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.
Curiosity could be fatal. It could also betray interests.
A tabloid reporter, Paul Gutierrez, told a congressional inquiry he was just curious when he paid a brief visit to a room at the Senate where a resource person, Jimmy Guban, was detained.
Lawmakers could not help it but were also curious about what was so special about the former Bureau of Customs intelligence officer.
Gutierrez and Guban were not friends. They had never met and talked before.
Gutierrez also admitted to lawmakers that Guban was the first detained Senate resource person he had visited in the 10 years he was covering the Upper House of Congress as a reporter for People’s Journal.
And it was a brief visit. A few minutes, Guban had recalled.
He claimed Gutierrez had visited him to warn him not to implicate the eldest son and son-in-law of President Rodrigo Duterte in an illegal drug smuggling case at the Bureau of Customs.
“Alam namin kung saan ka nakatira,” Guban recalled Gutierrez telling him when the latter went to his detention area in the Senate in 2018.
At the Quad Committee hearing, Gutierrez denied he had threatened Guban. He said it was only out of curiosity he paid him a visit.
But the visit was enough for Guban to fear for his life. Some of his close friends had been killed. Thus, he was forced to link a friend, a former police colonel, to the drug smuggling case.
The former police colonel, Ed Acierto, went into hiding after Duterte placed a P10-million bounty on his head.
Acierto’s problems began after he made two reports implicating Davao City Congressman Paolo Duterte and his brother-in-law Mans Carpio, who was married to his Paolo’s sister, Sara, and Michael Yang, the president’s adviser, to an attempt to smuggle in P6 billion with of illegal drugs.
Acierto said he gave his reports to two national police chiefs – Ronald dela Rosa and Oscar Albayalde, two of five senior police officers considered suspects in the crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
At the same congressional inquiry, Acierto stood by his accusations against Duterte’s son, son-in-law, and economic adviser on the illegal drug trade.
Guban, who linked Acierto to the illegal drug smuggling case, had recanted his earlier statements and corroborated Acierto’s accusations.
Acierto and Guban’s testimonies before the Quad Committee reinforced lawmakers’ suspicion that Duterte used his war on drugs campaign to eliminate rival illegal drug cartels.
Most of the high-profile drug personalities who were killed, Jeffrey “Jaguar” Diaz of Cebu and Melvin “Dragon” Odicta of Iloilo, Mayors Rolando Espinosa and Reynaldo Parojinog, were believed to belong to a rival drug cartel.
Antonio Trillanes IV, a former senator, said he also had information that the Dutertes – the father and his children – were regularly given money by a known drug lord in Davao City before he was elected president.
Trillanes said there were paper trails of these drug money payments because there were manager’s checks deposited to Duterte and his daughter’s joint account.
He said Duterte could be a top protector of an illegal drug syndicate and, later, helped them by eliminating a rival syndicate in the war on drugs policy.
However, lawmakers have to continue digging deeper into Duterte’s involvement in the illegal drug trade and his genocidal war on drugs policy.
The lawmakers had to tie up a lot of things – how the thousands of deaths in extrajudicial killings connected to the war on drugs were connected to the rivalry among illegal drug cartels.
How were the police operations against the illegal drug trade funded? And could the proliferation of offshore gaming operations have something to do with the police anti-illegal drug operations?
Duterte’s war on drugs had killed too many. It also destroyed too many lives. There were too many victims, too many fall guys.
A former senator was detained for seven years; a former local official spent seven months in jail; a former police colonel has been on the run; and a former Customs intelligence officer was in prison.
When can these victims find justice?
The lawmakers looking at the past sins of former president Duterte still have to find a smoking gun proof. They must hurry up. The victims cannot wait any longer.
They can start uncovering things with Paul Gutierrez’s sudden curiosity about Guban’s conditions. It can open a Pandora’s box.
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