Drug killings go on; journalists must keep probing   

Journalists should continue  investigations into the Philippine government’s campaign against illegal drugs as killings go on, a human rights advocate said at the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism’s Third National Conference on Investigative Journalism.

“They’re saying that it’s not as bloody as before. To some degree, probably, we certainly get the sense that Marcos is so different from Duterte,’’ said Human Rights Watch senior researcher Carlos Conde.

“In Duterte’s time, there was always someone giving orders: Kill, kill, kill. Under Marcos, you never hear him say that, which is nicer, I suppose. But the killings did not stop,’’ he added at the breakout session on the drug war on May 1. 

As of April 30, Dahas has recorded 639 killings on Marcos’ watch. It is a project of the Third World Studies Center of the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of the Philippines Diliman that keeps track of the drug war killings.

More than 6,000 were killed in the Duterte administration’s brutal campaign against illegal drugs, police said. But this could go as high as 60,000, according to estimates of human rights groups.

Citing Dahas data, Conde said there were more killings in the first year of Marcos than in the last year of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte.

 “The only sense that we get that the violence has lessened is because one, it’s not as flagrant and noisy as before, but the blood is still flowing in the streets particularly in certain cities,’’ he said, referring to urban centers such as Manila, Cebu and Davao.

In Davao City, where the former President’s son, Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte, recently launched a local drug war, Dahas has recorded 90 deaths — one carried out by an unidentified person, the rest by law enforcers, he said.

“This is one thing that we should look into,’’ he said.

Conde, a former reporter for The New York Times, said the drug and rehabilitation program of the Marcos administration was just as “coercive’’ as it was during Duterte’s.  

“It’s very coercive because the LGUs (local government units) are still using the watchlist, for instance, to compel, to coerce individuals to under drug rehab treatment,’’ he said.

“And apparently, what they want to happen is that the only way you can get your name off the drug list is to undergo drug rehab retreatment,’’ he added.

“Nobody should be compelled to do that. The problem is, if you refuse, you’ll be targeted. You’ll be subjected to Tokhang,’’ he continued, referring to the local term for Duterte’s drug campaign carried out by policemen raiding homes of drug suspects.  

And since the government offers no incentive for drug rehabilitation, a “drug user’’ would rather go to work to support his family. So far, the government has not shown any proof that someone has benefited from this program, Conde said. 

Does this mean that the thrust of the Marcos administration for a humane, bloodless drug war is wrong?

“The shift itself is not wrong… The problem is how they carry it out. These are the same people, same officials who persecuted people during the drug war, who targeted people, that are implementing this drug rehabilitation treatment programs. How is that possible? So there’s a lot of shenanigans happening in barangays or communities,’’ Conde said.

“That needs to be interrogated as well by civil society and the media,’’ he added.

Credible sources

In the same session, Pulitzer Prize winner Manuel “Manny’’ Mogato shared that doing an investigative report on the drug war takes time, needs collaboration, entails data mining and of course, is highly dependent on interviews with credible sources.

In 2018, Mogato and Reuters colleagues Clare Baldwin and Andrew R.C. Marshall won the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for their series, “Duterte’s War.’’ They were cited for their “relentless reporting’’ on the bloody campaign.  

From April 2016 to December 2017, the three produced 10 special reports, with the help of a motley crew of 40 correspondents, photographers and TV staff.

“It was a lot of work,’’ said Mogato, a veteran military and police reporter who now teaches journalism at the University of Santo Tomas.  

In the campaign’s first six months that saw drug suspects getting killed each night, he stayed close to his “police sources’’ as he did some sleuthing on whether “vigilantes’’ were the perpetrators.     

“You must be familiar with your sources, and you should trust them,’’ he said. “Secondly, they should be credible.’’  

Reuters reported about the victims and then about the killers – some policemen confessed to carrying out the killings.

But in 2017, the friendly policemen clammed up after former Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV filed a supplemental communication asking the International Criminal Court to investigate Duterte.

By that time Reuters has compiled voluminous reports from the police – just enough for the investigative team to mount data mapping, which depicted that the killings were concentrated in Manila, Camanava (Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, Valenzuela) and an area in Payatas, Quezon City, which is under the jurisdiction of Police Station 6.

“Based on the report, there’s one group [of policemen] that’s always involved. When we did more investigation, we found out that these policemen were handpicked by Bato dela Rosa (then national police chief and now Sen. Ronald dela Rosa). They all came from Davao. They’re ‘Davao boys’,’’ Mogato said.

They were led by Maj. Lito Patay, he added, eliciting chuckles from the audience.  

Soc-med savvy

According to Mogato, some of the policemen at Station 6 in Payatas were social-media savvy. Some even flaunted their “accomplishments” on platforms such as Meta (formerly Facebook) claiming “If drug addiction is a problem, we are the cure.’’

The Reuters team tracked them down on their social media accounts, eventually sending out a request for interview. Four agreed to the interview but backed out as calls for investigation of the campaign grew.   

“A journalist’s job is not just to do interviews with the community, the victims, families, at the funeral parlor or the church. We should also be mining data based on social media,’’ Mogato said.  

In January 2017, they had a breakthrough when a retired police general agreed to present two policemen who had first-hand information that the riding-in tandem gunmen were colleagues of theirs.

When pressed for proof, one showed a text message from a police officer requesting that on a certain night they should park their police car away from a street corner so they would not run into the “riding in tandem’’ gunmen.  

“That means the police are behind the riding-in tandem attacks. Those involved were neophyte policemen. It’s some sort of a baptism of fire,’’ Mogato said.

His advice to investigative journalists?  

“The killing of just one person isn’t right. We should keep investigating and getting interested in the human rights situation of the country,’’ Mogato said. — TJ Burgonio and John Dewey Ocfemia