The hammer of justice is finally coming down on former President Rodrigo Duterte. His imminent reckoning is long overdue–with his officials, perpetrators of his regime of terror, finally surfacing, both state and international probes are closing in around him.
A former administration acting with impunity and injustice is a narrative that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is keen to weaponize. The ire of the House quad-committee investigations filled to the brim with turncoats, who for now have allied themselves with Marcos and have fueled the fires hounding Duterte and his lackeys. Much of the smoke, however, was meant to serve to benefit Marcos’s grip on power instead of delivering genuine justice.
With the former president and his daughter Vice President Sara Duterte openly hostile against the current administration, Marcos allies in Congress have suddenly found the political will to grill Duterte for the extrajudicial killings and human rights violations under the former’s president term. Only now has Congress shined a spotlight on the havoc that Rodrigo Duterte’s impunity has wrecked on the country when it is finally politically convenient for them to do so.
Now that the two factions are in open war, Marcos has positioned himself as a clean reset from Duterte’s impunity, with “peace, unity, and reconciliation” supposedly a cornerstone of his Bagong Pilipinas. But his crimes are no different than Duterte’s–under the current administration, the “bloodless” drug war has tallied 854 drug-related killings, and the regime has racked up 119 extrajudicial killings.
But genuine justice is impossible to attain with a president who is only interested in cementing his own power. When given the chance to truly hold the former president accountable, Marcos has repeatedly refused to do so, shown by his flip-flop on the question of cooperating with the International Criminal Court. With rhetoric but no action, Marcos has drowned out the calls for justice by the families of the victims of Duterte’s administration.
Under Marcos, mechanisms to prevent human rights violations in the country and hold accountable those responsible remain toothless. His Special Committee on Human Rights Coordination is nothing but a tactic that evades responsibility for violations committed by his government, especially as sectoral groups were snubbed of representation, and as similar orders by the president resulted in no real progress.
Instead, Marcos has weaponized these state institutions in a whole-of-nation approach against his political enemies, the Dutertes. At the same time, like his predecessor, Marcos has continued to point this weapon against activists and political dissenters.
The current president has kept an atmosphere of repression, with 148 political prisoners arrested and 17 active desaparecidos cases during Marcos’s tenure. Anti-terror legislation and state impunity from Duterte’s term continue to be weaponized against environmental activists, farmers, and human rights workers. Bombings and forced evacuations have terrorized indigenous groups and rural peasants.
If the same repression persists without change, any attempt for such an administration to wield the hammer of justice is bound to fail. Solely focusing on Duterte without holding Marcos equally accountable is a grave miscarriage of justice. As long as the Marcoses or Dutertes continue to weaponize state institutions against each other and against the people, whoever sits at Malacañang will not matter.
For justice to be achieved, control of the narrative must be wrestled from the Dutertes and Marcoses back to the victims’ families. Congress must heed their calls to expand the investigation of the House Quad-Committee to include Duterte’s terror campaign. They must cut straight to the root of the state’s impunity by grilling Duterte lackeys such as former police chief Debold Sinas and police official Lito Patay, masterminds of the Bloody Sunday massacre, with the same fire and fervor as they do the former president.
But above all, campaigns must amplify calls for justice for the victims of human rights violations of both the Duterte and Marcos administrations. Such calls could cut through the rhetoric of the Marcos allies-dominated Congress if progressive forces consolidate campaigns centered on the calls of families for justice, such as the Duterte Panagutin Campaign Network. Through this pressure, progressive forces could shatter the illusion that the current president is a defender of human rights.
Impunity, whatever form it may take, must not go unpunished. For the sake of the victims of human rights violations in this country, the hammer of justice must strike wherever required, not only wherever it is politically convenient. ●
