VERA Files
Several times, President Rodrigo Duterte has proudly taken responsibility for the killings in his bloody campaign against illegal drugs. It goes without saying, therefore, that the prosecution of the drug-related killings would have to reach his level.
Four years into President Duterte’s War on Drugs – and three years since the death of Caloocan teen Kian delos Santos – Mr. Duterte’s first top cop, then-PNP Chief and now senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, admits: the controversial, bloody war should have started with an “internal cleansing,” targeting “scalawag” members of the police.
On April 1, 2020, around 10:30 p.m., Ronald Cumayas, 38, a volunteer, was manning the quarantine checkpoint of Barangay Bagong Silangan in Quezon City when he was fatally shot by four gunmen on board two motorcycles.
The number of drug-related killings in Caloocan is lower (373 deaths, based on a study by Ateneo School of Government) compared with the number of fatalities in Quezon City (400) and Manila (463) as of June 2018 (Ateneo School of Government 2018, 16). Yet, Caloocan is consistently touted as the ‘ground zero’ of Tokhang killings.
Official records do not bear out his claim.
10 years, 10 stories.
There’s a petition going around online addressed to Netflix to stop the April 9 showing of the TV series “Amo” about the brutal war against illegal drugs being waged by President Rodrigo Duterte.
In a press statement, the CHR pointed out that house-to-house drug testing “runs contrary” to the Dangerous Drug Act of 2002.
When police chief Ronald de la Rosa was once asked to explain before the Senate the deaths in the drug war, he had one reply: “They resisted arrest. Otherwise, they would have been alive.”
The Supreme Court’s swift move to grant protection to the lone survivor and the family of slain victims of a brutal Oplan Tokhang operation is timely and necessary, a law firm said Tuesday.