The televised meeting between President Rodrigo Duterte and Cebuano businessman Peter Lim was eerily reminiscent of the famous restaurant scene in the 1995 Michael Mann film “Heat.”
In that scene, screen legend Al Pacino, who played Lt. Vincent Hanna, picked up career criminal Neil McCauley, played by fellow award-winning legend Robert De Niro, and invited him over coffee and conversation barely a day after Hanna thwarted McCauley’s planned robbery of a precious metal shipment.
The two men talked over how their respective career choices affected their personal lives and how it would end violently between them if McCauley pursues his plans for one “final score,” that is, one final robbery.
“You do what you have to do, and I gotta do what I gotta do,” McCauley tells Hanna, which the police officer acknowledges. Hanna then pulls out a zinger, telling McCauley that even if he has to put him away and he doesn’t like it, he will do it.
“If it’s between you and some poor bastard whose wife you’re gonna turn into a widow, brother, you are going down,” Hanna tells McCauley.
Mr. Duterte and Lim, whom the President identified as a drug lord operating in the Visayas, had none of the epic exchange between Pacino and De Niro in their Davao City meeting, but in terms of threat level, Duterte’s words of warning to Lim were far more explicit.
The President told Lim, who was far more cooperative and meeker than someone who is suspected to be the biggest supplier of drugs in the Visayas, in no uncertain terms that if suspicions about Lim were confirmed, he would have him executed.
“Dili na ka magbakak sa ako (Don’t lie to me),” President Duterte told Lim before they started their conversation that was covered live by the presidential TV crew and uploaded to YouTube and Facebook.
Anyone who had followed Duterte’s career path as Davao City mayor would tell you that this is a familiar territory for him, as documentary crews filmed his every move and foray into the city that he dominated in decades-long rule before being interrupted by a solitary run and term in Congress.
There was online criticism about the inequality between how Duterte treats Lim, an influential businessman suspected of illegal drug ties, and how the police treat low-level users and pushers, who were made to sign papers during Oplan TokHang and then allegedly summarily executed if they return to their former lives — though the police reiterate that they shoot them down if they not only resist arrest but actually engage them in a shootout.
Lim is no ordinary person, yet Mr. Duterte was transparent enough to let the public see his meeting with the Cebuano businessman and allow him to avail of due process to disprove his guilt.
If anything, the meeting sends the message to drug dealers out there that the administration means business in its war on illegal drugs.
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