Press Release
April 28, 2017

Sen. Leila M. de Lima's Handwritten Note
Dispatch from Crame No. 72

4 / 28 / 17

If you can kill 8,000 human beings (and counting), what prevents you from illegally detaining incommunicado victims of Tokhang shakedowns?

The discovery of a secret cell of illegally detained individuals in a police precinct in Manila only mirrors the complete breakdown of the rule of law in the country. Once we allowed a mass murderer to take the helm of government and carry out a criminal policy of extrajudicial killings, there is pretty much nothing else that cannot be done with impunity under his regime.

Only the rule of law protects our citizens from being reduced to and treated as sub-humans. Once we let government discard that, there is nothing that we can hold up to against the tyranny and oppression, not even the bill of rights, which the President now only uses for toilet paper. Because we let him kill our poor countrymen like animals, we can only expect more animal and inhuman treatment from his policemen.

And as long as they are at this, they also might as well profit from the destruction of the rule of law--from tokhang-for-ransom, to the police vigilantes' pay-per-kill system, to the incommunicado detention of shakedown victims. This is us spiraling down the bottomless pit of impunity and lawlessness, with the former law enforcers turned enforcers of lawlessness profiting from it.

This is a call for our people to wake up and see the bitter truth: change has come, but not the kind we were promised or were hoping for.

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