Daily Archives: March 1, 2017

Jomar Palamar and his girlfriend Juday Escilona were killed in the early hours of Wednesday, cut down in a hail of bullets fired by unknown gunmen in a rundown backstreet of the Philippines capital Manila.

Described by a family member and community leaders as drug users, the couple appeared to be the latest victims of the deadly war on drugs launched by President Rodrigo Duterte in which over 8,000 people have died. Most have been small-time dealers and users killed in police operations or shot dead by unknown gunmen.

Duterte said on Tuesday he would recall some police to anti-drugs operations to provide fresh impetus to the campaign. He had suspended police from operations a month ago after which the killings slowed but did not end.

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Police said they did not know who killed Palamar, 22, and Escilona, 20.

"They were on a watch list, because they were users," said Nestor del Rosario, the deputy leader of the local barangay, or community, who was huddled along with dozens of neighbors behind a police cordon at the crime scene.

Police and barangay officials said the two died in shots fired by gunmen on motorcycles as they stepped out of a ramshackle convenience store in the Pasong Tamo area of Manila. At least a dozen shots were fired, they said, going by spent bullet casings on the street.

Palomar died on the spot, shot in the head. His body was lying on the street when a Reuters team arrived at the scene, his face covered in blood. Escilona was taken to hospital but didn't make it there alive.

No one in the crowd claimed to have witnessed the shooting. Del Rosario said four security cameras on the street could have captured the killing. But none were working.

Duterte suspended the national police from his war on drugs in late January after rogue officers kidnapped and killed a South Korean businessman and handed charge to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).

More than half a dozen drug users and dealers in some of Manila's toughest areas told Reuters that the drugs trade had come out in the open after the suspension, although it was not possible to verify their comments.

The "vigilante-style" killings of drug suspects slowed, down to about 400 in February, but it was unclear how many were drugs-related.

On Tuesday, Duterte said he needed more men to fight drugs, and had no choice but to put some police back in the campaign. He said the PDEA would remain in charge of the crackdown, with the support of the police and the military.

However, authorities have not spelled out when police are likely to return to the campaign.

In one of a series of investigative reports last year into the war on drugs, Reuters found that low-level officials in poor neighborhoods helped police assemble "watch lists" of alleged drug users and pushers that were effectively hit-lists, with many of the people named ending up dead.

Authorities strenuously deny that, and dismiss allegations that police are behind thousands of these shadowy killings, either pulling the trigger themselves, or paying hit men to do it.

National police chief Ronald dela Rosa warned on Monday that lawlessness and narcotics were returning to the streets and gains in the drug war would soon be lost unless police were allowed to tackle the problem.

In another part of Manila after midnight on Tuesday, the body of a man was pulled out of a swamp behind a labyrinth of slums in the city's Malabon area.

The victim, Jonathan Lapuz Valles, 28, was shot through the side of the head. Police at the scene declined to give details.

"Still under investigation," said the lead officer.

Funeral home workers hauled his black body bag awkwardly through winding, narrow alleys, repeatedly dropping it and as they stumbled on planks of wood and rocks sunken into the mud.

His girlfriend howled as the body was loaded into a van on a stretcher in front of crowds of onlookers and taken to the funeral parlor before it was laid out on a table. One of the workers at the parlor said the victim was a small-time seller of drugs.

"He had no job. I don't know if he was into drugs," said Valles's younger brother, Julius, his next of kin, who showed no emotion as identified the body.

"I didn't know him so well."

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Couple Gunned Down in Philippines Suspected Victims of President Duterte's War on Drugs - Newsweek

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, a staunch ally of President Rodrigo Duterte, has called on the public to support the possible resumption of the governments war on drugs after it was ordered suspended last month.

It should now be our peoples war against drugs, not just President Dutertes drug war, because it is our fight for our families safety, rights and values. We thank the President for reiterating his commitment to ending our countrys perennial problem on illegal drugs, Cayetano said in a statement.

A successful anti-drug campaign will mean fewer crimes and more peaceful communities, with our families as the biggest gainers in the process. This is our peoples war on drugs, our fight for the right of every family to a peaceful and safe community, to uphold the right of every peace-loving Filipino to be protected, he added.

Cayetano also called on professional and decent law enforcers to continue to be vigilant to prevent rogue cops from pursuing their criminal activities in the guise of the war on drugs.

Duterteon Tuesdaysaid he would have to call some of the police back to his war on drugs. He said he would leave it to the PNP whether to resume its Oplan Tokhang.

PNP chief Dir. Gen. Ronald Bato Dela Rosa earlier said the police force was ready to resume its antidrug operations following reports that drug perpetrators were supposedly back on the streets during the campaigns suspension.

Duterte suspended the war on drugs in January at the height of controversy surrounding the murder of South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo inside police headquarters in Camp Crame. JE

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Cayetano urges public to back resumption of war on drugs - Inquirer.net

Activists protest at the headquarters of the Philippine National Police, condemning the government's war on drugs and holding placards showing murdered South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo. The South Korean businessman was allegedly kidnapped by Philippine policemen under the guise of a raid on illegal drugs and murdered at the national police headquarters in Manila, authorities said. Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Activists protest at the headquarters of the Philippine National Police, condemning the government's war on drugs and holding placards showing murdered South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo. The South Korean businessman was allegedly kidnapped by Philippine policemen under the guise of a raid on illegal drugs and murdered at the national police headquarters in Manila, authorities said.

A month ago, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte hit the pause button on his controversial war on drugs. That war has left more than 7,500 people dead since Duterte took office last June, promising a "dirty" and "bloody" fight against drugs.

"Do your duty, and if in the process, you kill 1,000 persons, I will protect you," Duterte, nicknamed "The Punisher," told police days after his election.

And he did standing by them fiercely in the months that followed, despite allegations of of extrajudicial killings that prompted international outrage.

But then came the case of South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo, kidnapped and murdered in October by members of a police anti-drug unit. They'd seized him at his home outside Manila in an alleged anti-drug operation. He was strangled to death at police headquarters in Manila.

Some reports say Jee's wife paid a ransom to win his release, not knowing he was already dead.

When Duterte learned of Jee's murder in January, he wasn't pleased. He immediately ordered the Philippine National Police to stand down from its leading role in his anti-drug campaign. The force, he said, was filled with "scallywags" and was "rotten to the core."

Edcel Lagman, a Philippine congressman and one of the few Duterte critics in the House of Representatives, says he doesn't think the police "is entirely corrupt to the core. But the corruption in the police agency is substantial."

He wonders why it took a foreigner's death to make Duterte act.

"More than a single foreigner, 7,000 Filipinos had already been sacrificed in extrajudicial killings in this deadly campaign against the drug menace," he says.

Last month, Duterte vowed to "cleanse" the national police for before allowing it to return to the war on drugs, and tasked the much smaller Philippines Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) to take the lead in his anti-drug campaign.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte berates police officers at the presidential palace in Manila on Feb. 7, after learning of the murder of a South Korean businessman. In expletive-laden remarks, Duterte told police he'd send them to a southern island to fight extremists from the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group. Robinson Ninal/AP hide caption

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte berates police officers at the presidential palace in Manila on Feb. 7, after learning of the murder of a South Korean businessman. In expletive-laden remarks, Duterte told police he'd send them to a southern island to fight extremists from the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.

The mercurial, short-fused president also made his anger known in a live television address on Feb. 7 at Malacanang Palace, where he unleashed a foul-mouthed tirade at several hundred cops standing sheepishly before him. He ordered them transferred to the island of Basilan in the violence-plagued south of the country, the home turf of the al-Qaida linked terrorist group Abu Sayyaf the same group that beheaded a German hostage earlier this week.

"I will send you to Basilan, live there for two years. If you get out alive, you can return here," Duterte fumed. "If you die there, I will tell the police not to spend anything to bring you back here but to bury you there." Those who did not wish to go, he said, could quit.

Several dozen cops failed to show up for their trip south. Others, local reports say, had their deployment delayed to appear in court to answer charges against them. Duterte has indirectly threatened those who failed to show.

But on Monday, a month after pulling the plug on the national police, the Philippine online news site Rappler reported that Duterte would soon allow limited participation of the police in his controversial anti-drug campaign under the supervision of the PDEA.

"I lack personnel," he said. "I have ordered [national police chief Ronald dela Rosa] to recruit young men in the [national police] imbued with the fervor of patriotism to be the members only of the task forces, but only a select few, those without cases and without a history of corruption."

When this will happen and how many will be involved is unclear.

"We hope and pray that the authorities will clean up their act," says Chito Gascon, who heads the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines. "But I won't hold my breath after what I've seen the last seven months."

Of the 7,500 alleged drug related killings in the last seven months, Gascon says, more than 2,000 suspects have been killed in encounters with police. Police claim the suspects fired first. But there's a problem with that argument, Gascon says.

"The self-defense argument must be brought to the court," he says. "And of the 2,000 cases, not one single police officer has been brought to court. That's the problem. So it's not enough they do something about the case of the Korean national. It's just as important we begin the process of holding police officers to account."

Gascon says he hopes Duterte was sincere when he said that's what he wanted to do with the police after the murder of the South Korean businessman. But he has his doubts.

"Perhaps the pace will be slowed down, put the brakes on a little bit because people have crossed lines or violated rules or been found out," he says. "But in due course, I think eventually the killings will continue."

In the Arellano slum in Manila, a place where NPR has returned frequently since the war on drugs began, residents think so, too.

Cindy Medrano, who helps run her family's food stall in the neighborhood, says she supports the war on drugs and there's been far less crime in the neighborhood since it began. But she's not a fan of the extrajudicial killings and complains it's the poor who bear the brunt of the war on drugs not the drug kingpins or corrupt cops deeply involved in the drug trade. She's confident the killings will resume again soon.

"I think this is just temporary," she says. Because President Duterte, she says, is the kind of person who finishes what he starts, even if due process is ignored.

Lilibeth Diego, a former methamphetamine addict who surrendered to police back in September out of fear that she'd be killed if she didn't, agrees. Since the war on drugs was suspended, some say dealers have moved back to their corners to do business. But not in Arellano, she says.

"Even if I want to use again here, you can't buy anymore, nobody's selling," Diego says.

And the cops are still around, she says, in plainclothes, wearing black shirts and shorts. Just watching, she says. And waiting.

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A Foreign Businessman's Murder Pauses Philippine Drug War, But For How Long? - NPR

MANILA, Philippines Detained Sen. Leila De Lima criticized the governments decision to restart its renewed war on drugs, saying the problems that led to its suspension have not been addressed.

De Lima described as the height of arrogance the governments plan to lift the suspension of police operations against drug peddlers and traffickers without addressing the defects in in its anti-narcotics campaign.

The senator, detained at the custodial center in Camp Crameon drug charges, said that the government should heed the advice of local and global experts against problems in its war on drugs program such as police corruption and lack of an accountability system meant to check police abuses.

Itd be the height of arrogance if our government would resume its most murderous war on drugs without correcting its defects, without getting rid of corrupt policemen, and without making them accountable for their crimes, De Lima said.

Like many of you know, the illegal drug abuse and trafficking present a persistent problem not only for the Philippines but also for other countries. We are against drug trade, but we should not allow innocent people summarily killed, she added.

President Rodrigo Duterte announced on Tuesday that he was tapping the police again in his drug war because of lack of manpower.

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The president bared that he had ordered PNP Director General Ronald Dela Rosa to recruit young men imbued with the fervor of patriotism to be members of police groups that would run after drug syndicates.

Every station should have one (task force) pero piling pili, yung walang kaso at walang history ng corruption (they will be selected thoroughly, they should have no cases and no history of corruption), he said.

I have to do it because kulang ako ng tao (I lack manpower), the chief executive admitted.

This rebooted war on drugs by the government however will be different from its previous version because of the involvement of another element: the military.

The Armed Forces of the Philippinessigned a memorandum of agreement with the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency making it the campaigns force provider.

The military will aid PDEA in going after high-value targets and help the agency in activities such as counterintelligence, investigation and neutralization of persons involved in the drugs trade.

This move from the AFP came despite warnings from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the United States would be forced to suspend its military aid should the military become part of the drug campaign.

De Lima said that allowing the PNP to resume its anti-drugs operations would be a reckless move on the part of authorities.

It is reckless, to say the least, to allow the resumption of the anti-drug operations of the Philippine National Police which is more interested in the incentives given them than in investigating and preventing death-squad- style killings, De Lima said.

She said that the government should discard its Double Barrel Project and come up with a better program that respects and protects human rights of individuals, including suspected drug offenders.

The present war on drugs is a dismal failure because there were innocent individuals who were summarily killed, those who were apprehended were not accorded due process of the law, and only the poor were targeted, she said.

De Lima also called on the government to have a look at the Alternate Report the Ateneo Human Rights Center submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

According to De Lima, the report underscored the defects in the governments anti-drugs program which claimed thousands of lives including those of innocent individuals and children who are treated as mere collateral damage in its campaign.

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De Lima: Putting police back in war on drugs reckless, arrogant - Philippine Star

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Trump Vows to Win War on Drugs, But Doesn't Mention Marijuana ... AlterNet It kind of feels like 1972 again. In his inaugural address to Congress Tuesday night, President Trump echoed the ghosts of Richard Nixon and Ronald ... Chronicle AM: Trump Vows to Win War on Drugs, Sessions Rejects ...Drug War Chronicle Don't reignite war on weedRichmond County Daily Journal all 26 news articles »

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Trump Vows to Win War on Drugs, But Doesn't Mention Marijuana ... - AlterNet

Even five weeks after the inauguration, the president is still, as he demonstrated at CPAC, speaking in absolute terms of reducing crime and shutting down the sale and use of narcotics. Electorates make allowance for the exaggerated claims of politicians seeking election, and the media tend to overlook all but the greatest whoppers of inflated promises. But this president cant, as he as forcefully remarked, expect much fairness from the national media, and if he keeps promising draconian reductions in crime and especially drug abuse, and doesnt act accordingly, it will haunt him. The War on Drugs has largely been a fraud and a complete failure. After the imprisonment of nearly 7 million people and the spending of at least $1.5 trillion, narcotics are as readily available and as or more widely used and absorb more of the GDP than ever. And the United States is not blameless in the inflammation of virtual civil wars in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere, though there were many other contributing causes in those countries.

Every informed person in America knows that if the entire enforcement apparatus of the United States were employed to prevent drug imports, all aircraft entering American air space illegally and delivering drugs would be shot down or seized on arrival with their air crews and cargoes. Though it would require a serious increase in personnel at border crossings, all entering vehicles and persons could be swiftly checked for the transportation of any sizeable quantities of drugs, and the Mexican frontier could have been sealed to smugglers and unauthorized migrants at any point since General Pershings (unsuccessful) punitive raid against Pancho Villa and others in 1916, by allocating a larger number of adequately equipped people to patrol it. Practically every university campus in America is awash with drugs and every upper-income neighborhood in every city has home delivery of illegal drugs, as reliably as the morning newspaper, and on a more flexible timetable, i.e., at any hour of the day or night requested by a paying customer.

Instead of conducting a serious war, which would entail a massive sweep of campuses and a severe interdiction of delivery, as well as a tight control of border points and the air approaches to the country, it has been easier, these 40 years, just to troll through African-American and Latino areas, round up users, give first offenders a soft ride for denunciations of their suppliers, and send 7 million of such easily replaceable people to prison on absurdly extreme sentences, and masquerade as warriors against drugs. If the anti-drug war were conducted against white middle- and upper-income-area users, and the university students of America, with the same zeal it is waged against the non-white poor, the demand for and supply of drugs would decline sharply, the obscenely inflated number of incarcerated people would skyrocket, the ranks of students in institutions of higher learning would be thinned out sharply; and practically every elected official in the country would be impeached, recalled, or hammered at the polls.

Hypocrisy, selective permissiveness, and in-built failure are not the only problems with the War on Drugs. For the prevention campaign to be so porous, it is almost certain that there is a great deal of official corruption involved also. The legal system is such that anyone guilty of possession is effectively able to inculpate the alleged supplier, whether there is any truth in the denunciation or not. Grandstanding politicians have ensured heavy sentences, often by legislating themselves into the equation ahead of judges and requiring drastic mandatory minimum sentences, regardless of special circumstances, reducing judges who are (for the most part mistakenly) perceived to be a gang of indulgent, addled softies, to the role of rubber stamps.

The consequences of this phony war are not just to ensure that drugs are as pervasive as always, but to give the United States six to twelve times as many incarcerated people per capita as other prosperous democracies facing the same drug problems but applying less blunderbuss methods to them (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom). In 50 years, the United States has gone from the mid-point of those countries in terms of incarceration levels and only a somewhat high ratio of prosecutions that produce convictions to the appalling point where, with less than 5 percent of the worlds population, it has 25 percent of its incarcerated people, and 99 percent of prosecutions are successful, 97 percent without trial. A high proportion of the majority of incarcerated people are in state prisons and fester in barbarous conditions for unconscionably long sentences and no real effort is made to prepare them for a successful return to civil society. The prison system is infested with incompetent and maladjusted correctional officers, and the cost of housing this unseen host, even in miserable conditions, is about $150 billion a year.

I have written here and elsewhere before of my concern about the vagaries of the U.S. justice system, but am here concerned only with the new presidents promise to deal with the drug problem. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to do this. The president can use the armed forces and vastly increased border personnel to stop imports and go after users and suppliers in the middle class, including universities. Or he can legalize all drugs, require treatment for addicts to hard drugs, and tax the sale of marijuana and other less offensive drugs and transform them into a large source of revenue. This could assist the strapped states and municipalities, many of which are on the verge of insolvency, because they lack the federal governments ability to keep going with overt or disguised expansions of the money supply (as the Obama administration did, increasing 233 years worth of accumulated federal debt by 150 percentin eight years).

Marijuana may indeed be a gateway drug to worse substances, but Colorado and Oregon have already discovered the fiscal joys of the revenue it can produce, now that legalized pot is following the well-trodden path of liquor and gambling. All were long prohibited as incompatible with sober and virtuous behavior, diabolical temptations that public policy and Christian ethics required the state to defend the people against, until filthy lucre jostled out righteousness as the flavor of the sugar plums dancing in the heads of those who governed. The grace of conversion swiftly ensued: Liquor was wrested back from the gangsters and casinos sprang up all over. If President Trump really wants to reduce drug use, as he has often pledged as far back as New Hampshire, where he was apparently genuinely appalled to learn of the proportions of the problem in that state nothing short of a massive escalation of the forces applied to that end will achieve anything useful. Conditions are complicated by the fact that some of the strongest drugs can be created by children buying a variety of legal medicines and blending them in the correct proportions and conditions. This can be and is being done in every community in the country, and cannot be blamed on conditions in Mexico and has nothing to do with the borders.

The president will soon have to put up or shut up on this issue. He appears to have in mind a substantial increase in the countrys police forces, and the possible use of the Army or National Guard in Chicago and other cities with chronic problems of violence in some (minority) neighborhoods. Some such program as that, plus sealing the Mexican border, and tightening the screws partially on middle-class drug use would probably generate enough progress to represent to the country as delivering on his promises, if he didnt want to become radically more, or less, permissive. (And the country, though it wants radical results, may not, as has been mentioned, be ready for the methods that would produce them.) He could legalize marijuana and concentrate on more dangerous drugs, and pay for increased constabulary costs by releasing most of the countrys non-violent prison inmates and transferring them to a system of contributed work, Spartan living, and careful monitoring. The vacated prisons and jails could be cleaned up and repurposed as assisted housing for slum-dwellers. These problems are so profound and complicated, and have been the subject of sleazy political posturing for so long, that it is a disservice to toss off policy suggestions flippantly, but there are a number of plausible alternatives to the failed status quo.

It need hardly be said that both black and blue lives matter (and many police qualify on both counts), and that all lives are important. Americans can easily be persuaded that their urban ecosystems are degenerating into shooting galleries by and of the police. Those who wish the country and the administration well can only hope that serious planning is afoot. The sociological need is urgent and the political consequences of doing nothing about rising crime rates and the rampant illicit-drug industry would be so catastrophic they would obscure achievements in other areas. It will not take the presidents enemies in the media long to pounce on failure, and for once they would not be faking it.

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership.

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Donald Trump Drug War Strategy | National Review - National Review