Philippines Impunity Normalizing Extrajudicial Assassination

Why should we tell the story of Jasmine Dorana, a 15-year old Filipina widow & mother to an infant, after masked assassins dragged her teenaged husband, “Toto” by the hair, outside onto a rotten-wood porch of their tin-roof hut raised on posts above a fetid swamp choked in plastic and raw sewage, then shot him four times in the head, dying in her arms as she cried, “Pa, not yet…Not yet, please…We have a baby”?

Why should people care about, Remy Fernandez, an 84-year-old grandmother left to raise 7 grandchildren after their father was executed by masked gunmen sent to the slums to kill him in his own living room?

Metro Manila’s massive slums are a vast dumping ground for the multigenerational poor and they make up the vast majority of the victims - an estimated 13,000 extrajudicial killings victims (and counting)- in Philippines President Duterte’s War on Drugs, or “Tokhang”.

We tell these stories because we're human because by not knowing their story and not exposing these worst of crimes, we would become complicit in the crimes - we'd be sanctioning these crimes with our silence.

The impoverished and powerless, trapped in squalor, believed that, in Duterte, they’d finally found their saviour, their champion. Instead, Duterte has unleashed masked assassins in a spasm of slaughter that hangs thick and heavy, like a medieval darkness, creating a siege mentality in the slums - delivering assassination with impunity, without pause.

James Whitlow Delano