The death list

PAREDES

We have been so frustrated at how slow justice works in our flawed democracy that we are willing to let the one with iron hand rule with the law crumpled in a fist.

When it first came out, questions regarding its legality were easily drowned by cheers from the greater number of Filipinos who took it as a clear step that the drug war, which was going to be a shooting war, was finally starting with a list of targets.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s announcement of names from a list of drug lords, pushers, and their supporters or “backers” was met with jubilation from a nation that has gone frustrated over how slow the justice system works in the Philippines.

With its technical requirements for due process and proofs beyond reasonable doubt, the court seems to have only favored the drug lords who could easily bail their men out when caught by bribing police officers, judges, and witnesses or intimidating them.

As he promised Filipinos that he would rid the nation of criminality in just six months (a promise he eventually took back), Duterte resorted to the short cut: he made public a list of names purportedly endorsed by police investigators and agents of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and the National Bureau of Investigation, and practically branded them as drug lords, pushers, and supporters.

It was virtually a death sentence as those named feared for their lives. Some began hiding or left the country.

So, instead of filing cases and pursuing them down to the end, the new administration preferred the much shorter route of trial by publicity.

And the verdict is often handed down equally fast. After suspects identified in the list were publicly humiliated, some of them start to fall, with bullets in the head.

Things have changed, indeed, as the President promised.

Now, it’s no longer the courts with their due process or rule of law.

Now, it’s all up to a few people to decide, whether others are guilty or not and if they deserve to live or die.

But Filipinos were willing to accept that.

They entrust it all to the President to decide as he sees fit.

They elected him for his strong political will.

They wanted him to name names and bring them to justice — fast.

Never mind if it seemed he was taking the law in his hands.

They wanted him to use his iron hand to crush those people in the list.

The public gave its consent to the President and it was then easily extended down to the members of the local police who have now been empowered to make their own lists and even summon those in the list to come to their station, to demand surprise drug tests or to answer to interrogations.

Such police power over civilian authority was last seen during Martial Law era, when cops could make warrantless arrests at mere suspicion and could detain anyone indefinitely without being obliged to show them to the public or to the court.

Proof that the principle of due process is already lost in the public mind is how we seem to be ignoring the true implications of that recent call for the election authorities to ban anyone in the President’s list of drug personalities from running for public office in the coming elections.

It was yet another attempt to further weaponize the President’s drug list, to use it as an excuse to intimidate or persecute critics and enemies of this administration and to influence the minds of the electorate.

We have been so frustrated at how slow justice works in our flawed democracy that we are willing to let the one with iron hand rule with the law crumpled in a fist.

Yet, as some of the biggest drug lords roam free while the smaller ones are being killed one by one, we are realizing that very same iron fist could render the death blow to that weak democracy.