A year after stepping down from the highest elective office and peacefully handing over power to the succeeding administration, former president Rodrigo Duterte has broken his silence on how the war on illegal drugs should be pursued by authorities.
But what he said is not good at all.
Rodrigo Duterte, a longtime mayor of Davao City, a former prosecutor and congressman before becoming Chief Executive of this country, wants the PNP to kill outright their own officials and rank-and-file involved in illegal drugs without benefit of due process involving the formal filing of charges and a fair trial in a court of law.
Mr. Duterte’s unsolicited advice to the Marcos administration, particularly to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Administration and the Philippine National Police that’s been tasked to conduct the anti-drug war, is for the PNP to continue the same scorched-earth and take-no-prisoners approach that got him into trouble with the International Criminal Court and human rights groups here and abroad in the first place.
Here’s what Rodrigo Duterte actually said, as quoted in news reports: “Shoot them dead. Why allow them due process? …I love the police, but you know this is a difficult problem. I have said it before.
“The best way to deal with these kinds of lawmen: kill them. No need for court proceedings, just kill them…I do not find any redeeming factor in them.
“Why should I let them live, due to sympathy (for) their families? Would it be a redeeming factor? I don’t see any.”
So what else is new?
It’s basically a reiteration of his “kill, kill, kill” marching order to the PNP even before he was sworn into office in 2016.
Barely a month after Duterte won the 2016 presidential election, the police had already begun to implement his “kill-kill-kill” mantra, and kept owners of funeral homes enormously happy with bloody corpses arriving at their doorsteps at every hour of every business day.
The toll?
More than 6,200 officially reported by the police as having been killed by their anti-drug operatives from 2016 onwards, allegedly because they fought back (“nanlaban”), but without offering any solid proof.
The Commission on Human Rights and human rights groups dispute the official narrative, claiming between 20,000 and 30,000 casualties in Duterte’s bloody war on drugs perpetrated mainly by ‘vigilante groups’ said to be police personnel out of uniform themselves and paid for every kill.
The ex-president now wants the PDEA and the PNP to again throw due process of law out of the window and start killing all those cops involved in illegal drugs, no matter how high up they are in the hierarchy or even just ordinary cops compelled by their superiors to follow their orders.
When he was in power for six long years, Rodrigo Duterte littered the streets with the bodies of suspected drug traffickers and addicts but apparently failed to bring even a single really big-time drug trafficker to jail.
Now, the illegal drug trade persists even with the bloody results of his war on drugs.
This is the kind of unsolicited advice that the current administration should simply ignore as the product of an unsound mind and a warped sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.
