Philippine president-elect’s talk of killings raises fears

DAVAO CITY, Philippines >> The police warned 14-year-old Bobby Alia that there would be consequences after he was accused of stealing a cellphone in November 2003, the boy’s mother said. A few days later he was dead, stabbed in the back with a butcher knife.

He was the third of Clarita Alia’s sons to die in Davao, the southern Philippines’ largest city, in killings that remain unsolved. A fourth was killed in 2007. All had been accused of crimes, all were stabbed and all, Clarita Alia said, had received similar warnings from the police.

For years, rights groups have called for an investigation into whether Davao’s mayor, Rodrigo Duterte — the tough-talking politician who next month will become president of the Philippines — was complicit in the killings of hundreds of people in Davao since the 1980s by what they describe as government-sanctioned death squads.

The Davao police say they have not found evidence that such organizations exist. Investigations by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the Philippines’ own Commission on Human Rights, however, have found evidence that they do exist and that police officers and other government officials had been involved in the killings.

The victims, the investigations found, included people suspected of committing crimes or using drugs, street children and, in some cases, people who had been mistaken for someone else.

While Duterte has denied any direct knowledge of death squads, he has long called for addressing the Philippines’ severe crime problem by killing suspected criminals. In 2009, he said they were “a legitimate target of assassination.”

During the presidential campaign this year, he uncorked a running barrage of murderous boasts. He claimed to have personally killed armed criminals while mayor, though no evidence has emerged to support those stories. Asked to respond to a report that he killed 700 people, he replied, “No, it is not 700, but 1,700.”

Duterte promised if elected to deploy the police and the military in an all-out assault on criminal gangs.

“It is going to be bloody,” he told a business group in April. “I will use the military and the police to go out and arrest them, hunt for them. And if they will offer a violent resistance, and thereby placing the lives of the law enforcers and the military whom I would task for a job to do, I will simply say, ‘Kill them all and end the problem.’”

Duterte promised to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office and dump so many bodies in Manila Bay that the “fish will grow fat.”

The claims may strike some as outlandish. But the evidence of killings on Duterte’s watch as mayor of Davao has led to fears of a nationwide explosion of extrajudicial killings during his presidency.

“There’s a danger that Duterte’s electoral victory may be seen as a symbolic victory for a notion that’s already spreading in the Philippines: that extrajudicial vigilante-style killings of suspected criminals is a legitimate approach to crime control,” said Phelim Kine, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Asia.

Duterte’s hard-line stance on crime is wildly popular in Davao. Raul Tolentino, 82, who has practiced law here since the 1960s, said that popularity stemmed from the 1980s, when communist insurgents plagued the region and the city was notorious for bloody mayhem. Tolentino recalled armed rebel groups entering the city at will, and criminal gangs engaging in shootouts in broad daylight.

“It was terrible,” he said. “If someone had a grudge against you, they could just kill you. It was a lawless state. Even policemen were not safe walking alone on the streets. They would end up on a stretcher.”

Duterte, then a hard-charging prosecutor, was elected mayor in 1988 on a law-and-order platform. Around the same time, citizens’ groups formed that some called anti-crime organizations and others simply called vigilantes. Tolentino said that a combination of those armed groups and Duterte’s tough policies brought order to the city. Others say the citizens’ groups evolved into organized death squads that are still active.

“Usually, there is a list of names kept at the village level,” said the Rev. Father Amado Picardal, a priest who has investigated the groups. “The death squads are well organized, supported by the local government, and they follow a pattern. They usually issue a warning, though now sometimes there isn’t even a warning. If you are on the list, you are killed.”

In a 2009 report, Human Rights Watch said the killers included former communist rebels as well as street criminals and others who were subjected to threats and coercion. Their orders often came from current or former police officers who provided training and weapons, and in some cases coordinated the timing of the murders, according to the rights group, which said it had investigated 28 such killings.

The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights, a semiautonomous government agency, found in 2012 that death squads had killed 206 people, including 19 children, in Davao between 2005 and 2009. The panel said that lists of suspected criminals were kept by village officials, and that many of the people on the lists were killed. Edmundo R. Albay, the director of the agency’s office in Davao, said that another investigation into the death squads was underway but that he could not provide details about it.

In its 2012 report, the commission recommended that Duterte be criminally investigated for failing to take action to stop the killings, but it did not say that he had had direct knowledge of them. He has never been charged with a crime in connection with the killings.

Philip Alston, then the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, interviewed Duterte for a 2008 report on the death squads, which Alston said operated with such impunity that the killers did not bother to wear masks. Asked whether he was responsible for their activities, Duterte “insisted that he controls the army and the police, saying, ‘The buck stops here,’” Alston wrote. “But, he added, more than once, ‘I accept no criminal liability.’”

Alston said he found that position contradictory and untenable.

“He dominates the city so thoroughly as to stamp out whole genres of crime, yet he remains powerless in the face of hundreds of murders committed by men without masks in view of witnesses,” he wrote.

Alston wrote that Duterte “freely acknowledged that he had publicly stated that he would make Davao ‘dangerous’ and ‘not a very safe place’ for criminals, but he insisted that these statements were for public consumption and would have no effect on police conduct: ‘Police know the law. Police get their training.’”

The police in Davao have denied that death squads operate in the city. The police chief inspector, Andrea dela Cerna, said that many of the killings in question were probably gang-related, and that the issue had been exaggerated by political opponents of the mayor.

Tolentino, who has been practicing criminal law in Davao for 56 years, said he had never come across a case involving a member or a victim of a death squad.

“If there is such a group, they are only going after the bad people anyway,” he said.

Duterte and his supporters say his policies have made Davao one of the safest places in the Philippines. But data from the Philippine National Police show that from 2010 to 2015, the city of about 1.5 million had 1,032 murders, more than any other city in the country. Quezon City, a suburb of Manila with a population of 2.7 million, was second, with 961 killings during the same period.

In light of the reports about the death squads, Duterte’s violent rhetoric as a candidate has raised concern that extrajudicial killings will become a nationwide phenomenon.

For Clarita Alia, whose sons’ murders remain unsolved, that prospect raises a personal concern.

“If they are killing people all over the country, then they will forget about the cases in Davao,” she said in an interview at her home here, a wooden shack behind a vegetable stall. “They will forget about my sons.”