Former Senator Leila De Lima on Monday insisted that former President Rodrigo Duterte was the mastermind behind the alleged extrajudicial killings (EJKs) that characterized the previous administration’s war on drugs.
“There is no doubt in my mind that former President Rodrigo Duterte is the mastermind, as he was the instigator and inducer of the drug war killings. The drug war was implemented as an official Duterte program of government when he assumed office as President,” De Lima told the House Committee on Human Rights, which is conducting an inquiry into alleged drug-related EJKs during the Duterte administration.
De Lima, who has been a vocal critic of Duterte’s drug policies and was detained for several years on what she claimed were politically motivated illegal drug charges before eventually being cleared, provided a detailed account of how these killings were allegedly orchestrated and carried out.
The former senator said that the drug war was an official government program under Duterte, implemented through Oplan Double Barrel, a documented operational plan of the Philippine National Police (PNP).
“These killings were intentionally and deliberately carried out as part and parcel of Oplan Double Barrel upon Duterte’s orders as President and Chief Executive from 2016 to 2022,” De Lima said in her opening statement.
She said these actions constituted a systematic attack on civilians and should be considered crimes against humanity under international humanitarian law.
De Lima’s testimony traced the roots of the drug war back to Duterte’s tenure as mayor of Davao City, where the Davao Death Squad (DDS) was reportedly active.
“The 2016 to 2022 drug war is a mere offshoot of the DDS experience in Davao,” she explained. “What happened was that the systematic [EJKs] perpetrated by then-Mayor Duterte and the PNP of Davao were replicated at the national level when Duterte assumed the presidency.”
De Lima described a chilling system where assassination squads, comprising active policemen and civilian hitmen, were organized to carry out these killings.
These squads, she claimed, were responsible for the systematic identification and execution of targets, often under the guise of police operations or by so-called “riding-in-tandem” vigilantes.
De Lima highlighted the crucial testimonies of Edgar Matobato and Arturo Lascañas, former DDS members who have implicated Duterte.
She recounted her efforts to bring Matobato to the Senate in 2016, which led to her removal as chairperson of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights and subsequent arrest.
Lascañas, who later admitted to being the DDS operations head, is now a key witness in the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) investigation into Duterte’s actions.
De Lima noted that former Senator Sonny Trillanes recently revealed an ICC document identifying former PNP chief and now Senator Bato De La Rosa and other former high-ranking officials as additional suspects in the ICC investigation.
De Lima’s testimony cast a harsh light on the inadequacies of local investigations into the drug war killings.
She cited a 2017 Malacañang report that acknowledged over 20,000 deaths in police and vigilante operations within a mere 16-month period.
Despite these staggering numbers, she said the Department of Justice has only pursued 52 cases, with dismal results: 32 cases closed without charges, one conviction, and a handful still under investigation.
“We must note, though, that those figures do not yet include the earlier cases of Kian delos Santos, Carl Arnaiz, and Reynaldo de Guzman, which also resulted in the conviction of their policemen killers,” De Lima pointed out. “This is the status of the investigation and prosecution of more than 20,000 drug war killings from 2016 to 2022.”
She underscored the importance of the ICC’s ongoing investigation particularly its Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), describing it as “light years ahead of our local investigation” in terms of holding high-ranking officials accountable.
“We fervently await the application by the OTP and the issuance by the ICC pretrial chamber of warrants of arrest, hopefully within the year,” De Lima said.
The former senator closed her opening remarks with a message from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines: “No matter the moral correctness of the zeal against the drug menace, it can never be a moral justification for summary executions.”
Editor’s Note: This is an updated article. Originally posted with the headline De Lima accuses Duterte as ‘mastermind’ of drug war killings
