MANUEL “MANNY” P. MOGATO is Editor-at-Large and opinion writer, writing under the column “In the Trenches.” As Reuters Manila correspondent, he and two other colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2018 for their coverage of the Duterte administration’s war on drugs.
Rodrigo Duterte’s six years in power were characterized by fear of a secret and parallel organization that emerged within the national police to carry out the genocidal war on drugs.
Estimates vary on the number of deaths, but the Philippine National Police (PNP) has acknowledged that more than 7,000 people died in legitimate police anti-illegal drugs operations during those six years.
Human rights groups and the academe said the death toll in the war on drugs could be over 30,000 people – street-level peddlers, couriers, users, and some politicians, lawyers, and innocent civilians.
It was only two years after he stepped down from power when the House of Representatives started investigating the mass killings, uncovering shocking details about the war on drugs.
The secretive organization came to light as one of Duterte’s closest police officers volunteered information about the funding, organization, and operations of the secret police unit, which only answered the president.
Even police generals and the heads of the PNP deferred to a mere police colonel who was tasked to carry out the drug war.
The International Criminal Court has been conducting a separate investigation at The Hague for crimes against humanity.
Duterte won the presidency in 2016 with only 39 percent of the votes cast. He did not have the majority to control the Republic. He was also considered an outsider in Manila politics, having fewer connections with big businesses and influential political families.
But, in the end, he succeeded in consolidating power, using his experiences in Davao City with killing tens of thousands.
It was a reign of terror, a history lesson he learned from China, France, Russia, and other countries where dictators and despots controlled the population.
Davao City was the hotbed of Communist insurgency when Duterte first rose to become vice mayor in the late 1980s.
It was the laboratory for urban warfare by the New People’s Army (NPA), which formed hit squads called Sparrow Units.
Assassination teams from the Sparrow Unit shot dead traffic policemen in broad daylight in the middle of a busy street, sowing fear among the population.
Duterte copied the rebels’ strategy, forming his infamous Davao Death Squad (DDS) from the ranks of loyal police officers, former rebels, and civilian volunteers.
A Redemptorist priest had documented the DDS killings from the late 1980s to 2016 when Duterte rose to power and became president.
He came up with a figure of more than 1,400 dead as the number of deaths fluctuated when Duterte was not in power as mayor. He was a one-term congressman from 1998 to 2001 after serving for nine years as the city’s top executive.
He returned in 2001 as mayor, serving until 2010 when he slid to become the vice mayor to his daughter, Sara Duterte. He returned as mayor for the last time in 2013.
He became a popular mayor out of sowing fear as he publicly threatened petty criminals, his critics, and political foes over his weekly radio and television show.
Duterte copied his Davao model and implemented it on a national scale as soon as he was sworn into office on June 30, 2016.
His plan began in May 2016, as soon as he won the elections, but before he was officially proclaimed winner and sworn in as leader.
At 5 a.m. on May 26, he called up a trusted police officer, Royina Garma, and asked her to see him at his residence.
When they met, he asked Garma to look for a reliable police officer, preferably a member of the Iglesia ni Kristo sect, to head a task force to implement his campaign against illegal drugs.
Garma knew only of one police officer with such qualification – Edilberto Leonardo, her upperclassman at the Philippine National Police Academy.
A month later, Leonardo and Garma gathered a few classmates from the PNPA classes of 1996 and 1997 and paid a courtesy call on Duterte at his office at the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) in Davao City’s Panacan district.
Soon after, these police officers under Leonardo’s supervision were immediately assigned to key and strategic positions and carried out the drug war based on Duterte’s targets.
For instance, Garma’s classmate, Lito Patay, was transferred in July 2016 from Tagum City in Davao del Norte to Quezon City, where 108 people died in the 13 months he was posted there.
Patay’s team was responsible for nearly 40 percent of all deaths recorded in Quezon City during the period.
Leonardo’s special teams were also responsible for the deaths of high-value targets in Duterte’s list — local officials in Batangas, Leyte, and Misamis Occidental provinces.
The deaths of these officials had a chilling effect on other politicians and personalities as well as ordinary individuals.
Many innocent people also became collateral damage, including a nine-year-old girl hit by a stray bullet when assassins killed two men in Caloocan City.
Lawyers, who were defending drug suspects, were also targeted, as well as human rights advocates and journalists.
Duterte weaponized the law to silence lawmakers and political opponents who opposed the drug war, even to the extent of fabricating evidence and coercing witnesses to make false accusations.
Former senator Leila de Lima fell victim to Duterte’s efforts to silence the opposition, spending seven years in detention based on false witnesses and fabricated evidence.
In just six months after he assumed power, Duterte had complete control of the government and secured an unprecedented popularity rating among the population.
All this he won through an atmosphere of fear prevailing in those times. Duterte’s reign of terror worked. Manny Mogato
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