Law enforcement has fallen into the hands of officially hired gangs of thugs, writes DAVID McNEILLin Davao
THEY CAME to kill her children one by one. First was Richard in 2001, then his brother Christopher. Bobby was taken from her the following year and Fernando in 2007. Now Clarita Alia lives in fear that Arnold, her only remaining son is next. And far from protecting her shattered family, it is the police who are behind the killings, she says.
“The police said: ‘We will take your sons one by one’,” recalls the 54-year-old grandmother at the graveside of her murdered brood in the southern Philippine city of Davao. “They may kill me too, but I am not afraid to die. I’m already old.”
Insects hum in the humid tranquillity of this pauper’s graveyard. Below, the city of 1.3 million people, a tourist hub for some of the most spectacular scenery in Southeast Asia, sprawls toward the Pacific.
Mayor Rodrigo Duterte boasts that he has made this the safest urban zone in the country, but Davao’s motto of “love, peace and progress” is belied by an ugly killing spree that has claimed nearly 900 lives, including dozens of children.
The mayor says they all deserved to die. “What I want to do is to instill fear,” he told reporters in February.
“If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination.”
Condemnation and press coverage have failed to stop summary executions of what Duterte calls “society’s garbage” – Davao’s own slum dogs who are alleged petty drug dealers’ young toughs and street children.
Vigilantes have murdered 894 people in the last decade, including at least 80 minors, according to the Tambayan Centre for Children’s Rights, a Christian NGO that operates in Davao’s city centre.
The youngest victim was 12 – and the pace of killings is increasing: 57 people were stabbed or shot in the first three months of this year alone, up from two in the whole of 1998.
The killers escape arrest thanks to the tolerance and sometimes “outright support of the local authorities”, says a new report on the killings by Davao Death Squads by the US-based Human Rights Watch.
Most chillingly of all, officially sanctioned vigilantism is spreading as the country’s economic woes deepen, warns Edith Casiple, Tambayan’s executive director.
“The problem is now all over the country. Other leaders are copying mayor Duterte.”
In several cities, including the capital Manila, politicians have praised Davao’s style of rough justice. Activists, trade unionists and newspaper reporters have been added to the assassins’ lists.
Police officers in collusion with local city governments across the southern island of Mindanao are involved in the targeted killings – known in the local press as “salvagings” and “rub-outs”.
Executions have also been reported in the troubled holiday resort of Cebu and in Manila.
Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who once appointed Duterte as an adviser on peace and order, has “largely turned a blind eye” to the murders, says Human Rights Watch.
Most executions follow a similar pattern. Police officers or government officials from barangays – local administrations – approach alleged troublemakers to warn that they have made a hit list known as the “order of battle” or, in Davao, “Duterte’s list”.
Failure to heed the warning by quitting “illegal activities” or leaving town is a sentence of death, usually carried out by men on motorbikes carrying butcher’s knives or .45-calibre handguns.
The vigilantes have achieved their purpose: instilling terror in the city’s slums, says Renante Ventula (25), who lives on Davao’s streets. “When we talk about them, we do so in low voices because we don’t now who is listening.”
Last October, he says, his friend was murdered in a local internet café. “He had been warned by the San Pedro [(city centre] police. Two men arrived on motorbikes without licence plates, went into the cafe and took turns stabbing him. He had 10 stab wounds.”
When the cops arrive at the scene of such executions, they ignore investigative procedure and fail to interview witnesses, claim observers. Few of the killers have been caught and not one of the murders has been condemned by the city’s mayor, who used to read out the names of “troublemakers” on his weekly TV show.
The vigilantes, who are themselves sometimes recruited from the ranks of petty criminals, are guided by police officers or ex-police, known as amo “or bosses” says Human Rights Watch. Killings are often subcontracted – by the time they reach the street, they can reportedly be done for as little as 350-500 pesos (€5.30-€7.50).
Police spokesman Doble Rogelio denies the claims. “We are trying our best but there are no witnesses to the killings,” he said, the now standard police response to accusations they are not doing enough the catch the culprits. Local businesses claim the murders have made Davao a safer destination for thousands of tourists who visit annually.
“Duterte is very popular here,” says Emily Lawas-Juausengpue, owner of a city centre restaurant. “If you are not a criminal, you have nothing to fear.”
The mayor has been elected four times, most lately in 2001, and has been dubbed “Dirty Harry” in some of the Filipino press. Photographers often snap him holding a shotgun or sitting on the powerful motorbike he uses to ride to work.
But Irish priest Shay Cullen, who has lived in the Philippines for three decades, reacts angrily to suggestions that the victims deserved to die. “These are not criminals.They’re children who have never been convicted of anything.”
A decade ago, Fr Cullen was sued for libel by Davao’s previous mayor after he started a letter- writing campaign to halt the death squads. “It was a scary time because I could have been assassinated myself.”
He says the growing annual death toll shows people like mayor Duterte are now “out of control” and protected by powerful political backers.
Years of pressure by campaigners like Fr Cullen seemed to pay off this year when the Philippine Commission on Human Rights held a three-day hearing on the killings in Davao in March.
“Children are being executed,” chair woman Leila DeLima told the press. Most alarming “is the growing culture or mentality of acceptance of the executions . . . This is worse than apathy and indifference,” she warned, calling it “selective vigilantism” that targeted the poor and left big-time criminals untouched.
Mayor Duterte lived up to his gung-ho image at the hearing.
Asked by DeLima what he would do if he captured a member of the shadowy death squads operating in his city, he intoned: “If I catch you killing someone, I will shoot you in front of the people.”
The commission found him accountable for the murders on his watch and Duterte quit his supervisory role over the police force in April, but most observers believe he is still the city’s political kingpin.
In the rancid one-room hovel where Clarita Alia lives, her oldest son Arnold dozes on the only bed, next to her baby grandchild. She raised her seven children here in the teeming city markets of Bankerohan, where she sells cigarettes on the street for a living. None of her children finished primary school and some drifted into petty crime.
When the police came for Richard, they said he had already been arrested 10 times.
“I fought with them,” she recalls. “They didn’t have a warrant and I told them they couldn’t take my son. And the senior policeman said: ‘Okay, watch out because your sons will be killed, one by one.’” Richard was stabbed to death a few weeks later, aged 18.
Christopher (17) and Bobby (14) were knifed within months of each other. In desperation, Clarita sent Fernando to live out of the city but, after he returned, he was killed by the faceless assassins in April 2007, aged 15. Only Arnold remains, until the killers come again. “It hurts every time I talk about it,” she says, “but I don’t have a choice, because I want the world to know what happened to my children.”