Respect for Life and Human Dignity

Bennie had a thin, hollow face, the picture of malnutrition at 22 years of age, he had never been to school for more than a few months, could not read or write and he was a one-meal man. He ate once a day. He was dressed in shorts and a dirty t-shirt. His flip-flops were worn thin. They were his only possessions. He pushed a small wooden cart along the back streets of Manila picking up discarded plastic bottles, bits of metal that fell off a jeepney or a truck. He was a discarded piece of humanity himself.

On a lucky day in a garbage bin outside the gate of a mansion, he found an old computer keyboard. Finds like these were the treasures of his long walk. That was a big day for him and he sold it at the junk shop with the other bits and pieces he picked up. He joined his fellow scavangers and together they cooked what they  found in the garbage -a plate of pagpag and a little rice. Pagpag is made from the throwaway leftovers from the plates of the diners that ended up in the restaurant’s garbage bags in the back alleyways. It is retrieved by the very poor and boiled in a big pot on the side of the road. It made an excellent meal– for the hungry poor.   

After eating his pagpag, Bennie decided he would celebrate. That night he went down an alleyway to buy a small sachet of marijuana from the local reseller named Joey who was not much better off than him. Bennie just wanted to ease the loneliness of life, the ache in his back and legs, the pain in his feet and to forget for a short while the misery of his daily search for junk and his one meal of cheap pagpag food. There was nothing else in his life.

So just imagine what happened. Bennie was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. The small pusher Joey was a target of the hit squad that very night. They cut off the alleyway and moved in on the hovel of Joey. Two of the killers stepped inside and opened fire. Bennie and Joey were hit several times; their bodies bled copious amounts of blood they died within minutes. The hit team had a signboard ready, it read:  “I’m a drug addict. I deserve to die.”That’s how they were found one hour later. It was a fast response. Imagine Bennie’s and Joey’s lives ended over a one-dollar deal.

That can be a typical scene from the war-on-drugs. There has been a lot of success in the one-sided war since June this year. Over 6000 Bennies, Joeys and others too, suspected sellers of marijuana or crystal meth dead, but no one is sure how many more. That’s about 1000 suspects killed a month.   

The advocates of the hit squad policy say it’s a big success and takes the hardship and boredom out of routine police work. It is the death penalty in action, they say. There is no need for a death penalty law because in effect we have one already by having no rule of law. 

What Bennie and Joey got and thousands more is what the advocates of the war say is a very convenient and effective method to deliver capital punishment. It swiftly bypasses the dangers of investigation, the boredom of surveillance and painstaking evidence gathering, and making dangerous arrests. Think too of the difficult case-building, the preservation of evidence and long drawn-out court trials and the difficulty to get a conviction beyond reasonable doubt. Then there are the endless appeals and finally the stay of execution.

The President knows what it is like to prosecute fruitlessly with thousands of crimes to be solved and prosecuted in a judicial system that is rife with corruption and one case can take seven years or more. He was a prosecutor in Davao City and that’s why he launched the bloody shoot-to-kill war-on-drugs.  The old methods, claim the advocates of war, never worked. Instead the elimination by summary execution outside the system has been very effective, according the supporters of the policy. And it will keep on going, no end in sight. This instant solution to crime, just one gunshot, has, it seems, an overwhelming approval of 76 percent of Filipinos. During the same period after the election, President Aquino had 71 percent approval rating and Estrada had 69 percent. Not a huge difference but they were not advocating extrajudicial killings. 

The Senate may follow the House and may pass a capital punishment law, despite all the arguments against it such as: it doesn’t deter crime, it kills innocent framed up suspects, it is anti-poor because they can’t afford lawyers, it causes cruel punishment, it is vengeance-seeking, it deprives the accused of reform, it’s against the sacred value of life and the dignity of human person. One hundred forty one nations have banned it and the United Nations also. If it is passed, it would be a legal way for President Rodrigo Duterte to kill the convicted. He wants to hang six people a day. “Restore it and I will execute criminals every day – five or six. That’s for real,” he said. Of course he was just joking. The hit squad is quicker. 

Killing a thousand people a month as is the present practice is not a cruel joke. Something sinister has been unleashed. It is cruel capital punishment seen every day. Critics say it is one monster crime to counter many little ones. It must stop so life will be respected and cherished and the lives of the suspects are given a chance to defend themselves against their unknown secret accusers, as is their constitutional right. But those rights have been suspended and the challenge to all is how to restore them. We need to call for a ceasefire and stop what is happening to the Bennies and Joeys of the Philippines.

There was Jonathan

There was Jonathan, a 16-year old teenager. He was from a broken home where love no longer held together a family. There was poverty that kept food from the table and from the mouths of his brother and sisters.

Jonathan saw the last of his father as he stormed out of their shanty by the Pasig, drunk on cheap liquor to numb the pain of failure. He was a jobless man fired from his work by a corrupt boss and he had no food for his family. He was a useless, broken man, his dignity was taken away.

So Jonathan dropped out of school to find work. But there was no job without a high school diploma. There was nothing for him but to go to the local drug pusher and sell the illegal stuff for a profit.

A little of the crystal grains could give the body a lift from depression and misery, banish hunger in an empty stomach and alleviate the pain of the poor in dire and deprecated slums. Poverty is the best drug pusher of all time.

Jonathan was the distributer of the medication that could alienate the pain and suffering of some of the poverty-stricken and misery-filled people of the slums.  Crystal meth, called shabu, brings a short-lived hour or so of happiness and total forgetfulness for many. It brings the spurt of energy to others so they could work longer and ease their body pain.   

The addicted have fleeting moments of paradise that give away to a worst misery than before they turned the crystal grains to smoke and inhaled. They crave the bliss of forgetfulness once more the desire that ruined their already wretched lives comes again. They are more helpless than ever. They are the ones needing help and recovery and a chance at life again.  

There are others who use the crystal meth as do the natives of Bolivia that chew the coco leaf to help them endure the hardship of mountain living and exhausting work. It is necessary for them.

For the poor and dwellers of the slums the ruling elite provides no escape, no hope no future or salvation from the scrapheap of sadness. The poor have no help to ease the pain or heal the wounds of a life without purpose for hundreds of thousands.

The rich and the rising middle class sniff and inhale the crystal meth and other illegal drugs in the luxury of their plush homes and high-rise condo apartments. The filth and wretchedness they leave far below and see no need to pity the poor as they struggle to survive.

For the irresponsible rich, the poor are the no-bodies of this world, the pests are always with them they say with disgust. The jobless, the hungry and the sick are seen by them as the wretched of the earth, the inhabitants of slums, the dirt of humanity and undignified dwellers of the tar-pits of poverty.

The ruling class ignores them and does not reach out a hand of mercy or open a way to escape. For some poor the crystal  meth was  and  is their only escape. It gives moments of ease from the burden of their  struggle to survive.

Jonathan saw meager earnings. His earnings was enough to buy a kilo of rice, a few Ligo brand fish in a can and a handful of vegetables. It was food for the fatherless family.

His customers were equally poor as he was. There was Benny, the pedicab cyclist who pedaled fifty kilometers a day it seemed for a pittance. He didn’t own anything besides his t-shirt and shorts and worn down flip-flops that he got on a garbage tip.

He worked all day and earned a pittance for his children. He pedaled through the narrow back streets of Manila in the shadows of the towering condominiums of the filthy rich, the cool shadow is the only thing for free.   

He needed a sniff of shabu to keep going that extra hour to bring home his half-kilo of rice and vegetables for the family and stop the crying of the little one.  

And then it started. The word went out that they were useless criminals with shrunken brains without rights or dignity. They were to be eliminated, eradicated, massacred. The killers came dressed in hoods and riding cars and they hit the hovels with guns drawn and ordered the pedicab drivers to lie face down. They shot them dead and Benny was one of them. Now there is no one to bring the rice and vegetables and the baby cries all the time with hunger. He had no chance to explain his side.

Then the motorbikes came roaring down the narrow alley-way and Jonathan was the target. They killed him too with an assassin’s shot to the head. His mother screamed and all his brothers and sisters cried for a week and still do when they have no rice.

In the hovel beside the stinking smell of the Pasig, a river that was a cesspool of filth and dirt, he lay in a plywood box. The river flowed on through a city of death where four thousand have been killed and they are still counting. Jonathan was just one more gunned down on suspicion of a crime. He had no chance to plead his case.    

It was a hard life in the city slums where death came slowly with malnutrition and disease but now it is a city of sudden death. A relief  say some. As each body is carried away in a plastic bag somewhere well-fed citizens applaud and cheer the killing spree and says well done. There is blood upon their hands.

Now we see the death of dignity of this once proud nation that stood as best as it could for rights and freedom. The nation’s dignity is being killed day by day and lost in the fog of a war-on-drugs which is another way to rule by fear.

The Death Penalty is Being Implemented

Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and Capiz Rep. Fredenil Castro want to bring back the death penalty in the Philippines as a deterrent to crime. It can be said that the death penalty is already effectively and practically in force daily. As many as ten suspects are killed daily in the war on illegal drugs.

Some are killed in what is said to be police shoot-outs. Others are the work of vigilante death squads. They bind the hands and feet of the victims, gag them with tape and shoot them and leave them in a public place with a crude sign saying, “I am a pusher” or a similar message.

Some of those killed are victims of mistaken identity; others are victims of criminals who kill and use the signboard to forestall any investigation. With the sign left on the body, it is presumed that the victim is a drug pusher. It is another case of a false accusation, a wrongful killing.

The suspects are lined up on lists prepared by the local barangay officials and given to the police. This denunciation of one’s neighbors by those elected to protect their rights is a contradiction. In the gated communities of the rich, the officials are not cooperating with the police demands for a list of suspects. Many end up dead and most of them are poor, small-time “suspected” drug users. The big drug lords have yet to fall.

This is very hard on some of the barangay officials of conscience. They feel the burden of guilt for having made a list of suspects and put their neighbor in harm’s way without any evidence or due process of law. The normal way to apprehend a suspect would be to investigate, get evidence of illegal drug possession then arrest the suspects and charge them in court by the prosecutor.

This is being bypassed at present. The daily death penalty is setting a culture of fear and death where impunity is the norm. There is nothing to prevent anybody from accusing their enemy to settle a score, to steal a wife or girlfriend or to get rid of a political or business rival by marking them for death by denouncing them to the police as drug dealers. It is setting up a network of informers, pitting neighbor against neighbor.

The legislators are determined to bring back the death penalty. As proposed in House Bill O1 by Speaker Alvarez and Rep. Castro the law will provide lethal injection as the method to carry out the death penalty by the government. It would be given to those convicted of human trafficking, illegal recruitment, plunder, treason, parricide, infanticide, rape, qualified piracy, bribery, kidnapping, illegal detention, robbery with violence against or intimidation of persons, car theft, destructive arson, terrorism and drug-related cases. So it is death for almost any crime covered by this harsh and unnecessary law.

What is very clear in the Philippine judicial system is it will be the poor who cannot afford a lawyer who will likely get convicted. The rich and wealthy, if ever charged in court, will be able to have brilliant lawyers to get them acquitted. Studies show the death penalty is no deterrent at all.

It is only a deterrent for victims not to make a complaint against their relative for rape or child sex abuse. When the death penalty was active in the Philippines in past years, children repeatedly raped by their father were very reluctant to pursue a case in court. They feared they would be responsible for putting their own father to death and have to endure the scorn and rejection of her family.

The most plausible argument against the death penalty is the clear danger of a false accusation and a false and wrong conviction. The death penalty is final and if the convicted is found to have been innocent, there is no way to correct the mistake. There is no resurrection from the grave in this life.

In the United States, hundreds of men convicted wrongly and received the death penalty have been consequently proven innocent and released after many years on death row. The convictions were overturned by new DNA evidence that proved the convicted was in fact innocent.

The Philippine judicial system is not superior to that of the United States with all its faults and weaknesses. Nor can it rely on DNA forensic evidence to prove the innocence or guilt of a suspect. That is if ever he gets his day in court. Nowadays, it seems the court process is too cumbersome and the delivery of the daily death penalty is sufficient.