A never-ending drug war story

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ell-known to be drama and soap opera junkies, Filipinos are fans of not just the usual fiction fare offered by TV and radio. Even congressional hearings can have them enthralled, like those involving a mayor of a small town who turned out to be a Chinese national with alleged connections to illegal gambling operations. 

But Filipinos found themselves spoiled for choice when a related congressional inquiry began while those on the mayor weren’t quite finished yet. 

Led by the House of Representatives’ quad committee – a megapanel composed of the House Committees on Dangerous Drugs, Public Order and Safety, Human Rights, and Public Accounts – the inquiry had the ambitious goal of investigating the links between illegal offshore gaming and extrajudicial killings in the drug war.

From August to December last year, Filipinos were glued to their TVs and radios as the almost daily inquiry by the “Quadcomm” slowly but eventually found its way up to the powerful Duterte family. 

For sure, some observers noted that the investigation was being conducted just months before the May 2025 general election, and wondered if it might be an early campaign tactic in disguise. Others pointed out that the Quadcomm was formed after a bitter fallout between the clan of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and that of Vice President Sara Duterte; for these observers, the committee looked much like a mere tool of the Marcoses to go after the Vice President’s family, particularly its patriarch, former President Rodrigo Duterte.

But for the families of drug-war victims who never found accountability under the Duterte administration, the Quadcomm inquiry has been the closest they could get yet to justice. 

Christine Laxamana, mother of 18-year-old Joshua Laxamana who was killed by police in 2016, was among those invited to one of the Quadcomm hearings in October. 

“This was the moment we’ve been waiting for, to finally meet him (Duterte) and not just to air our grievances to the media,” Laxamana said. “This was our chance to tell it to his face.”

Still, rights advocates said that the inquiry fell short of their demands for a genuine truth commission that would not only investigate the abuses in Duterte’s drug war but would also provide reparations for its victims –  similar to the body established to compensate and institutionalize the commemoration of victims of martial law during the regime of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, father of the current president. 

Lawyer Kristina Conti, for one, observed that throughout the four months of hearings, victims and their relatives were heard “for less than 30 minutes.”

“(Their) time to tell their stories and to confront perpetrators has not been adequate,” she said. “It cannot and has not fully enforced the ‘right to truth’ and the corresponding entitlement to reconciliation, justice, memory, reparation.”

Sociologist Randy David also wrote in a column that a real truth commission “would have formulated its objectives more clearly and laid out its procedures more systematically. Its proceedings would have been less repetitive. There would have been less opportunity for grandstanding and greater respect for the rights of witnesses and resource persons.” 

Key findings

Yet those following the marathon coverage of the hearings on TV and radio found them filled with as much intrigue and suspense as the most popular TV action-drama series. The main difference, of course, was that while the actors in the TV dramas later got up and walked off the set after they were killed onscreen, the victims in the Duterte drug war remained dead.

According to official data, the six-year anti-drug campaign of the Duterte administration killed over 7,000.  But rights groups estimate the number could go up to 12,000 to 30,000 – the same figures used by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in its current probe into alleged crimes against humanity committed during Duterte’s drug war.

Several witnesses invited by the Quadcomm during its inquiry testified about the inner workings of the drug war – and how Rodrigo Duterte and his closest allies, including Senators Christopher “Bong” Go and Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, pulled the strings behind the scenes. (Go was formerly Duterte’s special assistant while Dela Rosa used to head the Philippine National Police.)

Police Colonel Royina Garma, who was a rumored Duterte favorite, revealed the existence of a payoff system that incentivized killings in the war on drugs. Two inmates, Leopoldo Tan and Fernando Magdadaro, meanwhile said that they were ordered to kill three Chinese inmates in 2016, at the supposed behest of Duterte. 

A former Bureau of Customs intelligence officer, Jimmy Guban, testified that a massive meth shipment that came into the country in 2017 was owned by Duterte’s eldest son Paolo; his son-in-law and Sara’s husband Manases Carpio; and his former economic adviser Michael Yang. 

Duterte supporters have dismissed these as fiction. But when Duterte himself was invited to the Quadcomm hearings on Oct. 13, he not only doubled down on his promise to assume full responsibility for all the crimes committed during his brutal war on drugs, he also dared the ICC to “come here and start the investigation tomorrow.”

Two months later, as the panel was about to wrap up their marathon hearings for the year, Quadcomm senior vice chair and former police general Romeo Acop said that their findings pointed to Duterte at the “center of a grand criminal enterprise” that used the brutal war on drugs as a cover to profit from the very same scourge that the country’s former chief executive said he wanted to eliminate.

“This is such a painful thing for us to say, because it seems we were nabudol (scammed),” Acop said in his closing speech. “This was a difficult job. We didn’t want to go up against a very popular president. But like him, we, too, are elected by the people…. He won on a platform of hardline stance against illegal drugs and criminality, only for him to be the face of illegal drugs and criminality himself.” 

On Dec. 18, as Congress adjourned, Quadcomm lead chair and Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers declared that Duterte, along with his allies, should be held accountable for crimes against humanity under Republic Act No. 9851, which criminalizes genocide and war crimes, among others. 

In urging charges against the former president, the mega panel asserted that the drug war constituted “a profound and systematic violation of their inherent rights to life and dignity.” 

This recommendation was contained in a 51-page progress report, where the panel accused Duterte of having “incited the perpetration of extrajudicial killings and emboldened the impunity of state authorities, by actively encouraging, facilitating, and directly participating in the system that orchestrated the killings and the targeting of suspected drug users and dealers.”

The ICC question

There are some concerns, though, that going forward with these prosecutions might affect the ICC investigation, which had been allowed to go on precisely because the Philippines has shown unwillingness to investigate the same crimes. 

But Conti, who also serves as the legal counsel for the drug war victims serving as complainants in the ICC case, sees no problem as “the domestic law’s reverse complementarity supports the continuing investigation by the ICC.”

“The ICC is in a better position to prosecute Duterte,” she asserted. “It has the benefit of time, having studied this for the past eight years. It has the trust of thousands of victims who have participated in the representation stages. And it is insulated and independent from Philippine politics, keeping with its work regardless of election results.”

“Most crucially,” added Conti, “it has the breadth of experience and authority in dealing with this kind of crime and proceedings.”

Retired judge and international humanitarian lawyer Soliman Santos, for his part, stressed that “it may be best not to put all of one’s eggs in one ICC basket.”

“What if the ICC proceedings are, for whatever reason, subsequently dismissed with finality?” he asked. “This should not be left to chance. The best policy for victim justice quest purposes may be to keep all options open, based on ‘significant change of circumstances’ or the situation in the ICC and in the Philippines.” 

Indeed, for now, it’s unclear how the drug-war saga will play out, and what role the Marcos Jr. administration will eventually take in it. At the very least, President Marcos Jr. has made more considerable effort to engage with international human rights mechanisms compared to his predecessor, who pulled the Philippines out of the Rome Statute that established the ICC in 2019 in an attempt to avoid prosecution. 

Last Nov. 15, Marcos Jr. himself confirmed the Philippines would not stop Duterte’s possible arrest if the ICC should issue an arrest warrant against him, which would likely be effected by the Interpol. 

“We do not cooperate with the ICC,” he told reporters. “That is the position of this government.” 

But he also said that “as (Interior) Secretary (Jonvic) Remulla explained before, we have obligations to Interpol and we have to live up to those obligations.”

Pot meets kettle?

Yet with the Marcos-Duterte dynastic alliance now broken, there are genuine concerns about whether the current dispensation is merely trying to gain the upper hand in holding the former president accountable for his real abuses.

In truth, the “war on drugs,” while less intense than under the previous administration, continues to be a source of grave concern. Data from the University of the Philippines-Third World Studies Center, an independent recorder of drug war-related deaths, showed that 2024 alone saw 364 drug war-related deaths, or almost one killing a day. 

Investigations and prosecutions on these have remained scarce as there were only three court convictions in relation to drug-related killings since Marcos Jr. took office in June 2022. 

“Lack of progress in this area is unjustifiable,” said Astrud Lea Beringer, coordinator of the German-based Action Network Human Rights Philippines that released its own assessment of the human rights situation in the country in 2024. “Thousands of families of victims of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ are still waiting for justice while drug-related killings are ongoing.” 

At the same time, red-tagging, or the labeling of individuals and organizations as communists or terrorists, is still being used to silence dissent and target activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. 

A report by Amnesty International released in October found that the Marcos administration “increasingly weaponized digital tools, misinformation, and vague anti-terror laws to harass, intimidate, and repress young activists.” 

Unfortunately for ordinary Filipinos, the plot continues to thicken and they are unable to wrest control of the script. ◉