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By Carlos H. Conde, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
First of 2 parts
DAVAO CITY — In one of the many hovels crammed
inside Bankerohan, this city’s largest public market, Christmas is
about to come and go unnoticed once more. While the Alia family is
no stranger to a joyless Christmas, this year’s yuletide has been
exceptionally sad. The family is still mourning the death of yet
another Alia child, who last month was added to a growing list of
teenagers sacrificed in a brutal war against crime.
Clarita Alia, who hauls vegetables in a tiny
cart for a living, used to have eight children. Now she has only
five. She lost her second child Richard in July 2001. Three months
later, it was Christopher’s turn. Next was Bobby, who died just
this November.
Richard was only 18 when he was killed, while
Christopher was 16, and Bobby, 14. All three were knifed to death,
and while authorities have done little to investigate their cases,
practically everyone assumes their deaths were part of the
extra-judicial killings that have been plaguing Davao City in the
last few years.
A significant number of those killed have been
minors who had been in conflict with the law — just like the Alia
brothers. Tambayan, a local child-rights group, estimates that at
least 104 people, most of them male, have been victims of such
extra-judicial killings since August 1998.
Of the 41 cases documented by the group from
March 1999 to November this year, 20 involved boys who were 18 years
old and below. Not one of these cases has been solved, even if the
killers said to range from gang members, to ex-rebels, to
policemen are known in the local community.
For a city touted to be the country’s largest,
Davao in the last several years has been able to keep an enviable
peace and order record. Unlike in other urban centers, one can walk
Davao’s streets even at 2 a.m. with few worries about being
mugged. Police visibility is good, and Davaoeños take pride in
the fact that there has not been any gang wars in their city for
quite a while now. For this reason, Davao has become the envy of
other cities, which now want to follow in its footsteps.
That, however, may mean taking a very bloody
path. Clarita Alia is not alone in believing her three young sons
and others like them have been killed as part of what is popularly
seen as a successful, if unorthodox, strategy for battling crime.
The public’s tacit support for the killings is
one reason local authorities, including the police, do not appear
interested in finding the killers. Many Davaoeños believe that the
executions are helping keep their city safe and do not seem to care
that minors are among those being killed as part of a campaign
against youth offenders, many of whom are petty thieves.
This is why Davaoeños support Rodrigo Duterte,
their tough-talking mayor, who has made it well known that he will
stop at nothing to fight criminals.
“I tell the people during elections: If you
want a mayor that doesn’t kill criminals, look for another
mayor,” Duterte told the PCIJ in a recent interview. “I was
elected in 1988, reelected in 1992, reelected in 1995, reelected in
2001. That’s my gauge of people’s acceptance.”
Still, the mayor, who is also President
Macapagal Arroyo’s anti-crime consultant, denied having any direct
connections with the killings. “I would like to give you this
assurance that I have never ordered the killing of anyone,” he
said. “If I (ever) suggested that I’m abetting it, well, I will
have to live with that.”
In late September last year, Duterte described
the series of killings of suspected criminals as unlawful. But he
also made it clear he was hardly sorry that they were happening.
“I do not have any tears for you if you die, you idiots!” he
said, referring to drug pushers. “You all deserved to die.”
Last March, Duterte once again declared war
against teenage gangs, which the local police say are responsible
for most of the crimes committed in the city. “If they offer
resistance,” the mayor told reporters here, “I will not hesitate
to kill them. I don’t care about minors.”
Such declarations have upset child-rights
advocates, including Councilor Angela Librado. The chair of the City
Council’s committee on women and children, Librado notes that
while the mayor “hasn’t really violated any law,” his
statements “send the wrong signal to the public. The signal is
that, it’s okay for these people to die because they are useless
anyway.”
If anything, Duterte’s contempt for teenage
gangs and his encouragement of extra-judicial methods to deal with
them have made children in conflict with the law fair game. Two
weekends ago, three minors who had had brushes with the police were
killed in separate incidents by unknown assailants.
One of the casualties was Alexander Buenaventura,
a 19-year-old toughie who was gunned down on Dec. 15. Duterte had
singled him out in his TV program in March. “Dodong,” the mayor
called out to Buenaventura on the air, “I’m warning you, our
paths will cross one day.”
But child-rights advocates say the most daring
display of contempt toward “useless” children happened in
October last year. As activists prepared to march around the city to
condemn yet another rash of killings of juveniles that month, gunmen
shot dead two minors right in one of the streets the demonstrators
had planned to take in the downtown area. The boys had been
suspected snatchers. Said Ariel Balofinos, advocacy officer of the
Kabiba
Alliance for Children’s Concerns: “We are
really angry. It’s as if the killings were staged in time for our
rally.”
A few days later, Sr. Insp. Leonardo Felonia,
chief of the San Pedro Police Station, declared that the
extra-judicial killings targeting children in conflict with the law
were a “practical” way to deal with crime. At least 18
extra-judicial killings have taken place within the jurisdiction of
the San Pedro Police Station, which also covers Bankerohan, where
most of the city’s teenage gangs come from.
Like Duterte, the police have washed their hands
of the killings. But this has not stopped many people from
speculating that local authorities are behind all these, even if the
media keep on pushing the idea of the existence of a Davao Death
Squad or DDS.
“The DDS has no face,” observes Tambayan
program officer Pilgrim Guasa.
“But when you ask gang members and their
families, they can pinpoint who are the ones doing all these
killings. Usually, these killers have a connection one way or the
other to policemen, ex-policemen, assets, civilian law enforcers.
There are those who say some of the killers are former New
People’s Army rebels. One thing is certain: the killers are known
in the community.”
Why none of these self-styled executioners has
been caught is explained by
Bernie Mondragon, executive director of the
Kabataan Consortium, a group of child-rights NGOs: “Of course no
one would want to come out and testify.
Who would? This is the usual line by the police:
no witness, no case. But I think that, deep inside, the police think
the killings are valid and justified, hence the inaction.”
Guasa says child-rights advocates are frustrated
by the Davaoeños reaction to the killings. Most of the callers in
phone-in surveys conducted by local
TV stations invariably say they are for the
killings. Alice, an office clerk, echoes the sentiment of many here
when she says the targeting of suspected criminals “somehow makes
me feel safe. I know that anybody who does something bad to me in
the street will someday meet his comeuppance.”
Guasa theorizes that such an attitude could be
traced in part to the city’s “history of being used as a
laboratory for violence.” By that, she is referring to the 1980s,
when vigilante groups were roaming the city, summarily executing
suspected communist rebels who in turn were killing policemen. The
incidents prompted some people to call the Agdao district, where
most of the killings were then occurring, as “Nicaragdao.”
In a way, says Guasa, “the public has been
desensitized by the summary executions. Most worrisome of all is
that they perceive extra-judicial killings as a practical solution,
especially when it is a means to maintain peace and order.”
Councilor Librado, for her part, says her
committee had asked the Davao
City Police Office to submit a report to on the
killings. All they got, she says, was a table containing a summary
of the killings, which can be obtained from the police blotter.
“No in-depth investigation, no determination of culpability,”
says Librado. “There was nothing new in it.”
Most of the agencies approached by her committee
to investigate the matter also said they could not do anything
because there weren’t any complainants. She says even the National
Bureau of Investigation only “took for granted” the
committee’s resolution requesting for an investigation into the
child killings.
Librado recounts, “I told them, We are talking
here of specific killings targeting minors. There could be a trend
here. We expect agencies to initiate all the moves so facts could be
drawn.”
“The funny thing is,” she adds, “I was
invited to a forum once where mothers and relatives told us that
they were willing to file charges.”
Gang members interviewed by the PCIJ said that
criminal syndicates are behind some of the killings. In others, the
hits are ordered by rival gangs. But the gang members also say many
of the murders are contract killings. Says one gang member: “There
was a time when the killers in the community would bid for the
contract those who bid the lowest gets to kill the prey.”
Sometimes, the assassin is handpicked. Gani (not
his real name), a member of one of the most notorious gangs in this
city, was only 17 years old when he was given P500 to kill an
alleged drug pusher. A few months later, he was asked again to kill
another pusher. He was paid P350 for that one. He was approached a
third time for another hit. But the victim survived, and those who
contracted Gani refused to pay him the P350 they had promised him.
Gani is now in hiding, after receiving death threats.
A former gang member who wants to be called
“Bing” says that in a number of instances, the preferred killers
are the butchers at Bankerohan, and their weapon of choice is the
kolonyal, the butcher’s knife.
In the Tambayan’s tally of killings since
March 1999, however, 30 or 73 percent of the total were done with a
gun, usually a .45 caliber pistol, the same weapon issued to the
police force. In such hits, the victim is usually shot in the head
and at close range. Some child-rights advocates say it would not be
a stretch to claim that these killings were done not by gang
members, who like to use makeshift arrows and knives, but by people
with considerable experience in handling firearms.
Gang members say that more often than not, the
targets are first given a warning. Bing, for one, says that in 1998,
a policeman living in their community approached him and said, “If
you don’t mend your ways, you’re dead.” Bing wasted no time in
reforming himself. He now goes to school and hardly goes out with
his gangmates anymore.
Clarita Alia also says, “I had been told not
just once that I should tell my children to stop what they’re
doing or else they’d be dead.” She readily admits that her late
sons had figured in snatchings, drugs and all sorts of petty crime
in Bankerohan. She adds that their names eventually landed on the OB
(order of battle) of the police.
Before Richard’s death on July 17 last year,
police went to the Alia home to arrest the teenager for rape. Nanay
Clarita asked them for evidence but when the police said they did
not have any yet, she refused to turn over her child to them.
“They told me I was stupid for protecting my
son,” Nanay Clarita says. Richard had also been warned by
unidentified men that his name was third on their list. It soon
became common knowledge in Bankerohan that the Alia brothers were
marked for liquidation. More than two weeks before Richard was
killed, his siblings were already hearing that he was in danger.
Tambayan’s Guasa confirms that other victims
were told beforehand of being in some list. “Before each killing,
there were deliberate warnings to would-be victims that their names
were on the list. They should stop or they would be killed,” she
says.
Many believe these “lists” are lists of drug
pushers and users in the community that are oftentimes prepared by
the Barangay Anti-Drug Abuse Council (Badac). It was then President
Joseph Estrada who had created the Badac through an executive order,
which also says that anyone in the barangay can report to the
Council who the users or pushers are in the community.
These same lists end up in the hands of the
Regional Anti-Narcotics Office, the police and local officials. But
Guasa says that the problem with the Badac lists is that anybody can
just point a finger on someone without presenting proof. “If the
police have a case against somebody on the list, why not file a case
against that person?” she asks. “Why supplant due process with
these lists?”
Nanay Clarita herself asks between sobs, “My
sons may have committed crimes, but why are they being butchered?
The people who do this why do they think the lives of my sons are
not worth anything? Is it because we’re dirt poor? Is this why due
process does not apply to us?” Conclusion
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