Sen. Leila M. de Lima's Statement on President Duterte's Policy of Killing Drug Suspects
Dispatch from Crame No. 153

The true mark of a coward is that he cannot stand by his own words and actions.

After flooding the Philippine airwaves with declarations that his reign will be bloody, Duterte is now disavowing the very centerpiece of his platform of government: the killing of thousands of suspected drug offenders.

He likened himself to Hitler and has publicly stated he would be happy to slaughter three million drug addicts. He is proud of this. He is proud of the Davao Death Squad. He is proud of being internationally known as the butcher of addicts.

He gives instructions to his death squads on national television, that they should plant evidence of a firefight even when there is none to justify the execution, or to save on public funds by just disposing of bodies hogtied, instead of wrapped in packing tape.

Kian's killer cops were just following Duterte's direct televised orders. They planted a gun on Kian and didn't wrap his body in packing tape.

Now, Duterte says, in response to Senator Hontiveros' statement during the Senate hearing the other day, that Kian's and Carl Angelo Arnaiz's killings do not reveal a pattern of extra-judicial executions. He says that two killings do not establish a pattern.

A coward and a shameless liar.

Two killings maybe. But there are not only two killings. There are thirteen thousand. Thirteen thousand dead in fourteen months at the hands of policemen and vigilantes do not only show a pattern of summary executions, they reveal a coordinated and organized implementation of a genocide project never seen before in this country.

Duterte's sudden turn-around from his aggressive endorsement of his genocide to a Pontius Pilate act of washing his hands clean of any responsibility for the carnage he has orchestrated is nothing but a cowardly act. This serves as a warning to the PNP and to its men who carry out Duterte's genocide orders. The President does not stand by his word.

After proclaiming that no policeman carrying out his genocide orders will be prosecuted and sent to jail, he has now sacrificed three policemen identified in the killing of Kian to placate the public outcry, and to save his own skin.

Duterte does not only leave his men behind, he also disposes of them when they have already outlived their usefulness, as former DDS members who escaped their own executions would attest to. The sooner the PNP assassins realize this, the sooner they can save themselves, either from the reckoning that is to come, or from the hands of their fellow assassins.

We no longer even need a pattern to prove Duterte's genocide. We already have his public admissions and 13,000 bodies. Unlike him, we do not forget his words and actions. Neither does the world, the United Nations, nor the International Criminal Court.

Duterte is fooling himself if he thinks he can still take back all his public admissions to save his own skin at the expense of the PNP men he has now left hanging out to dry.

This is also why PNP Chief Bato dela Rosa is always crying, even using Senator Hontiveros as his personal mother confessor. He knows that he and his men are already hanging from the clothesline, left out to dry by their President under the heat of the burning sun.

There is only one lesson in this. It never pays to serve a man who does not stand by his word, one who is spineless.