‘My father kept begging the police not to kill him’
Maria’s last memory of her father is of him lying face down and begging for his life moments before gunshots rang out. Earlier on a December morning in 2016, she and four siblings had been celebrating their sister’s birthday, squeezed happily on to the worn sofa in their tiny home in the Philippine slum of Payatas and eating spaghetti prepared by their father Jerome, 37.
Then a movement by the window caught the young girl’s eye. “A man was pointing a gun at us,” Maria recalls. A squad of seven unidentified men, armed and dressed in black jackets, then burst through the door. The family suspect they were police officers, although The Daily Telegraph has been unable to confirm this.
The children froze and were too scared even to scream. When her siblings were pushed outside and their father was ordered to lie down, Maria, then 11, broke free to cling to him, trying to shield him from harm.
“My father was showing them his ID but the policeman said he didn’t care and pointed a gun at his head. My father kept begging them: ‘If I have done something wrong please just put me in jail because I have seven children’,” she said.
But they didn’t listen. The slight child was torn from her father and tossed outside as he was killed in cold blood. Three years later, Maria, now a shy teenager, still cries as she recounts the story, tormented that she was unable to save him.
She bears witness to the devastation felt by thousands of families ripped apart since the start of the Philippine government’s bloody war on drugs. Humanitarian workers warn that the brutality of the anti-drugs campaign is compounding nationwide poverty and fuelling a mental health crisis, the effects of which will be felt for decades to come.
The spiralling death toll among alleged drug dealers and users since Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine president, rose to power in 2016 vowing to “feed the fish in Manila bay” with criminals, has prompted calls for an independent United Nations investigation. The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency has recorded
5,526 deaths of “drugs personalities” during anti-drug operations, but the Philippines Human Rights Commission puts the number of extrajudicial killings at nearer 27,000.
Recently the murders have become more low key, say human rights activists, where victims simply disappear, and their corpses turn up on wasteland days later.
However, Salvador Panelo, Mr Duterte’s spokesman, rejected the term “extrajudicial killings” as drug-related deaths were “neither state-initiated nor state-sponsored”.
He said: “Drug-related deaths are consequences of police operations when the subjects violently resist arrest to the point which endangers the lives of law enforcers who then act on self-defence, which is permitted by Philippine law.”
Mr Panelo pointed to several state-run programmes to help those with relatives involved in illegal drugs. The government’s “Yakap ng Bayan” programme offered financial help for education, health and burial expenses, and additional schemes provided livelihood and skills training support. Some 28,979 recovering drug addicts had benefited, and 9,732 former drug users received training.
Over the past year, 421,724 “surrenderers” had gone through recovery programmes, while 4,706 had completed a primary care programme at department of health rehabilitation centres. By the end of Mr Duterte’s term in 2022, each region should have at least one drug abuse and treatment centre, said Mr Panelo.
However, many survivors fear the authorities. Eight families interviewed by The Telegraph in Manila and Quezon City said they turned not to the state but to churches and civil society groups for psychological and financial support.
Maria can now speak after initially being struck dumb by grief, said Father Danny Pilario, the dean of the St Vincent School of Theology in Quezon City, near to Payatas.
She is an altar girl in the local chapel and hopes to become a lawyer to help others who face injustice. But daily survival is tough for the seven siblings, who rely on their grandmother Rosa, 86, as their main caregiver.
“I pray to God every day that before I leave this world, my grandchildren will have finished school. That’s the only thing that I ask,” she said.
Payatas, a sprawling shanty town of hundreds of thousands and host to the Philippines largest open dumpsite, was one of the first killing fields in the drugs war. At the height of the murders the Church struggled to bury the mounting number of bodies, while – in a trend widely reported elsewhere – funeral services hiked up their prices to exorbitant rates, plunging grieving families into debt.
Jasmine, a mother-of-three, wept as she recalled sitting alone for days by her husband’s coffin when neighbours did not dare attend his wake, and some mocked her. She said that her husband had been shot six times when he witnessed a friend’s assassination. The trauma of identifying his disfigured body worsened when she could not afford to bury him and the local authorities allegedly refused to help.
“My husband’s coffin lay on the street outside our house for 17 days,” she said. “The children kept asking, why is our father there?”
Once again it was Father Pilario who intervened. For cases like Jasmine’s, he is forced to crowdfund on Facebook.
Father Flavie Villanueva, who runs the Saint Arnold Janssen Centre in Tayuman, northern Manila, and who has faced death threats for his work on the front lines of the drug war, is saddened that the church can help only a “handful” of potentially hundreds of thousands who may be suffering.
Father Villanueva’s institution has overseen the education of some 265 “EJK [extrajudicial killing] orphans.” In the nearby district of Caloocan, a well-documented killing zone, the local parish has offered schooling to dozens more.
Althea, a bright 11-year-old, is one of the children to have received the painstaking care of volunteer psychologists. Three years ago, she was jolted from her sleep at 3am by gunshots fired inside her home by masked men hunting down her grandfather, a drug user.
“I saw my grandfather lying on the floor next to me in a pool of blood… my grandmother was hugging him,” she said. “Then my father came into the room and shouted ‘Papa!’ and the men took him out and pushed him into a car,” she explained. “The next time I saw him, he was in a coffin.”
Despite the violence he has unleashed, Mr Duterte is on track to becoming the Philippines’ most popular leader in more than 30 years. He finished the first half of his six-year term with a record net satisfaction of 68 per cent, according to a poll in July.
Bernadette Ramos, 37, a mother-ofthree from the district of Tondo, said she supported the president even though her husband’s cousin, a drug addict, was a victim of the killings. “Normal people are now safe from the drugs lords,” she said. “Before, we were afraid to go out because of robberies and hold-ups,” Ms Ramos added.
Human rights groups have called for international action. Last month, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to open an investigation into the drug-war deaths, although Manila immediately rejected the plan.
“These cold-blooded killings of parents or other relatives are happening every night, right in front of children – so is it any surprise they are profoundly and deeply scarred by what’s happening?” said Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch.
In the absence of state help, a few priests and NGOS are risking their lives to support survivors, said Mr Robertson. Nobody knows the personal cost more than Bishop Pablo David, of Caloocan, who now has 24-hour security after receiving death threats for his outspokenness.
He is one of 35 high-profile critics of the anti-drugs campaign – including the Philippine vice-president – facing a sedition case from the Philippine National Police. He denies the charge and believes it is linked to his pushback against the authorities’ actions. In an interview, he said he understood the need to fight illegal drugs but that substance use disorder should be treated as a “health issue.”
“People who fall into drug abuse should not be treated as criminals… we should treat them as victims who need help,” he said.
His parish runs a rehabilitation programme. Dozens of volunteer mental health workers have been trained to help grieving families and orphans are given scholarships for school. “They’re not just numbers, they’re not just statistics,” says Bishop David, “they’re human beings like you and me.”
‘My husband’s coffin lay on the street outside our house for 17 days. The children kept asking, why is our father there?’