Kill lists

Cong Corrales .

IF there’s one thing we ought to know by now is that this administration is spectacularly bad at making lists.

Remember Digong Dada’s list of judges, mayors, police officials who were supposedly involved in the proliferation of illegal drugs in the country? To help you jog up your memory, he presented the list of more than 150 names to media last Aug. 7. The list included a judge who has been dead since 2008.

Let’s not forget Digong Dada’s drug matrices. He had the Marawi drug matrix and the matrix on the drug network operating in the country. Among those named in the top rung of that matrix were Peter Co, Peter Lim, and Herbert Colangco.

These lords, except for Colangco, will be exonerated. The country’s very own Department of Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II chalked it up to “weak evidence.” Even the self-confessed drug trafficker Kerwin Espinosa was also off the hook. Yes, the guy who testified in front of the senators that he made at least P40 million to P50 million a year dealing drugs.

What does their exoneration tell us? It confirms our suspicion that Digong Dada’s war on drugs is really just a killing spree of those who are in the lowest rung of the drug syndicate ladder while those on top enjoy the “assumption of innocence until proven otherwise.”

Currently pegged at the tens of thousands, if that’s not a killing spree I don’t know what is. Let’s use this administration’s list of killings lest I’ll be branded as a purveyor of “fake news.”

In the Presidential Communications Operations Office’s accomplishment report, under the section “fight against drugs,” some 3,967 people were killed in anti-drugs operations and 16,355 homicide cases under investigation from July 2016 to Sept. 30 last year. That’s 20,322 persons killed.

With that disappointing denouement of the drug list, Aguirre submits yet another list  — a list of people the government wants to be branded as “terrorists.”

Filed Feb. 21 before the Regional Trial Court Branch 19 in Manila, Aguirre submitted a 55-page petition, 21 pages of which consists of the actual list of names. The petition seeks to have the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army declared as “terrorist and outlawed organizations, associations and/or group of persons” under the Human Security Act of 2007.

Like their drug list before, this administration has also listed people who have long departed this realm (read: dead). In a Bulatlat.com report, at least eight persons in the list have long been dead while two others have been missing for years.

It even listed Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples in the list of supposed Maoist groups. This administration sure has a weird way of cozying up to the International Criminal Court, huh?

Why should this list be relevant to us, here, in Mindanao? Well, it should be because of the 657 people listed, some 364 are from Mindanao. Here’s the scary part, of the 364 people listed, some 162 names are aliases. Let that sink in for awhile.

Anybody and I mean anybody who unfortunately falls from grace with Digong Dada could just as easily be branded as one of those 162 aliases in the list.

Mindanews quoted Lt. Col. Emmanuel Garcia, chief of the Public Affairs Office of the Armed Forces as estimating the strength of the NPA, as of last year, at 3,700 armed guerrillas.

It would be safe to assume that Aguirre lists the “brains” of the so-called terrorist movement in the Philippines with 3,700-foot soldier strong to carry out its terrorist acts. Then, why haven’t we witnessed at least one “terrorist attack” each week since this administration started? One would think that many “brains” could have expelled this administration by now.

This list, like all the other lists of this administration in the past, is nothing but another veritable kill list. This administration’s lust for blood wasn’t sated enough with the ongoing killing spree under the pretext of a drug war, it has now created another kill list. Pfft.