My Friend is a Political Prisoner (and the public doesn’t care)
February 25 is what is commonly referred to in the Philippines as the EDSA Revolution. On this day in 1986, Filipinos peacefully threw the dictator Ferdinand Marcos out of office by camping out for three days in the middle of Manila’s main thoroughfare known as EDSA. The people massed on EDSA because it was the most direct path to the military camp where Marcos’ defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile and a band of rebel soldiers had holed up after a failed coup attempt against Marcos. Out of options and facing imminent arrest and execution, Enrile called up the politically influential archbishop of Manila, Jaime Cardinal Sin, and asked for his intervention. Sin, already critical of the Marcos regime, went on the radio and called on the public to surround the military camp and prevent the Armed Forces from arresting Enrile and his coup plotters. First hundreds, then thousands of people filled the streets of EDSA for three days, at one point blocking the path of tanks that had been sent by Marcos to force their way through the crowds and enter the camp. By the third day, Washington had abandoned Marcos and smuggled him and his family out of the country to Hawaii, where he eventually died without ever returning to his plundered homeland.
Thirty three years later, on the eve of the anniversary of the EDSA Revolution, I’ve joined a few dozen people inside the same military camp where Enrile and his followers triggered the chain of events that led to Marcos’ ouster. We came not to celebrate the EDSA revolution but to pay our respects to Senator Leila de Lima, the most prominent political prisoner of the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte, who is observing her second year in prison. Yes, the same place where a dictator was ousted from power three decades ago now houses a critic of another authoritarian regime.
Two years ago, Leila de Lima was a first term senator, having been elected in 2016, the same year that Duterte won the presidency in a landslide victory over de Lima’s partymate, Mar Roxas. Her victory and Roxas’ loss, made her instantly a part of the political opposition and she began to speak out against President Duterte’s brutal war on drugs. But even before 2016, de Lima had spent years investigating allegations of human rights abuses against Duterte, who was mayor of Davao City for about three decades. Davao City was the commercial center of Mindanao, the troubled southern region of the Philippines, which was plagued by a Maoist insurgency, a Muslim separatist movement, and rampant criminality.
Duterte was widely credited with cleaning up Davao by forging a kind of détente with the Maoists, isolating it from the Muslim separatists, and cracking down hard on criminality. He imposed strict measures against public smoking, littering, and drunkenness and established nighttime curfews for minors. Over time, Davao City went from an economic and political basket case to the showcase of strongman rule done right, at least on the local level. Duterte’s success earned him the almost godlike worship of Davao residents and the admiration of the people of Mindanao, many of whom were dealing unsuccessfully with the same problems that Duterte appeared to have solved.
But cleaning up Davao came at a cost. Stories arose about the Davao Death Squad — vigilantes who would take to the streets and kidnap and kill suspected criminals. Over time it became widely suspected that these death squads were not really vigilantes, but local militia working with the permission of Duterte himself. In the mid-2000s, when I was working as a journalist, one woman recounted to me how her son was abducted by the Davao Death Squad and how his corpse was found days later dumped on a Davao street corner riddled with bullet holes. No warrant, no trial, just an execution. I investigated it and became convinced that Duterte was at the very least aware of the death squads and was likely encouraging them, if not controlling them outright. But for most Filipinos, the violations of the rights of suspected criminals was a small price to pay for the prosperity, peace, and relative order that Davaoenos now enjoyed. I filed my story but it never aired.
In 2009, de Lima, then chairman of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), began an investigation into the Davao Death Squads. The CHR was an independent constitutional office that had the obligation and the power to investigate human rights violations. De Lima left the Commission in 2010, before the investigation could be completed, when she was appointed secretary of justice by then-president Benigno Aquino III. In 2012 the CHR recommended a formal criminal investigation into Duterte and his possible involvement in the death squads. The Office of the Ombudsman, who investigated the case and had the power to file cases against Duterte, declined to prosecute the case, citing lack of evidence. Nevertheless, de Lima had made a lifelong enemy of Duterte, and her attacks on him in the senate would not go unanswered.
In 2016, just months into her term, she attacked Duterte and the extrajudicial killings under his deadly nationwide drug war on the senate floor and called for the senate to investigate the president.
Duterte hit back hard. Within weeks, he publicly accused de Lima of protecting drug lords during her time as secretary of justice. For good measure, the president even slut-shamed her by announcing that she was having an affair with her driver and aide. An obedient senate removed her from its committee investigating Duterte’s war on drugs, witnesses to corroborate Duterte’s allegations were produced, and within months, charges were filed against de Lima in court, and a warrant was issued for her arrest on 23 February 2017. The next day de Lima, who had never been arrested or even charged for anything in her life, surrendered to authorities.
Since then, de Lima has employed every remedy she could. She has appealed twice to the Supreme Court to question the legality of her arrest and has been rejected twice. At her ongoing trial, a police investigator who looked into the allegations made by Duterte against de Lima appeared as a prosecution witness and admitted that there was no evidence linking her to the drug cartels or even to any drug related activity. International human rights organizations have condemned her detention and called for her release.
Despite it all, de Lima remains unbowed. Prison will either break you or strengthen you, and in de Lima’s case it appears to have buttressed her conviction that Duterte is asking the Philippines too high a price for the sense of security that he undeniably provides them. Because to de Lima, support for Duterte means reconciling your conscience to the idea that it’s okay to give him the power over life and death to exercise at his whim, the power to stay in office as long as he wants and dispense favors to whoever he likes, and the ability to silence legitimate criticism from anyone he doesn’t like.
She will need to nurture that conviction, because today in the Philippines, her warnings are largely being ignored by a public that is very different from the public who flocked to EDSA 33 years ago to oust a dictator.
