Right and Wrong
“Hindi po... hindi po totoo ‘yun. Nag-sidecar lang siya kasi wala na kaming pang-almusal. Hindi po ‘yun totoo eh. Wala pong totoo diyan.”
Jennilyn Olayres was the woman in Raffy Lerma’s iconic “Pieta” photo that captured the climate of violence and hopelessness of that period. Timelines blur with the distance of years, so we tend to forget now that the murder of her partner Michael Siaron happened barely two weeks after Rodrigo Duterte came into power. Siaron, in fact, did not die during police operations, but rather at the hands of unknown assassins “riding-in-tandem,” that damned phrase of ugly Filipino English that you could only get from our finest law enforcers.
The police tried to wash their hands of this murder and thousands of others, with PNP leadership floating the cockamamie theory that these were rival criminal gangs killing each other. Even at the very start, it was curious how the spate of supposed vigilante killings mirrored what had happened in Davao City, which Duterte ruled as mayor for decades with an iron fist. The script was remarkably similar, with a rash of murders followed by Duterte’s assertion that the summary killings were being committed by criminals against fellow criminals. It all felt like a template, right down to the lies that were so baldfaced you had to wonder if they did it simply to insult your intelligence.
As early as 2017, Reuters had spoken to police insiders who claimed that most of the killings during the drug war were perpetrated by the PNP. In 2018, Patricia Evangelista released a series of reports featuring on-the-record accounts of how the police in Manila “outsourced” the killings to gang members. That, of course, aligned with the 2016 testimony of death squad members from Duterte’s time in Davao narrating how they worked with the police to carry out their murders.
The details may have been shocking, but nothing in those reports was surprising; on some level, we knew all along. There were always receipts, like when a police station in Manila recorded no killings on the same night they were having their Christmas Party, or when cops in Oriental Mindoro got into a shootout with a pair of assassins who turned out to be police officers from a neighboring town.
But knowing all along, and being powerless to stop it, just made things more hopeless. Jennilyn Olayres expressed as much in an interview just days after Michael Siaron’s death. “Hindi na mabibigyan ng hustisya ‘yung asawa ko eh,” she said. “Alam ko po ‘yun kasi hindi naman po namin alam kung sino ‘yung gumawa nito.”
For a long, long time, she was right. Police identified a certain Nesty Santiago as the gunman behind Siaron’s death. Conveniently, Santiago was also killed by assassins riding in tandem that December. Investigators declared the case solved.
And then, after a long time being right, there’s now suddenly a sliver of hope that Jennilyn Olares may finally be wrong.
Reading and watching back these accounts now, it strikes me how, from the very start, there was resistance. Amid overwhelming public opinion. Amid violent rhetoric. Amid the whole state apparatus ganging up on the helpless. Amid hopelessness. There was always, at every turn, resistance.
These came from everywhere: church members, whistleblowers, lawyers, doctors, social workers, activists, artists, academics, journalists, and photographers, in what Sheila Coronel called “a parallel ecosystem of empathy and defiance.”
It was a lonely circle that is perhaps just a bit less lonely than it was before; but of course, things today remain hopeless, if just a little less hopeless than they were yesterday. There remains popular support for Duterte, as evidenced by some of your friends on social media engaging in what might be the world’s worst essay-writing contest in his support following his arrest.
After thousands of deaths, I think the next biggest tragedy of this whole thing is the fact that we live in a society where large swaths of people are so bereft of empathy and moral bearings and just plain humanity that they would condone cold-blooded murder FOR ANY REASON AT ALL.
I wonder, if I told them to think about a person they loved — maybe their child or partner or a parent — and asked them, “When would you be OK with the police killing them? What would they have to do for you to be fine with their death? Drugs? Theft? Or would you still want them to always come back alive, even if only to face the consequences?” I wonder how many of them would give that same grace to those who lost parents, partners, and children in the drug war. That’s what I think about when I think about hopelessness.
But just because their view is popular doesn’t make them any less wrong, just as those who resisted weren’t any less right, despite all the mockery and harassment they’ve had to endure. That moral clarity was the engine of their resistance, and it is the only reason we have the small sliver of hope we have today.
Photo: KMJS