Extrajudicial Killings

34 Years Since Martial Law, Despotism Still Reigns

Ferdinand Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo: Chilling similarities

The similarities of the atrocities during martial law and today are chilling. Hooded men knocking down doors and dragging out victims in the dead of night. Assassins on motorcycles. Killers shooting victims in cold blood, often in close range. Anguished relatives looking for answers and, most important of all, justice.

By Carlos H. Conde
davaotoday.com

MANILA ? Four years ago, Dee Batnag-Ayroso, a 37-year-old mother of two, lost her husband Honorio when gunmen abducted him. Honorio was never found. And much as Dee still wants to cling to the hope that he?s still alive somewhere, the continuing killings and abductions of Honorio?s fellow activists heightens her desperation.

Dee was in her home last month when she heard on the radio that Ernesto Ladica, a member of the leftist political party Bayan Muna, was shot dead while having coffee with his three sons outside their home in Misamis Oriental. Dee?s husband was also a member of Bayan Muna; many of the victims of these murders and forced disappearances were members and leaders of this group.

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Extrajudicial Killings and Sham Investigation

The presidential order forming the commission is widely seen more as a political gimmick rather than as a major step toward stopping the extrajudicial killings. It was meant to mollify public outrage over the killings and clear the constitutionally impaired presidency of possible accountability.

By the Policy Studies, Publication and Advocacy Program
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)

MANILA — Unless the Melo Commission gets to the bottom of the extrajudicial killings, it will suffer the same fate as previous presidential probe bodies. The task that challenges the commission is to make itself credible by holding an impartial and independent investigation of the political killings even if this would mean summoning the president for ?command responsibility? as the armed forces? commander-in-chief.

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Rody’s War

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DAVAO CITY (davaotoday.com) ? Mayor Rodrigo Duterte likes to regale his guests with the story of how, one time, using a piece of firewood, he crushed the hands of a man accused of stealing hand-held radios. The problem with the story, as the mayor himself would tell his visitors, is that he had actually punished the wrong man.

Duterte laughed out loud when he narrated this story one evening last week, during dinner with friends and journalists. He used the story to drive home the point that he hates thieves and criminals with passion.

The irony was apparently lost on him. To his critics, however, this story illustrates perfectly what is so wrong with Duterte?s obsession with ridding the city of criminals using what has been described by the mayor?s critics as criminal methods. Because he sidesteps due process, they say, he is bound to make mistakes sooner or later.

Indeed, according to the Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE), an alliance of human rights and child advocates in the city, 12 of the 469 murdered by death squads or hired killers here from 1998 until 2005 had been cases of mistaken identity.

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