FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Courageous Filipino fights back amid ‘anti-drugs’ bloodbath    

Courageous Filipino fights back amid ‘anti-drugs’ bloodbath    

When the first drug war killing happened in her community, she shrugged it off. She even felt a twinge of hope that the addicts and small-time dealers would learn their lesson, be afraid, and give up their vice.

Sister Juanita “Nenet” Dano lives in the second most densely populated district in Manila. The people of San Andres Bukid are desperately poor, many of their huts too small to deserve the name home.
Before the advent of the Duterte administration’s anti-drug campaign, trade in narcotics was rampant in the community. No single district in the area was free of illegal drugs, Sister Nenet recalls.
Two months into the implementation of the euphemistically titled “Oplan Tokhang” (Approach and Talk) Sister Nenet became disturbed; the killings were now happening every week. One question haunted her: “Is killing the only solution to the problem of illegal drugs?”
Sister Nenet is a member of the Good Shepherd order, along with 170 other nuns stationed in the Philippines. She spent eight years as a missionary in Senegal, where she became fluent in French. After returning to the Philippines in 2011, she started social work among the poor families in San Andres Bukid. She trained a group of 20 women residents to assist her in her work.
As the frequency of extrajudicial killings soared to 50 or more per week in Manila, Sister Nenet’s worry turned to outrage. Together with her 20 volunteers, she began attending the wakes of victims, offering prayers and helping arrange the funerals.
It was here, while talking to the bereaved families, that she found out details of the killings that were otherwise not reported. She learned of victims who were sleeping when they were shot dead. Victims who were stripped naked and found to have no guns or drugs, but who were still killed. Young men eating lunch at a roadside joint when shot, apparently victims of mistaken identity. Those who were taking a bath when gunned down, or killed in place of the target, who could not be located.
Sister Nenet and her volunteers learned of masked assassins discovered to be policemen. Of fabricated documents stating that guns and ammunition were seized from victims, hours before the buy-bust and killings. And of a police letter directing that a corpse be taken to a specific funeral parlour – an irregular practice that naturally sparks suspicion of a cover-up.
Sister Nenet and her volunteers underwent paralegal training, enabling them to record the details of each killing with charts, written eyewitness testimonies, and an inventory of evidence. These were compiled and submitted to the Supreme Court as part of a class suit filed by the Centre for International Law to seek protection for San Andres Bukid residents.
Sister Nenet also meets with drug users and helps them undergo counselling. She and her lay volunteers minister to “drug users who are not yet badly addicted by giving them activated carbon capsules meant to help clean their systems”.
In her written Supreme Court testimony, Sister Nenet was asked why she persists in her mission in San Andres Bukid. She answered: “Have you been to a crime scene? Have you heard the cry of someone who lost a father, a brother, a grandfather because of illegal drugs? Have you seen children helplessly crying and trembling because they experienced being dragged and forced to ride a police car? Or because they witnessed their mothers being forcibly separated from them as ‘palit-ulo’ [relatives of the accused] or because policemen planted evidence as a way of trapping drug personalities?
 “I have been witnessing these since August 2016. Like the bereaved, I also cry for justice. I, together with our mission partners and other stakeholders, must continue our mission. Our motto is to never give up on our brothers and sisters who are drug dependent.”
After the Supreme Court case was filed, there has been no killing reported in San Andres Bukid, and police drug operations have reverted to the arrests of drug suspects.
 Juanita Dano is a courageous example for all ordinary Filipinos.

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