Cardinal-designate David represents Filipinos’ hope for justice

Slowly, the season turns, from a time of killing to a time of healing… to once more shore up the foundations of peace

Oct 08, 2024

Kalookan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David answers questions during a press conference at the Commission of Human Rights headquarters in Manila on Sept. 14, 2017, as bishops rallied opposition to President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war. (Photo: AFP)


By Inday Espina-Varona, Manila

Pope Francis’ appointment of Kalookan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David as cardinal designate immediately sparked thoughts of Ecclesiastes 3.

The promise of change, of God’s grace amidst dark days, has succored rights defenders in the Philippines, which has Asia’s largest Catholic population.

David’s appointment comes as lawmakers wind down their probe into the conduct of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, with discoveries that vindicate prophetic warnings by clerical and secular critics.

David, who also heads the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), frequently denounced the extrajudicial killings of tens of thousands of mostly poor Filipinos from 2016 to 2022. His diocese alone reeled from nearly 400 deaths in the first two years of Duterte’s rule.

“The biggest lie is that this drug war is meant to eradicate illegal drugs,” David told a conference on democracy and disinformation in April 2019.

Death threats poured in, including from the president himself in December of that same year.

David briefly went into hiding yet he refused to be silenced.

He expressed pain over the massive support for mass murder in a country with 85 million Catholics.

He traced the “split-level kind of Christianity,” that had Filipinos separating religious belief from temporal events to the Church’s failure to educate its flock. He expressed fear that the social repercussions would take a generation to unravel.

Dark secrets exposed
Congressional hearings show the accuracy of David’s diagnosis.

Senior police officials, including those whose ferocity earned Durerte’s praise, have bared the following:

• Monetary rewards motivated the police to kill thousands sans due process while law enforcers who missed “kill quotas” risked getting tagged as drug cartel protectors.

• In the blackest of ironies, drug lords and gambling lords underwrote police kill operations.

Rewards ranged from US$300 to $1,000 per head, according to the House of Representatives committee on human rights chair, Bienvenido Abante. Using the low end of these figures and the Philippine National Police (PNP) admission of 7,500 drug war deaths, that computes to at least $2.2 million — $8.7 million if one uses the human rights sector’s estimate of 27,000 killings.

Police did not question orders to “neutralize” high-profile targets, including foreign nationals already in jail, judges, local politicians, lawyers, businessmen, and even government executives. Some of their targets turned out to be officials investigating corruption in agencies where the president had placed loyalists in top positions.

A police lieutenant colonel received $8,700 for the murder of a retired general who was stalling efforts to award illegal gambling groups with lottery franchises.

Hearings also unearthed evidence of law enforcers and their patrons taking over tons of seized narcotics. Lawmakers estimate the value of siphoned drugs at $140 million.

House public order and safety committee chair Dan Fernandez has laid out the real story of Duterte’s war:

Crime groups funded police extrajudicial killings to mask the expansion of the narcotics trade. Foreign nationals masquerading as Filipinos laundered drug money through land purchases and the construction of cyber hubs where trafficked workers manned global fraud operations,

The government task force on transnational crime estimates that just one section of a hub could rake in $6 million weekly. A single hub could involve dozens of fraud operations.

Even Duterte’s harshest critics did not imagine this.

Awakening from apathy
Part of David’s prophetic work was reminding Filipinos that playing blind and deaf encourages abuse.

Many of the legislators who now rail against the drug war were once noisy supporters or silent spectators. Rep. Romeo Acop, the co-chair of the four-committee probe, admits as much.

“When the killings were happening, we remained silent,” the retired police general said during one hearing. “One, it was because of fear, and two, because of approval by certain sectors of society.”

This was the perfect recipe for impunity.

Human rights workers, including lawyers, were gunned down. Others were hauled off to jail on trumped-up charges.

Former senator Leila de Lima spent six years in detention for daring to launch a probe into extrajudicial killings during Duterte’s long years as mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines.

David and three other bishops faced, but overcame, sedition raps that also implicated three priests, then-vice president Leno Robredo, and three opposition senators.

There have so far been very few convictions for extrajudicial killings. Some plaintiffs have folded due to pressure from lawmen and the financial hardships that come with the loss of the family breadwinner.

Challenges ahead
San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alminaza, another outspoken rights defender, says full healing from the drug war trauma requires “the prosecution of the guilty all the way to the principal.”

That’s a tall order in this country. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s legal counsel, Juan Ponce Enrile, also the architect of martial law under the incumbent’s father, has just been acquitted of plunder, in one of several cases that sent more than 100,000 citizens to the streets a decade ago.

The watchdog Dahas PH has also monitored 359 drug-related killings from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, on top of the 342 recorded in 2022.

The country still confronts a long slog to justice. Still, the light that has pierced through the dark blanket cast by Duterte could allow rights defenders to identify remaining patterns of impunity.

Slowly, the season turns, from a time of killing to a time of healing, a time to mend tattered democratic institutions, a time to once more shore up the foundations of peace.--ucanews.com

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