JJ’s head hung loosely out of the blue body bag. His face was smeared with dirt and covered with blood – thick, red and fresh.
The men from the funeral parlor carried his lifeless body carelessly to a waiting vehicle. It’s as if they were delivering a slaughtered cow to the wet market.
They found him in a dark and cramped shanty home in the slums of Victory Avenue in Quezon City where a policeman’s bullet killed him.
The policemen cordoned off the crime scene for three hours. Not even his mother was allowed to break past the yellow line. And then he was strewn grotesquely on a decrepit faded blue multi-cab.
It’s a haunting sight – a man stripped of even the slightest dignity he might have had when he was still alive.
Lucy dela Rosa, his mother, heard neighbors screaming her name minutes after the shooting happened.
“Lucy! Lucy! Your son!”
Earlier that night, a team of police went to JJ’s community for an anti-drug operation. JJ tried to escape and then he allegedly fought back with a 45. caliber pistol.
I saw JJ when I tagged along with the night beat years ago in the early months of then president Rody Duterte’s violent drug war.
I remember it now, as I remembered it then:
At the dreaded witching hour, I roamed with journalists to the nooks and crannies of Metro Manila’s slums, trailing policemen to crime scenes of blood and gore.
In this netherworld, the men and women survive on odd jobs – a small time contract today, none tomorrow; a day’s minimum wage for a month’s work or what-have-you. Yet, people take it, because they usually have no other choice.
The 32-year-old JJ was no exception. He used to sell second hand car parts, mostly stolen side mirrors. And when he needed to earn more to feed his five children, he sold drugs.
Duterte had warned that it would be bloody. There are 3.7 million drug users in the Philippines – epidemic proportions – he said when he was president.
“We will not stop until the last drug lord, the last financier and the last pusher have surrendered or put behind bars or below the ground, if they so wish,” he said during his first State of the Nation Address back in 2016.
And bloody it has been. We can debate about the actual figures, 3,000, 7,000 or 10,000 people dead but that is missing the point. Isn’t one death too many?
This is Duterte’s drug war and it has given birth to many harsh realities – human rights violations and police brutality. And, in the fog of it all, we fail to see what this country has be-come. Whatever happened to due process?
Many have cheered the apparent peace and order but at what cost, really?
Drama
The deaths are real, the photographs are as raw as can be, not staged nor manipulated. I’ve heard the wailing of loved ones left behind.
Yet Duterte once dismissed it all as drama, just like in the movies.
“Eh tapos nandiyan ka nakabulagta and you are portrayed in a broadsheet na parang Mother Mary cradling the dead cadaver of Jesus Christ. Eh yan yng mga yan magda-dramahan tayo dito,” Duterte said.
He was referring to photojournalist Raffy Lerma’s poignant photograph of one Jennilyn Olayres cradling her partner Michael Siaron after he was shot to death by motorcycle-riding gunmen on July 23, 2016.
But drama it was not. Every victim was real; every place a cartographic reality. It was an open season for killing.
And yet, the drug war isn’t over. The carnage continues. Mindanao Gold Star Daily just published a photo of a drug suspect slain last week.
Indeed, Duterte is no longer in power but the abuses continue because perhaps, as in hunting, the thrill of the chase is addicting.
Word on the streets of Binondo is that there are rogue policemen behind kidnap for ransom activities, preying on Chinese businessmen. Don’t be surprised if the abuses go beyond the drug war and extortion activities reach ordinary traders and businessmen.
This is just one among the consequences that we see with a police force that is more empowered to act as they please.
How then do we best deal with the drug war? Stop the source and plug the loopholes. Isn’t it ironic that at the height of the drug war, a P6.4-billion shabu haul entered the country?
I think of the drug war now as we observe this season of Lent because I remember the victims, the vivid images. Some of them were like Jesus crucified.
One morning in Estero de Marala Bridge in Barangay 101, for instance, a foreign journalist saw a lifeless body dumped in the water.
The man’s shirtless body was floating in the murky dark blue waters, legs and arms tied up. Tattered pieces of dirty white and blue cloth hang loosely around his body, forming a cross of sorts. It seemed like the Crucifix.
Let the ICC investigate
Will they see justice?
The Marcos administration is consistent in its defense against a looming International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation but I see no other way than to bring this to the ICC.
True justice in the Philippines, after all, remains elusive. Let’s not fool ourselves; it is rarely within reach by the powerless and the poor.
In the meantime, the killings continue and in the stillest, stillest point in this chaotic world, in Manila’s darkest slums, the crack of gunfire will pierce through the silence – one, two or three shots. And slum dwellers will know in that instant that a neighbor has died.
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Email: eyesgonzales@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.