As the Duterte drug war dirt being dug up by the so-called Quad Committee of the House of Representatives piles up, the stench is becoming stronger. It is so bad that Duterte supporters are claiming that the investigations are intended to politically harass the powerful family from Davao that once ruled the country with its signature closed fist that many members of the current Congress used to brandish with pride, whilst conveniently averting their eyes to everything that was going on right in front of them.
The criminal activities proliferated under the Duterte regime that got the most attention from the investigations include extra judicial killings and Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations (POGO), as those are the most noticeable strands of the tangled web of what everyone has known are the government-sponsored crimes that everyone was somehow able to tolerate just a few years ago.
To be fair to the lawmakers, their “investigation in aid of legislation” has resulted in more than just digging up lots of dirt, but also led to the filing of a few pieces of legislation.
One proposes to classify as heinous crimes extrajudicial killings “committed by a public officer, person in authority, agent of a person in authority, or any person who is acting under the actual or apparent authority of the state,” with the penalty of life imprisonment. The bill also seeks to grant reparations to the legal heirs of EJK victims. That proposed bill is significant, considering the numbers of “drug suspects”” killed during the six years of the Rodrigo Duterte administration and its bloody war on drugs. Official numbers range from 6,000-8,000 but human rights groups believe the actual number of dead could be up to 30,000 Filipinos.
Another legislative measure proposes a complete ban on “all forms of offshore gaming operations in the country,” laying out penalties for violators, including foreign nationals and public officers. POGOs flourished under the Duterte administration, being touted as a source of easy revenue for the government. However, it came with a host of criminal organizations and activities, from money laundering to human trafficking, and even kidnapping and murders.
To be fair, those proposed bills can be considered a good result of the Quadcom investigations, which have exposed so much dirt on how things were done by government officials that were apparently made to think that there wouldn’t be day or reckoning so they could subvert and ignore the law just because their set of priorities were apparently more important than anything else.
However, if the Quadcom investigations are really meant for the good of the nation in general, and not just aimed at bringing down a political clan so another can take its place, it really has to come up with more comprehensive measures and protections to ensure that whatever misdeeds the Duterte administration was able to pull off can never ever be repeated.
Because if you come to think of it, while EJKs and POGOs are terrible crime machines, they are simply the symptoms, and not the cause of the disease that was able to easily afflict our country for 6 whole years, when all 3 branches of government so quickly bent the knee to one guy who was very good at projecting that he was the strongman that the country needed to fight his chosen evil that wasn’t even that big of a problem until he deemed it so.
If the Quadcom really wants to do its job, it has to ensure that no elected Filipino leader can excuse such crimes from being carried out by our government ever again. This means strengthening the checks and balances instead that were supposed to go with having three independent branches of government, especially after being treated to a master class in how the existing protective measures could be short circuited.
The Dutertes and their supporters have an intimate relationship with harassment, having been on the giving end when they were in power, as their brand of government went after politicians like Senator Leila de Lima and Mayor Jed Mabilog. Their problem is now that they are at the receiving end, where it’s just not as fun. If it’s any consolation, at least this brand of harassment isn’t as brutal, unlike during their time, when aside from sending people to jail or forcing self exile, quite a few mayors were either included in their ‘drug list’ and killed; or killed and then included in that magical list that excused practically everything.
If you come to think of it, the harassed Dutertes can always look at what happened to the Marcoses, who were also “harassed” into leaving the country and going into exile. For political dynasties that play the long game and depend on the Filipino people’s short memory for plunder and grave abuses, and gullibility to misinformation and propaganda, a comeback is surely feasible and always in the cards. It may take some time, but in this country, anything is possible.
As the cycle of harassment continues, Filipinos can hope to benefit by getting additional safeguards as the abuses and loopholes of previous administrations are exposed. After our country was traumatized by Martial Law, the public officials that took their place had to harass their predecessors as they put in place protections against its return. This time around, if the current set of rulers can do a bit more than the obvious, which is criminalize the already criminal EJKs and POGO, and add more safeguards against the weaponization of a sketchy drug list, and further protect and improve the ability of our armed and security forces to withstand the pressure to commit illegal acts when encouraged to do so by a commander in chief without a moral compass, our nation could make incremental gains and come out stronger.*