveros used yesterday’s hearing to defend her boneheaded strategy of taking custody of some witnesses, a la Matobato, even if she laid herself open to charges of tampering with their important testimony. It was why Senator Franklin Drilon could grill Caloocan City prosecutor Darwin Canete about the latter’s supposed inclusion in Duterte’s list of drug dealers, when Canete wasn’t even on trial.
It was why Senator Bam Aquino could make a long introductory speech that signified nothing except his bias against the police, absent a real investigation. And why Senator Joel Villanueva could use the hearing to learn about forensics and criminology, perhaps for some future academic credits.
Ultimately, I think, it was also why the senators agreed to hold a closed-door session with the witnesses at the hearing’s end. They were no longer convinced that they could make the story bigger than it was, in order to cast a wider net and to snare bigger fish, despite their efforts of an entire afternoon.
I predict that these senators, especially those who were clearly in it only for the weaponizing of Kian’s death against Duterte, will soon lose what remains of their interest in the case. Which means that they will wait until the next case that comes down the road that they can link to the President to and try to milk that one, in the hope that they will finally hit the jackpot.
(I think that the effort to link the President’s son, Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte, to smuggling at the Bureau of Customs has also panned out. Since the Customs controversy has now degenerated into a battle of claims and counter-claims between Senator Panfilo Lacson and former Customs Commissioner Nicanor Faeldon, the controversy seems to have entered another dead end for the anti-Duterte campaign.)
It’s sad that Kian delos Santos was used even after his death by politicians who really don’t care if he gets justice or not, as long as they have another reason to bludgeon the president. And that—and their impending abandonment of the case —is just as outrage-inducing as what the Caloocan policemen actually did to the young man.
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But don’t you just love how Drilon can turn from defense lawyer and obstructor of justice to deep-diving prosecutor and seeker of the truth in just the space of two days? Fresh from his stint of lawyering for Bautista last Wednesday, running interference for the beleaguered Commission on Elections chairman in the face of questioning by his colleagues, Drilon converted himself into the scourge of the police and other authorities in Kian’s case yesterday.
It’s enough to take your breath away, this virtuoso display of shape-shifting role-reversal. Bravo, senator; I’m now an unabashed fan.
