Manila Rep. Bienvenido Abante on Friday defended lawmakers who allocated state resources for the Duterte administration’s anti-drug campaign, saying the billions of pesos they earmarked was never intended to fund operations leading to the summary execution of thousands of Filipinos.
Abante, who chairs the human rights panel and co-chairs the Quad Committee, said then-incumbent
House members unwittingly financed a “drug war” that would claim “over 20,000” mostly innocent lives by approving the previous administration’s budget requests.
“The objective of this campaign was to end the threat posed by illegal drugs, not to cut short the lives of innocent men, women, and children,” he stressed.
“The bloody drug war implemented during the Duterte administration, as explained by one of our colleagues, did not solve the drug problem. In fact, it worsened it, creating more harm than good by orphaning thousands of children who lost their parents, often the family breadwinners, on mere suspicion of involvement in drugs,” lamented Abante.
The lawmaker lamented that “the victimized families, left fatherless by Oplan Tokhang and Oplan Double Barrel, are now even poorer five to ten years later.”
“With no support from their slain breadwinners, these children and relatives struggle to get a proper education, and as a result end up as street children who often get involved in petty crimes due to their poverty. Instead of solving the problem, the previous administration exacerbated it,” he added.
However, Abante also recognized that most lawmakers and other concerned sectors still chose to remain silent even upon realizing the unabated extrajudicial killings (EJKs) happening then.
“Media outlets were silenced, and those who opposed the drug war—such as lawyers, judges, and politicians—were implicated in illegal drugs. Their names were unjustifiably included in publicized drug lists, and they were later murdered because of it––with no thorough police investigation following their deaths,” said Abante.
“In simple terms, the Duterte government used taxpayers’ money, through intelligence funds, to kill thousands of Filipino drug suspects deprived of due process––including innocents,” added Abante.
Meanwhile, another lawmaker said Sen. Ronald dela Rosa has a lot of explaining to do over the jailing of then-Sen. Leila de Lima over trumped-up drug charges.
Santa Rosa City Rep. Dan Fernandez pointed out that alleged drug lord Kerwin Espinosa’s claim that Dela Rosa helped fabricate the charges against De Lima has been corroborated by Police Lt. Col. Jovie Espenido.
The Laguna solon said the burden of proof now falls on Dela Rosa to try to refute the mounting evidence against him.
Fernandez challenged Dela Rosa to take advantage of the Lower Chamber’s inquiry to clear his name.
“That’s the reason why… if he abandons parliamentary courtesy, it’s okay [for Dela Rosa to appear before the Quad Comm]. Because when congressmen are invited [to Senate hearings] they usually show up,” he said in Filipino.
During Tuesday’s marathon Quad Comm hearing, Espenido retracted his previous statements made during a 2016 Senate hearing, where he implicated De Lima in the illegal drug trade.
Espenido confirmed his retraction in the presence of De Lima, who attended the hearing for the first time as a resource person.
In an earlier Quad Comm hearing, Kerwin Espinosa claimed that Dela Rosa had pressured him and Espenido to link De Lima to illegal drug operations, which led to her incarceration from February 2017 until November 2023.
Now that Espenido has corroborated this claim, Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers, overall chairman of the Quad Comm, urged Dela Rosa to clarify the matter once and for all, possibly in a Senate investigation.
Barbers also remarked that testimonies from witnesses in the Quad Comm are pointing to the possibility of fabricated charges against De Lima and possibly other officials.
“It is not far-fetched to assume that they did this [fabricate charges] to others. This could have been done to mayors, who were accused of being high-value targets or drug lords, which caused them to be assassinated,” Barbers said, apparently referencing the 2018 assassination of Tanauan Batangas Mayor Antonio Halili.
As this developed, former President Rodrigo Duterte, relatives of alleged EJK victims and 30 other individuals were invited to attend a Senate Blue Ribbon subcommittee’s investigation into the previous administration’s drug war on Monday.
Also invited by the subcommittee led by Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III, are De Lima, PCSO General Manager Royina Garma, and former Iloilo City mayor Jed Mabilog, among others.
