[The Slingshot] Leila de Lima’s supplemental communication to the ICC

Unknown to many, and certainly unknown to Rodrigo Duterte, then-senator Leila de Lima filed a supplemental communication with the International Criminal Court on October 6, 2017 when Duterte had already jailed her on fabricated charges of drug trafficking. The supplemental communication was personally submitted by one of her lawyers to the ICC in The Hague, Netherlands as duly acknowledged by the head of the Information and Evidence Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP).

Under the ICC processes, there is no such thing as complaints. What it receives is called communication. This may be in the form of information from various sources, including media reports, related materials, and information from individuals, groups and victims. The ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor then assesses and validates the communication received.

The first such communication the ICC received on the Duterte drug war killings was from lawyer Jude Josue Sabio entitled, “The Situation of Mass Murder in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte: The Mass Murderer,” dated April 24, 2017.

On June 5, 2017, then-senator Antonio Trillanes IV and then-congressman Gary Alejano of the Magdalo party list submitted the first supplemental communication, entitled “Digong, The Grave Digger: A Look Into the Philippine President’s Bloody War on Drugs.”

On October 6, 2017, the jailed Senator De Lima submitted the second supplemental communication, “TARGETTING MAYORS, KILLING MINORS, AND ONE-DAY BLOODBATHS: Duterte’s Mass Extermination Program in the Philippines Thus Far.”

The De Lima Supplemental Communication came a year after 16 senators voted to oust her as chair of the Senate committee on justice and human rights. Days prior, De Lima had presented in the Senate confessed Davao Death Squad hitman Edgar Matobato who accused then-president Duterte of ordering extrajudicial killings in Davao city. Obviously, the 16 senators were cajoled by Malacañang to gang up on her. And then Duterte had her locked up in jail on February 24, 2017. These predicates are important. It was part of the price that Duterte wanted to extract from De Lima.

Was he able to silence her? Given the milieu of crucifixion around her, we can clearly see now the gallantry of Leila de Lima, that even while in the oppression of her Duterte-decreed imprisonment, she managed to file a supplemental communication against him in the ICC. Today, as she savors the freedom that the court verdict has given her, De Lima is free to relate what was contained in her Supplemental Communication.

De Lima gave the best possible panoramic view of the Duterte drug war by presenting several facets not mentioned by the two previous communications. The first part, Duterte’s Drug War, begins with the Parojinog Raid in Ozamiz City on July 30, 2017. We all know what happened, that then-mayor Reynaldo Parojinog and his family were shot dead by raiding police “because they fought back” and hence there was a firefight. De Lima gives the contrasting version that no court of law under Duterte had bothered to investigate:

“However, according to a witness who survived the incident, what happened was a massacre. According to said witness, the people inside Mayor Parojinog’s residence were ordered to gather inside a room and lie face down. Later, the police raiding team all left the room and several grenades were lobbed inside the room.”

She then gives a point about the breakdown of law and order under Duterte: “Like all other staged police encounters ending in firefights and the killing of the subject suspects, no investigation was conducted by the government to ascertain the veracity of the police version, despite the revelations of a survivor to the massacre.”

She then presents the Mabilog Set-up, when Duterte threatened to assign Police Inspector Jovie Espenido to Iloilo City to go after its mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog who Duterte had alleged was a drug trade protector.

What exactly was Duterte’s beef against Mabilog? Duterte lost by a big margin to Mar Roxas in Iloilo City in the 2016 presidential elections. “From then on, Duterte painted Iloilo Province as ‘the most shabulized province’ in the Philippines and Iloilo City as the ‘the most shabulized city’, even when among 81 provinces and 27 cities listed by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) from January to August 2016, Iloilo province ranked only 79^th in terms of the number of drug-affected barangays per province, while Iloilo City ranked 51^st.”

In contrast, how did Duterte’s own “safest city in the world” Davao fare? Using officially published statistics, De Lima reasoned that Davao City “posted the highest murder rate in the Philippines from 2010 to 2015 and had an increased drug rate in 2012, after 24 years under Duterte’s strongman rule, as admitted by its own City Anti-Drug Abuse Council. At the start of Duterte’s nationwide drug war in July 2016, Davao City registered a number high of 17,211 drug surrenders, proving that as late as Duterte’s assumption to the presidency, the city that he controlled with an iron fist for almost 30 years was still among the most drug-infested in the country.”

Mabilog and his family left the country in late August 2017. For sure, he was next in line to be executed by another Espenido raiding team, as it did in Albuera, Leyte and Ozamiz city.

De Lima then narrates the so-called Davao Group that shipped P6.4-billion worth of shabu through the Port of Manila using layers of grease money paid to the Bureau of Customs and private brokers. This is now part of the investigations currently being conducted at the House of Representatives. The significance of the Davao Group link lies in its corroborative power — ICC witnesses Arturo Lascañas and Edgar Matobato both narrated their personal participation in the drugs-smuggling activities of Duterte son Paolo. It also provides a counteracting version — that the Duterte drug war was only a sham designed to destroy competitor drug traders.

De Lima was taking notes while in jail. Though she was rendered practically incommunicado with neither communication gadgets nor a computer, she had very detailed scenarios of the Duterte operations.

The part on the One-time Big-time police killing operations beginning August 15, 2017 was pivotal. It was called such because of the record number of killings in one single day in Metro Manila and Central Luzon. I acquiesce to her narration:

“Thirty-two (32) drug suspects were killed in province-wide operations in Bulacan, the highest number of people killed in a single day since the start of Duterte’s program for the nationwide extermination of drug suspects middle of last year.”

“On the same day, another record high was set by the counterparts of the Bulacan police in Manila, where twenty-six (26) people were killed in Santa Cruz, Malate, Tondo, and Sampaloc Districts.”

“Finally, still on the same day and the day after, seventeen (17) people were killed in the CAMANAVA (Caloocan-Malabon-Navotas-Valenzuela) area of Metro Manila.”

“In total, sixty-nine (69) to seventy-four (74) people were killed in the five Metro Manila cities and one province in a span of two days. PNP Chief Ronald Dela Rosa said that there will be no let-up in Duterte’s drug war, adding that the so-called ‘One-Time Big-Time’ operations are a ‘synchronized simultaneous service of warrant or buy-bust operations.‘”

“He threatened more killings, since Duterte’s narco-list ‘is still thick’ because names are continuously added to said list. He promised that the police will continue with the ‘One-Time Big-Time’ operations as long as the suspects are still free.”

“After the incidents, President Duterte praised the ‘One-Time Big-Time’ Operations in a speech delivered before the members of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC), saying that 32 dead in one day is good, and goaded police to kill 32 more every day in order to ‘reduce what ails the country.‘”

Suffice it to say that today, the De Lima narration of the One-Time Big-Time is amply supported by testimonies of victims’ families and published recordings of Dela Rosa’s and Duterte’s statements.

That is only the first part. The second part of the De Lima Supplemental Communication deals with the Outcry Over the Killing of Minors. She begins about the Caloocan Death Squad as documented by Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of the Diocese of Caloocan.

Then she segues to the celebrated case of Kian de los Santos, narrating his murder by police and then the public outcry it sparked. Here De Lima narrates one of the most peculiar damage controls Duterte maneuvered, using the help of a state agency within its criminal justice system.

“Immediately, his administration started the damage control by appearing to champion the dead boy and his family. The Public Attorney’s Office (PAO) Chief Persida Acosta, who recently reiterated that there are no extra-judicial killings (EJK) under the Duterte Administration and defended the police accused of EJKs instead of the victims’ families, rushed to present herself and the services of her entire agency to Kian’s parents. Together with her superior Secretary of Justice Vitaliano Aguirre II, who likewise previously proclaimed that criminals are not humans and therefore killing them was not a crime against humanity, Acosta brought Kian’s parents to an audience with Duterte himself at Malacañang Palace. The public relations stunt was geared towards assuaging the public outcry, and culminated with a photograph of Kian’s parents doing the iconic Duterte fist-pump with the President and VACC Chairman Dante Jimenez.”

“The next step undertaken by Acosta, Aguirre and Jimenez was to take control of the child witnesses to Kian’s killing. The child witnesses were taken under the protection of opposition Senator Risa Hontiveros and presented before the Senate Committee investigation on the killing of Kian. Aguirre and Acosta demanded that custody over the witnesses be surrendered to the governments’ Witness Protection Program (WPP) administered by Aguirre. The fight over the custody of the Kian witnesses ended in a stand-off at the residence of Caloocan Bishop Pablo David, where the children witnesses were eventually given sanctuary, with Acosta, a VACC lawyer, and the PNP-CIDG demanding custody of the child witnesses from the Bishop.”

By this, De Lima showed to the ICC how state actors were coopted into the vicious Duterte script. God knows what could have happened to Kian’s witnesses had Senator Hontiveros and Bishop David conceded to Aguirre, Acosta and Jimenez. It also showed that the Duterte drug war killings were by then an epidemic that raged using state agencies meant to protect ordinary Filipino citizens from crime.

De Lima then cites the cases of Carl Angelo Arnaiz and Reynaldo “Kulot” de Guzman when Duterte also used photo-ops with their parents and the help of Persida Acosta. But there was a little piece of truth that was Acosta’s irony: her office’s autopsy had proved that Carl Angelo was handcuffed when he was killed. It was the same with Kulot: the PAO autopsy established that he was stabbed three times, then stabbed 24 more times after he was dead.

This last narration was a fitting prelude to the third part of the De Lima Supplemental Communication. Here she presented the Weakening of Accountability Institutions: the Ombudsman, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the Commission on Human Rights.

Using the classic Duterte approach of name-calling to gaslight, Duterte attacked the then-CHR chief Chito Gascon, calling him a pedophile and a homosexual. Analyze well if there is even any semblance of wisdom in Duterte’s statement: “Why are you so fixated on teenagers? Are you? I am starting to have doubts. Are you gay or a pedophile you son of a bitch? You’re so focused on a trivial thing [referring to the death of the minors].”

The pliant House of Representatives under then-speaker Pantaleon Alvarez then took a most unusual step for a government agency that was constitutionally mandated: granting the CHR a mere P1,000 (US$20 then) for its 2018 budget. That was because, as Alvarez irrationally intoned, the CHR was instead protecting the rights of criminals.

In the Senate, Senator Richard Gordon demanded an apology from a CHR commissioner. Even with the apology, Gordon terminated the hearings without the CHR witnesses being presented. Of the 13 CHR witnesses, Gordon only allowed two to testify.

“In one of the incidents where witnesses were not allowed to testify, four of the witnesses were minors. They witnessed their own father shot to death inside their own home by Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) agents. When their father was shot, the minors saw their father lying in a pool of blood while the PDEA agents played a game of darts. When the minors pleaded to take their father to the hospital, the agents threatened to tape the mouth of the 11-year old child.”

As for the Ombudsman, De Lima points out in particular a central error of judgment made because of Duterte’s attacks against Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales’ tenure of office:

“Last December 2016, Edgar Matobato already filed a complaint for murder against President Duterte, his son Paolo Duterte, and several other members of the Davao Death Squad, mostly active and retired Davao policemen. Recently, this August 31, the Ombudsman was reported to have decided to start the preliminary investigation on the Matobato complaint, but only after dropping President Duterte from the investigation. This decision of the Ombudsman to drop Duterte from the investigation practically seals the fate on any domestic remedial measure on the accountability of President Duterte for ordering the extermination of 13,000 human beings so far.”

De Lima discusses the threat of impeachment Duterte’s allies in Congress inveigled upon Chief Justice Lourdes Sereno. Impeaching Sereno was an imperative need for Duterte. Then-congressman Gary Alejano had filed an impeachment complaint against Duterte on May 15, 2017. It meant that once his presidency was threatened by impeachment, Sereno would no longer preside at the impeachment trial court but a Duterte appointee together with Duterte ally Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III.

Finally, De Lima ends with Public Statements as State Policy supported by references of Duterte’s statements on his kill policy as published in newspapers and broadcast media. In the ICC, these are acceptable as incriminating to a suspect.

One of her final paragraphs is noteworthy:

“Unlike his statements as Davao Mayor where his bloody policy of extermination was mostly made by himself alone, and to a limited provincial and rural audience, Duterte’s statements as President are this time echoed by his highest officials and broadcast nationwide. These include reiterations made by the Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Ronald Dela Rosa, Secretary of Justice Vitaliano Aguirre II, Solicitor General Jose Calida, House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, and a host of other executive and legislative officials and their underlings. Like Duterte, these men have already prided themselves in the impunity of their public speeches and official statements, unafraid of the consequences of publicly calling for the summary execution of criminals and enabling law enforcement officials to plant evidence and stage crime scenes to justify said executions.”

Today, an edgy and jittery Senator Bato dela Rosa should not be surprised at his impending ICC arrest by the Interpol. All his public statements were recorded.

De Lima’s ends with a powerful argument:

“All of this makes Duterte’s program for the mass extermination of suspected drug users, regardless of innocents, state-sanctioned policy, so much so that the Secretary of Justice has already made the word ‘collateral damage’ acceptable terminology in official statement, underlying the fact that the figurative phrase for ‘war on drugs’ has attained a literal interpretation for these officials. According to them, since this is a war, innocents will be killed, and this should be an accepted consequence as in any war. In the first place, the method is the same as in any war: to kill as many of the enemy as possible, armed or unarmed, shooting back or surrendering. Kian Lloyd was tagged as ‘collateral damage’ in this war, a victim of the police abuse, indiscrimination, and impunity that has characterized this State program of extra-judicial killings as a replacement ersatz system of justice.”

Leila de Lima’s Supplemental Communication has added an aura of invincibility to the case of crimes against humanity lodged in the ICC against Rodrigo Duterte et al. Justice should await not just the victims and their families, but to the Republic of the Philippines whose systems of democracy, reeling as they already are from weak and corrupt leaders, have been severely undermined by the lunatic despotism of one man, Rodrigo Duterte.

Let the arrests come very soon. The Philippines needs to feel the warm and joyous spirit of victory. – Rappler.com