Dutertes’ senator foe says ‘destroy or be destroyed’
Church bells toll in protest
After launching his political career from a jail cell, Philippine Senator Antonio
Trillanes believes it could end in a grave thanks to a relentless campaign against his “hitman” president.
But the former Navy officer with a history of coup attempts appears to thrive on the pressures that have come with regularly accusing President Rodrigo Duterte of being a corrupt mass murderer.
“This man is a sociopath and he has the mindset of a hitman,” Trillanes, 46, told AFP in an interview on Wednesday from his senate office, offering a typically incendiary assessment of his rival.
Duterte won last year’s presidential elections on a brutal law-and-order platform in which he promised an unprecedented campaign to eradicate illegal drugs in society by killing up to 100,000 traffickers and addicts.
He vowed so many bodies would be dumped in Manila Bay that the fish would grow fat from feeding on them, and said he would pardon police if they were found guilty of rights abuses while enacting his drug war.
Climate of fear has also emerged, with critics warning the president is determined to silence dissenters and drag the Philippines back into a dictatorship three decades after a “People Power” revolution ousted Ferdinand Marcos.
Duterte has launched tirades against the Supreme Court chief justice, the Commission on Human Rights, the Catholic Church and critical media outlets. He and his allies have then started campaigns to curb their powers or discredit them.
Senator Leila de Lima, who had been one of the most vocal critics alongside Trillanes, was in February jailed on drug trafficking charges she says were fabricated. Rights groups describe her as a political prisoner.
On the weekend Duterte made Trillanes his new top target.
“I will destroy him or he will destroy me,” Duterte told reporters.
This came after Trillanes had Duterte’s son, Paolo, brought before a Senate inquiry last week to face allegations he was involved in drug trafficking.
Trillanes accused the younger Duterte of being a member of a Chinese triad that imported huge amounts of methamphetamines into the Philippines, and challenged him to show a tattoo on his back that allegedly proved he was a member of the gang.
Paolo Duterte acknowledged he did have a tattoo on his back, but refused to show it and rejected all accusations against him.
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Church bells rang across the mainly Catholic Philippines late Thursday as bishops rallied opposition to the “reign of terror” that has left thousands dead in President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war.
Police have reported killing more than 3,800 people to fulfil Duterte’s vow to rid the country of narcotics, with the 15-month crackdown triggering wider violence that has seen thousands of other people found dead in unexplained circumstances.
An elderly church sexton tugged on a rope to ring a 171-year-old bell atop the San Roque cathedral, its slow, deep peals sweeping over the vast slums of northern Manila around the 211-year-old church.
“Many of the drug killings had taken place in this diocese,” Ryan Rezo, another church employee, told AFP.