No place for cuteness

By: Reyshimar Arguelles

War never changes. War is hell. War pushes your sanity to its limits, smothering your soul with the gruesome spectacle of blood and gore. You don’t expect the enemy to fight you with cushions wrapped around your hands. What you can expect with utmost certainty is that the enemy won’t show you mercy.

Such is how the supporters of the Duterte administration’s drug war, now past its third year, want to describe the President’s campaign to rid the country of illegal drugs once and for all. The drug menace embodies pure evil and the government has effectively stretched this logic to justify the flagrant rhetoric of the President and his cohorts and the extralegal approaches they advocate.

For Sen. Bato dela Rosa, who apparently has seen the ferocity of the problem from his time as the chief of the Davao City police and his tenure as the Director-General of the Philippine National Police, extreme measures should be taken. Indeed, there is no place for cuteness when you are confronting drug lords and pushers who will not hesitate to make swiss cheese out of you.

Senator Bato made this point very clear to Vice President Leni Robredo when the latter finally accepted President Duterte’s challenge to have her taste what it is like to be in the frontlines of the drug war. Walk the talk, as the administration’s supporters want to point out, mocking Robredo’s capacity to lead let alone understand this no-nonsense campaign.

Apparently, the government is acting as if it is confronting an irate patron at a five-star restaurant. Either it has taken offense at an angry diner’s review or it has failed to acknowledge its own ineptness, but its intention to install Robredo as a “drug czar” is clear: it needs to wash its hands clean and make people forget about the promises that catapulted a mayor into national prominence.

But to the surprise of the administration and more so to its detractors, Robredo took the offer, confidently asking if the country is ready for her. This has proven to be a huge gamble on the part of the opposition which suffered a devastating defeat this year against the combined forces of the PDP-Laban and Sarah Duterte’s Hugpong ng Pagbabago.

Robredo’s acceptance should put everybody on edge. If she does it right, then the opposition can start to rebuild themselves from scratch and prove to the world that 2016 was a mistake; otherwise, they will have nothing left to prove in 2022.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Robredo has not even scratched the surface as the co-chair of the Interagency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs. Then again, the President’s closest allies have been relentless in their criticism of Robredo, going so far as creating fake news supposedly quoting Robredo’s proposal for the police to carry no guns during anti-drug operations. Added that the heaps of reproaches from Senators Bong Go and Bato dela Rosa who are expecting Robredo to be soft on pushers and drug lords when she should be just as cruel as these ingrates. And they are right – now, if only these senators could say the same thing when the President gave businessman Peter Lim a talking to.

This, however, should lead us into reassessing the administration’s own approach to the drug menace. Despite the numerous calls of an unforgiving killing spree to rid the streets of crystal meth, Duterte had at one point admitted the impossibility of his campaign promise, just as he demonstrated the impossibility of his other outrageous promises. So, why admonish Robredo if the government could not even hack it from the outset?

But let us be frank here. To both the administration and the opposition, addressing the country’s problem with illegal drugs right now is a way for them to score points. We can all talk about immersing ourselves in police operations or submitting to an international probe on the issue of extrajudicial killings, but unless we address the socio-economic factors that nurtured the drug problem in the first place, we will still find ourselves chasing geese with blindfolds on.

There is no place for cuteness. And there is definitely no place for shallowness and opportunism in a war where people’s lives are reduced into statistics displayed on an Excel spreadsheet.