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[av_heading heading=’Playing devil’s advocate for de Lima’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
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OVER coffee at Hotel del Rio, this writer sat with a group of habitués singing praises to President Rody Duterte for his swift sweep of illegal drug merchants by hook or by crook.
They were particularly ecstatic over the possibility of Senator Leila de Lima languishing in jail. They seemed to have accepted as truth beyond reasonable doubt the notion that, in her incumbency as Justice Secretary, she had received “donations” from drug lords for her senatorial ambition.
Suddenly, one of them asked, “What if you were in her shoes, would you have turned down the millions of pesos dangled in exchange for looking the other way?”
Nobody answered. They were as much in a dilemma as de Lima might have found herself in. Answering “no” – would have placed them in the league of the beleaguered lady. “Yes, I would have turned it down” would have been unbelievable. Only animals like cats and dogs would not salivate at the sight of the millions of pesos they could not have earned from years of back-breaking work.
Anyway, it is not surprising that the lady senator – a San Beda College of Law graduate who ranked 8th in the 1985 bar exams – has refused to be cowed. She has won cases for clients, who included now “unfriendly” fellow senators Koko Pimentel and Alan Peter Cayetano. The two are present-day allies of President Duterte.
De Lima knows that as in chess, the best defense is offense. While keeping her mouth shut on the” immoral” tag hurled against her, she has chosen as weapon against Duterte the latter’s track record hewing to violation of human rights. To her, the Philippine National Police (PNP) has become an expanded version of the Davao Death Squad that killed suspected drug pushers during Duterte’s incumbency as mayor of Davao City.
De Lima insists that EJK or “extrajudicial killings” has become a policy to end the illegal drug trade in the Philippines. But Duterte debunks it, arguing that rival drug syndicates – if not vigilante groups – could have masterminded some of the killings. Incidentally, as I was writing this yesterday morning, news of fatal riot at the New Bilibid Prison involving drug lords was airing on radio. This could be the stuff today’s headline would scream.
No less than the President has advised law enforcers to “kill or be killed” in self-defense. We are familiar with the usual police explanation whenever a pusher is shot dead: “Nagbatò abi” (he fought).
Rather than belabor de Lima’s opinion that some of the 3,000 dead in the three-month war on drugs were “salvaged,” let us see it on the viewfinder of the PNP chief, Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa. On national TV the other day, Dela Rosa cited Colombia as a model worth following if the Philippine government has to succeed in besting the menace. Well, we all have heard of how the death of drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1993 in the hands of United States-trained Colombian police eventually dissipated the Medellin drug cartel.
The end of that cartel, however, did not end competing drug lords from gambling their own lives in order to gain wealth and power. Today, the cocaine business still thrives ironically between two unlikely competitors – those identified with the Colombian Marxist guerillas and, on the other hand, with the right-wing paramilitary – who control coca plantations and ship cocaine to other countries, whether legally or illegally. Yes, it is exported to countries using it for medical (hence legal) purposes.
An Internet story recently cited a 19-year-old Colombian, Wilmer Ovalle, who earns a substantial salary spraying weed killer around the bright green bushes of coca on a steep hillside in north-eastern Colombia. Born to poor parents, he enthused that he could not have landed a lucrative job “If the government’s drug war had worked.”
Sounds familiar. Here, too, poverty drives people to join the mob, hoping to live and die comfortably. Sadly, the war against poverty remains to be won, too./PN
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