Former president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs is back on the front-page news with the ongoing hearings in the Senate and the House of Representatives, bringing back memories of grief suffered by families of the victims. Duterte’s admission to senators of knowing the existence of death squads and encouraging police officers to kill drug suspects...
Tag: war on drugs
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Duterte admits setting up death squad in Davao City
In two stunning admissions he made before a Senate blue ribbon subcommittee on Monday, former President Rodrigo Duterte said he kept a death squad that was set up to “fight crime” when he was mayor of Davao City. Duterte said three former Davao police chiefs had led the so-called “Duterte Death Squad (DDS)” and that...
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Garma says Duterte phoned her after her testimony on drug war’s ‘reward system’
Former president Rodrigo Duterte phoned retired police colonel Royina Garma after she testified two weeks ago at a hearing of the House of Representatives’ quad committee that killings were enforced in his “war on drugs” in exchange for rewards. Garma made the admission under questioning by Alliance of Concerned Teachers partylist Rep. France Castro during...
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‘Gatilyo: Tatlong Dula ng Pag-alala’ is ‘tokhang’ revisited
The period from June 2016 to June 2022 will always be considered among the darkest days in contemporary Philippine history. According to government figures, at least 6,252 persons were felled during the “war on drugs,” but human rights organizations put the number between 12,000 and 30,000. Small wonder that “tokhang” (or when cops knock on...
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Story for our times
Kerwin Espinosa’s testimony at the Oct. 11 hearing of the House of Representatives’ quad committee dredged an 8-year-old case from the swamp of oblivion. The killing by state forces of his father, Mayor Rolando Espinosa of Albuera, Leyte, while incarcerated at the Baybay Sub-Provincial Jail, was a shocking development in President Rodrigo Duterte’s young administration....
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Quad committee’s upcoming hearings will be a ‘blockbuster’
More witnesses want to testify and some quarters have tried to stop others from appearing at the joint public inquiry into the possible links among illegal Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos), illegal drugs, and extrajudicial killings (EJKs) during then President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. These are among the challenges facing the powerful quad committee...
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Some difficulty with Patricia Evangelista’s ‘Some People Need Killing’
More than two months have passed, and I still catch myself thinking of Patricia Evangelista’s book launch at Aldaba Recital Hall at the University of the Philippines Diliman. The event was dubbed as her homecoming, Evangelista being an alumnus of UP’s Department of Speech Communication and Theater Arts. She and her book, “Some People Need...
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In Payatas, the Church helps widows and orphans pick up the pieces
The women are all business inside a tailoring shop a stone’s throw from Ina ng Lupang Pangako church in Payatas, Quezon City. They work on fabrics and sewing machines to produce bags of all shapes and sizes—totes, “ecobags,” shoe bags, envelope bags, lunch bags, laundry bags. For six days of work a week, they take...