There was a time at the height of the Davao City killing fields when Rodrigo Duterte’s own assassins were stupefied at who killed who. For aside from the Davao Death Squad (DDS) that Duterte himself supervised, he had also permitted his trusted lieutenants to form their own death squads.
Why was that? There was a killing economy behind it. Each death squad would get a killing bounty from the murderous mayor. There was the Bong Go death squad, and the Vicente Danao death squad. There was the Isidro Lapeña group that handled abductions.
The confessed DDS assassin Arturo Lascañas, who had gifted me with the entire manuscript of his notarized affidavit, related an unusual incident of two Duterte-authorized death squads arriving at the same scene. Let me render a rephrase of his account:
It was between 8-9 in the morning when I, with Jim Tan, Bobong Aquino and the Duhilag brothers, arrived at the corner of Monteverde and Lizada Streets. We were about to hit our intended suspect who was standing outside his store.
Suddenly, two hitmen riding tandem on a motorcycle, arrived and shot our intended target person point-blank. This target was a Filipino-Chinese engaged in the retail of agricultural produce, mostly imported onions from China. The hitmen killed our target instantly and they then fled on board their motorcycle.
Jim Tan told me that we should intercept those killers. I told Jim Tan that I actually identified the shooter. His name was Wangyu Latayada. Hence we called up Sonny Buenaventura to narrate the incident to him. Sonny then gave us confirmation. The target was killed by the Bato dela Rosa death squad.
Is that the reason why Dela Rosa would run through the labyrinth of the senate’s nooks and crannies, only to stumble along the stairs that Al-Jazeera and The Guardian wrote as news stories, because he was running away from the bitter accountability of his DDS past?
Lascañas had more Bato tales.
Sometime 1999-2000, an abduction operation was approved by Duterte and assigned to Dela Rosa. The suspects were three Moro individuals (Note: Lascañas referred to them as “Muslim individuals”). They were residents of the so-called Muslim Village in Maa, Davao City.
Dela Rosa himself joined the operation. He himself was the one who forcibly pulled out the three Moro men from a passenger jeepney bound for the city. We wore bonnets for that operation.
We brought the three abducted Moro to Tabab’s Apartelle. Not a single sachet of shabu was recovered from the suspects. That night at 10 pm, Dela Rosa ordered us to erase without a trace the three individuals. He said that was the wish of Duterte.
The three were blindfolded and hogtied. We brought them to a new mass grave in Maa near a banana chips factory along the banks of the Davao River, near a banana plantation. They were then killed and buried in a mass grave. Their clothes were thrown in the Davao River.
Our group then received P50,000 as reward money.
Dela Rosa then was the commander of the city’s Presidential Anti Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF – Davao City). One day, the commander called up Lascañas for a “special ops.”
The real motive was that Dela Rosa had taken sides in an internal squabble of small-scale miners in the gold-rush Diwalwal in Moncayo, Compostela Valley. Two Moro miners were first abducted, then brought to Laud Quarry in Davao City as Dela Rosa had ordered. His order was to immediately “neutralize” them without the benefit of tactical interrogation.
I only have one question to ask readers: would you give the fugitive Bato dela Rosa the benefit of due process now that his warrant of arrest is out?
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
