Mariano Carrasco
PRESIDENT Digong has pledged to eliminate the scourge of drugs and criminality in six months. His method: kill the pushers, drug lords and addicts, and other criminals. But I seriously doubt if he can truly do it in six months’ time. I don’t think he can do it in six years. By now, almost a thousand criminals, drug addicts, pushers and drug lords have been killed, and seems to be endless.
Digong must go to the root causes that breed criminality and drug addiction. Most of the criminals and drug addicts are jobless, without decent homes, uneducated, without farms and lands to till, and without the necessary income to sustain decent lives and families.
We can see it on TV--most of those killed or caught sniffing shabu live in squatter colonies and squalid homes. As long as the roots of criminality and drugs are alive, the leaves and branches will grow back after cutting them. He needs to address the root causes.
He needs to provide the landless and homeless with lands and decent homes, give the people free education, universal health care, decent employment and income which would require the abolition of contractualization and oppression of workers and peasants, and curtail the outflow of our resources and profits of multinational corporations so they could be plowed back for the people’s benefit. He needs to stop vote-buying and vote-selling come election time so that only the decent and good public officials would assume governmental power.
But if he does do that, he would encounter opposition from the hacienderos, big landlords, landgrabbers, big business, oligarchs, multinational corporations and their dominant allies and puppets in the legislature, government, and mass media who are raking in huge profits at the people’s expense. Duterte could be subjected to a coup or could get assassinated.
In the long run, we really cannot expect much. Now, here’s my queer although limited proposal for Digong. Instead of killing the criminal and drug pushers interminably and endlessly, and who could no longer be accommodated by funeral parlors soon, why won’t he just have all the suspects summarily detained in some kind of idyllic farm colonies where they would have huge farms to plow and where they could plant fruit trees and vegetables, complete with decent housing, basketball and tennis courts, swimming pool, seminar and re-education rooms, videoke rooms minus the alcohol, chapels and churches, and fishponds where they could leisurely fish all year round. This is a huge country and there must be some space left. Isn’t that nice and more effective? To borrow the favorite phrase of a deceased friend, “tsada, di ba?” He he.
(Mariano B. Carrasco is a lawyer based in Cagayan de Oro.)
