Fr. Amado Picardal predicts 70,000 killed in Duterte’s ‘drug war’

Fr. Amado Picardal predicts 70,000 killed in Duterte’s ‘drug war’

Fr. Amado Picardal

By the time his term ends in 2022

By Althea Manasan
The Philippine Reporter

As the death toll rises in President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war against drugs,” one of the loudest voices speaking out against the violence is coming from the Catholic Church.

That voice was heard at New York City’s Columbia University earlier this month, where human rights advocate and Catholic priest Father Amado Picardal delivered a talk about extrajudicial killings (EJKs) in the country and how the Church has been responding to them.

Speaking to a crowd of about 50 people, including faculty and students, Picardal said that “the Church is playing a vital role” by providing support to victims’ families and demanding justice.

“The Church is exercising its prophetic voice,” he said.

The event, titled Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines and the Church’s Response, was hosted by Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and moderated by Sheila Coronel, a renowned investigative reporter and dean of academic affairs at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Picardal, a Redemptorist priest whose criticisms of EJKs by Duterte’s government have been widely covered by the media, had just come from delivering similar talks at DePaul University in Chicago and Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

Since Duterte’s presidency began in July 2016, thousands of suspected drug users have been killed in his anti-drug campaign. (The Philippine National Police puts the official death toll at 3,987, but Human Rights Watch estimates it’s closer to 12,000. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines puts the death toll at more than 16,000.)

Fr. Amado Picardal with Sheila Coronel

Picardal has witnessed some of these deaths first-hand. Standing in front a projector screen, he showed photos of dead bodies, some of which he had taken himself in order to document the deaths.

A photo showing a man, bloodied and lying in the dirt by the side of the road, was of a pastoral worker he had trained. When Picardal heard the news of his killing, he rushed to the scene.

“I went there with my camera. I was crying when I was taking this picture,” he told the audience. His presentation was filled with similar horrifying, graphic images.

If trends continue, Picardal predicts that by the time Duterte’s term is over, more than 70,000 will have been killed in the campaign.

The Church’s response

In the wake of all these deaths, Picardal explained how the Catholic Church has taken on the role of providing support for victims and their families, both spiritually and economically.

“Burying the dead is the immediate response,” he said, pointing out that the majority of the victims’ families are poor and cannot afford to pay funeral costs. Many have to abandon the bodies of their loved ones at funeral parlours, and those bodies are eventually dumped in mass graves.

“Many of the killing fields are in the urban slums, and most of the victims are poor,” Picardal said.

In addition to grief counselling for families, including monthly meetings for orphans and widows, the Church also provides financial support. Scholarships are available for the children of victims.

“Families of victims are often sick and traumatized after witnessing the deaths of their loved ones,” Picardal said. “If you kill one person, it affects six people…If they are poor, their situation becomes worse.”

Along with humanitarian work, Picardal pointed out that the Church’s activities are also political. There are nuns living among the poor, organizing them and helping them file writs in court to help keep police officers from terrorizing their barangays.

Bishops and priests have also pledged to provide sanctuary to witnesses and to police officers involved in killings who are now experiencing crises of consciousness.

“This is very, very important,” said Picardal, adding that witnesses could eventually testify in the International Criminal Court with the support of priests and other religious and lay people.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines has also issued several pastoral letters condemning the EJKs in Duterte’s anti-drug campaign.

“Confronted with these killings, the Church has not been silent,” Picardal said.

A lifetime of resistance

Picardal has not been known to be silent either.

His activism began in 1972 when, at the age of 17, he was caught in Cebu City distributing leaflets protesting martial law under Marcos. He was arrested by the Philippine Constabulary, taken to jail and tortured.

“One of the things that happened to me was when they put that .45 caliber in my mouth, and I thought ‘I’m going to be salvaged,’” Picardal recalled. “I was lucky because the one that was [pulling] the trigger changed his mind.”

Picardal was eventually released and went on to complete his theology studies, but the realities of the Marcos era still weighed heavy on him and his fellow colleagues. He was a schoolmate of fellow Redemptorist priest Father Rudy Romano, who made headlines in 1985 after he was abducted in Cebu. He was never seen again.

“Father Picx and the priests of his generation were caught in the vortex of Philippine politics and revolution at that time in the 1980s,” Coronel said in her introduction for Picardal.
As fate would have it, in 1995 Picardal was assigned to Davao City at the same time that Duterte was entering his second term as mayor.

While there, Picardal served as a spokesperson for the Coalition Against Summary Execution, an organization that monitored EJKs by the Davao Death Squad. It’s estimated that the vigilante group is responsible for more than 1,000 deaths or disappearances between 1998 and 2008.

Picardal said the EJKs happening today follow the “Davao template.” This includes compiling lists of targets and the use of policemen and their assets to carry out the acts of violence. “Many of these are very familiar to me,” he said.

He also compared the violence happening under Duterte to the blood that was shed during the Marcos regime. Just like during Marcos’s rule, he said, some of the killings are politically motivated and dissidents are being targeted as enemies of the state.

“EJKs are the legacy of the dictator Marcos, whom Duterte idolizes,” he said. He believes that the war against drug addicts, criminals and enemies of the state is a “pretext for expanding control and hegemony.”

Picardal said that now with the brutality of Duterte’s administration in full view, civil society is now looking to the Church for moral guidance.

“We are actually fulfilling a role that we have as an institution that can stand up to bullying by the powers that be,” he said. “We have the experience on how to deal with them and they do not scare us.”