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DAVAO: Clarita Alia’s nightmare began after a man
in a police uniform showed up outside her hovel in this southern
Philippine city in July 2001.
Send your boys away,” the
stranger warned, “or I will get them one by one.”
Two weeks later, Richard, 17, who
like his siblings had dropped out of school and joined a gang, was
knifed to death in the tough Bankerohan neighborhood of Davao City
on the southern island of Mindanao.
Chistopher, 16, and Bobby, 14,
met the same fate within 16 months.
By 2006 Clarita’s youngest,
Fernando, 15 was also dead. No one was arrested or prosecuted for
the killings.
Their 54-year-old mother, who
hawks cigarettes and lives in a six-square-meter shack at the
Bankerohan public market with two dogs, her remaining son and his
wife and two children, swears the man who threatened her boys still
lives nearby.
“I know God will be angry, but
I feel happy every time I learn on television that a policeman has
died,” she told Agence France-Presse. “I tell myself it’s only
right that they also suffer.”
Independent rights monitors here
say at least 583 persons, including 45 minors and 185 young adults,
have been shot or knifed to death since 1998 by unknown assassins in
a city whose local officials openly back a tough stance against drug
dealers and juvenile offenders.
Philip Alston, a special
investigator for the UN Commission on Human Rights, flew to the
Philippines last year to investigate extrajudicial killings of
leftist dissidents across the country and of minors in Davao.
All the young Davao victims lived
on the street, had joined gangs, and many had police records for
petty crime or were drug couriers, local rights monitors say.
“One fact points very strongly
to the officially sanctioned character of these [Davao] killings: no
one involved covers his face,” Alston wrote in his report.
Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte,
unavailable for an interview for this article, previously denied
that the killers were executing his orders.
Alston, who also talked to the
mayor last year, said Duterte would “perfunctorily deny the
existence of a death squad.”
“This is a war against the
poor,” said Father Amado Picardal, vicar of a Roman Catholic
Church that caters to the Davao urban poor community of Sagrada
Familia.
“The death squads are actually
copying Brazil,” he said, referring to the wave of vigilante
killings of street children in the South American country in the
1990s.
He recalled a wealthy parishioner
venting his spleen at a group of street children after his car was
broken into as he attended Mass in 2003. A week later a youth was
shot dead outside the church.
Davao has a long history of
political violence, and Picardal is alarmed that some of his flock
approve of the killings.
“They said that this is a good
thing for Davao. This is good for business because people feel safe,
that the DDS [Davao death squads] is doing a service to the
community—that they’re trying to get rid of the garbage,” he
said.
Communist New People’s Army (NPA)
rebels turned Davao’s slums into laboratories for urban guerrilla
warfare in the 1980s until they were supplanted by anti-communist
militias, some of them armed and trained by the security forces.
Rights monitors say the
killers’ tactics uncannily ape those used by NPA gunmen who
assassinated soldiers, police and government officials in the
1980s—two men on one motorbike, one acting as the executioner and
the other as lookout and getaway driver.
Davao, a sprawling city of 1.3
million people, is the hub of Mindanao island’s industries, mining
and corporate farms.
Massive labor migration from
surrounding rural areas in recent years swelled its teeming slums
and accounts for rising numbers of children joining gangs, said
Carla Canarias, a case officer for Tambayan, a Davao halfway house
that helps out street children.
“They actually have families.
But when they moved into the city the parents have to look for work
and the children are left at home,” she told Agence France-Presse.
“Many of them are abused, physically or sexually,” she added.
Alma Loysabas, another Tambayan
official, said a girl who sought refuge at the center suffered a
nervous breakdown after one of her young male friends was murdered.
“She said she was tailed by
unknown men who flashed their guns and showed her a hit list that
included her name,” Loysabas added.
In 2006 the killers’ tactics
shifted and they started using mostly knives.
Jesus Dureza, a Davao-based
senior adviser for President Gloria Arroyo, said the government
“does not condone extrajudicial killings” and added “no one
can play God” in Davao or elsewhere.
--AFP
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