The Courtroom in Caloocan
Survivors of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war are seeking justice for their slaughtered relatives.
SEPTEMBER 26, 2023
PHOTO: Entrance to the Regional Trial Court of Caloocan. Courtesy of the author.
The trial of the four police officers accused of killing Luis and Gabriel Bonifacio, which began in late 2021, is being held at the Regional Trial Court of Caloocan, a city within Metro Manila. The hearings are held on the second floor, in a space no larger than a classroom. The judge presides over a room of mismatched furniture: metal benches for the public, wooden tables and plastic chairs for the lawyers, industrial filing cabinets along the walls. The lighting is harsh but dim. An air conditioner hums. It is one of the only trials for a drug war that has claimed thousands of lives in the Philippines. Its setting seemed a warning: the building was as decrepit as the legal system is broken.
The trial was well into its second year of proceedings when, one morning in May 2023, I went to hear the last of the four accused policemen testify. The officers have been charged with two counts of homicide, one for each victim. When they arrived in their navy uniforms and gleaming black boots, there was a flurry of movement in the room as they took their seats. One of them, Johnston Alarce, sat on the same bench beside the plaintiff Mary Ann Domingo, who claims that police intended to kill her husband Luis Bonifacio and son Gabriel when they raided the family home in an anti-drug operation on September 15, 2016. Both men were shot by police during the raid and died the same night. According to Domingo, what happened was an extrajudicial killing; it was murder.
The Bonifacios are among the thousands of victims of the “war on drugs” declared by Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines. The long-time mayor of Davao City, located on the southern island of Mindanao, Duterte won the 2016 presidential election on his reputation as a tough guy. (One of his many nicknames is a spin on Dirty Harry: “Duterte Harry.”) The day after his inauguration, he issued a memorandum that ordered the police to carry out “the neutralization of illegal drug personalities nationwide.” He was less euphemistic in his public remarks. In an August 2016 speech, he threatened drug users: “I will kill you. I will kill you. I will take the law into my own hands.”
The Philippine government does not deny thousands of Filipinos have died in the drug war. (Its official tally as of May 2022, when it stopped updating official statistics, is 6,252; other estimates by media and human rights groups are as high as 30,000.) But the government disputes the circumstances under which the deaths occurred. Under Duterte, whose term ended in 2022, as well as his successor, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who is a political ally of Duterte, the government says that police acted in self-defense because the targets of anti-drug operations resisted. Such killings are known as nanlaban, which means “to fight back.” Human rights organizations and the families of victims allege the police covered up unlawful killings by planting drugs and guns to justify using deadly force.
Alarce, who was to testify that day, sat cracking his knuckles while he waited to take the stand. His testimony took less than an hour. His lawyer asked a series of questions about what happened that night in Caloocan. Alarce began by explaining that he was back-up security for the operation. The set-up was a “buy-bust”: two undercover police, helped by a confidential informant, would try to buy illegal drugs from the targets, then arrest them. Alarce would only be needed if the targets resisted. The police arrived after midnight at a home in a poor area of Caloocan, a priority area for the drug war. Alarce and three other police on back-up waited on the street. He heard gunshots —three, he said — from the upper level of the house. The four of them shouted they were police. The firing continued. Alarce said he shot his gun once towards the stairs as a warning. Other officers from the drug enforcement unit of the police entered the home first. There was more gunfire from upstairs.
“I saw a bloodied male person,” Alarce said, describing the scene when he reached the second floor. He helped another officer carry the injured man out of the house and placed him in the police van. There was another man inside the van already. Both were still alive, he testified. The police van transported them to hospital, where doctors pronounced the two men dead. The defense lawyer asked if the police had checked the ballistics from the scene. No, Alarce replied. He didn’t expect charges would be filed against him. Domingo, the widow, had told police at the hospital that she didn’t want an investigation, he said. The hearing adjourned.
During his election campaign and as president, Duterte repeatedly assured police that he would grant them amnesty if they were charged and convicted for following his orders.
Alarce, like the other three officers charged, denied that he had shot Luis and Gabriel; he only admitted firing his gun. Domingo’s lawyer, Kristina Conti, mused afterwards to me about how she would rebut the argument mounted by the police. It seemed unlikely the Bonifacios could have sustained multiple gunshot wounds — as their death certificates from the hospital stated — if the officers had blindly fired at the stairs.
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I began reporting on the drug war because I was curious about the lack of domestic prosecutions. Before 2023, only three police officers in the Philippines had ever been convicted for actions undertaken as part of Duterte’s drug war. It is remarkable that Alarce and his colleagues are even on trial. Like the handful of other cases heard in Philippine courts, the accused are all junior officers. During his election campaign and as president, Duterte repeatedly assured police that he would grant them amnesty if they were charged and convicted for following his orders.
The brutality of the drug war did not escape international attention. Photojournalists captured images of victims’ bodies littering the streets of poor neighborhoods like Caloocan. Human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, where I now work as a deputy Asia director, documented the killings and called for them to stop. The United Nations human rights office investigated and concluded in a 2020 report that the killings were “widespread and systematic.”
In February 2018, the International Criminal Court began the first stage of an investigation — a preliminary examination — into the alleged extra-judicial killings committed under Duterte. The ICC takes on cases when a state “is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution,” according to the Rome Statute, the court’s founding charter. As a court of last resort, the ICC has jurisdiction over the drug war and earlier killings when Duterte was mayor of Davao starting from 2011, when the Philippines ratified the Rome Statute, because domestic trials in the Philippines, such as they exist, do not duplicate its work. The ICC investigates and prosecutes senior officials responsible for a pattern of abuses rather than individual killings, and determines whether the violence amounts to an atrocity crime under international law. As president, Duterte publicly belittled the threat posed by the ICC, yet nevertheless withdrew the Philippines from the Rome Statute a month after the ICC’s preliminary examination began. The ICC could still investigate and prosecute crimes committed in the country until March 2019, when the withdrawal took effect.
One evening in March 2018, I had dinner south of Manila with a friend who is a prosecutor in the justice department. A couple months before, three officers had been indicted for murdering Kian delos Santos, a teenager who was shot in the head by police in Caloocan on August 16, 2017. His death prompted an unprecedented public outcry since the start of the war on drugs. Probes were opened by the police, the public attorney’s office, the ombudsman, and the human rights commission.
My friend, whom I’ll call Carol, was mortified to be working under the then-justice secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II who, in response to allegations that the government was committing crimes against humanity, had told reporters: “The criminals, the drug lords, drug pushers — they are not humanity.” Many of her colleagues agreed with Aguirre and supported Duterte’s extrajudicial methods, Carol told me with dismay. The justice department had little political incentive to examine police misconduct in the drug war, a UN report released in 2020 found. The Kian delos Santos case was an exception. Carol believed the officers who killed him had been indicted because the evidence was strong: the CCTV footage, which showed police dragging Kian through the streets before shooting him, was damning. The three officers charged with murdering him were found guilty in August 2018, becoming the first police convicted for a drug war killing.
The trappings of criminal justice were there — the characters, the setting, the legal formalities — but the hearing felt inconsequential. When the drug war has killed thousands of Filipinos, does it matter if these four police are found guilty?
The week after I had dinner with Carol, I met Kristina Conti of the National Union for People’s Lawyers (NUPL), an association that handles human rights cases pro bono. She exuded charisma, with the warmth of an activist and the polish of a corporate lawyer. Conti and her colleagues at NUPL were filing complaints on behalf of victims with the ombudsman, whose office can review the conduct of government agencies — including the military and other security forces, such as the police — and those holding public office; summon evidence; and decide whether to press charges. At that time, the office was led by Conchita Carpio-Morales, who had been appointed by Duterte’s predecessor. Conti and other lawyers I spoke to believed the office was the most independent part of the judiciary. She sent me the documents for the first case NUPL had filed: Mary Ann Domingo’s complaint.
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Sitting in the courtroom behind Domingo, I wondered whether the proceedings felt like justice to her. The ICC’s investigation could take years; and there is no guarantee there will be a trial, let alone a conviction of the masterminds of the drug war. In the meantime, a hearing like the one I attended is the only option, but one that has been possible for very few victims. The trappings of criminal justice were there — the characters, the setting, the legal formalities — but the hearing felt inconsequential. When the drug war has killed thousands of Filipinos, does it matter if these four police are found guilty?
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When Domingo heard the shots that killed Luis and Gabriel, she was standing on the street outside their small home with her seventeen-year-old eldest daughter, Kaila. The police had entered after midnight, and dragged her and her younger children out of the house. The last time she saw Luis alive was when he was kneeling shirtless on the second floor, surrounded by police with their guns drawn. Before she left, Domingo asked the police to let him put on a shirt at least.
Her eldest son, Gabriel, who was nineteen, stayed with Luis and pled with the officers.
“That’s my dad,” he told them in Filipino. “We’ve done nothing wrong.”
Domingo and her daughter Kaila ran to get help from the community hall, where neighborhood police were on duty. They said they couldn’t get involved. The women returned to the house and saw three vehicles, including a van, and motorbikes leaving from their street. When Domingo tried to enter her home, an officer blocked her. There were bystanders huddled on the street. She did not know who these spectators were. The police told her to go to the nearest hospital.
Kaila went ahead. A nurse told her that both men were dead. She found her brother’s body on a gurney. There was a gunshot wound on Gabriel’s right chest, just beneath the tattoo on his collarbone, and three other gunshot wounds elsewhere on his body. Kaila called her mother to tell her to come straightaway.
When Domingo, who is a petite and soft-spoken woman, arrived at the hospital, she found herself contending with police amid her grief. She was approached by a man from a special branch of the police that deploys to crime scenes, as well as a representative from a funeral parlor that is often called to take away the cadavers of drug war victims. She recognized them from the crowd that had been on the street outside her home during the police operation. They wanted to take the bodies of Luis and Gabriel to be autopsied. She was suspicious. “I refused to give them their bodies because of the fear I had and distrust in them. Because they were also there at the time of the crime,” she said. “Killing, murdering my son and husband.”
“It was in my heart that I would fight for them,” she recalled, describing how she felt in the aftermath of the killings. She seemed to vibrate with anger remembering the injustice of what had happened to her family that night.
They argued and argued. The police asked if she planned to file a case against them. “I told them that I wasn’t going to file a case because of how scared I was of them,” Domingo remembered when we spoke. Finally, the police gave up and she called a different funeral parlor to come to the hospital. She asked her son’s friends to take photos of Luis and Gabriel’s bodies. Domingo also wanted photos of the detritus from the police operation inside the family home: spent shells and bullets, small plastic bags, coffee cups, empty food containers. She saved the images on her phone.
Domingo did not know how to hold the police accountable for killing Luis and Gabriel. But she had the photos and the death certificates from the hospital proving that they had been shot dead. She also managed to secure a copy of the “spot report” from police, a document officers file immediately after an operation to inform their superiors of the outcome. Domingo did not agree with the spot report, which stated the police had acted in self-defense, but it gave her the names of eight officers who had been at the scene that night. The decisions she made at the hospital and in the subsequent hours and days made it possible for her to later seek justice for Luis and Gabriel. “It was in my heart that I would fight for them,” she recalled, describing how she felt in the aftermath of the killings. She seemed to vibrate with anger remembering the injustice of what had happened to her family that night.
The vast majority of families who have lost someone in the drug war cannot and do not seek justice through the domestic criminal justice system. Fear, in part, holds them back. The police who killed their relatives are often still present in their communities, according to Jodesz Gavilan, who has been covering the drug war for many years as a reporter at Rappler, the media outlet co-founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate and journalist Maria Ressa along with other journalists. Gilbert Andres, a lawyer and executive director of CenterLaw, an organization that handles human rights cases, represents Efren Morillo, who survived a police operation on August 21, 2016, in Quezon City that killed four of his friends. When Morillo and the other victims’ families were first referred to CenterLaw, they were “in no state to file a criminal complaint,” said Andres. They were terrified for their safety because the same policemen were still in their community. By petitioning the Supreme Court in early 2017, CenterLaw secured a temporary protection order that suspended anti-drug operations within one kilometer of their clients’ homes and workplaces. Only then did Andres file their complaint with the ombudsman’s office, in March 2017, the same month as NUPL filed on behalf of Domingo.
Many deaths in the drug war are the work of unknown vigilantes. When there is no identifiable perpetrator, victims have little faith in the police to investigate.
Poverty is another reason that makes it hard for victims to take legal action. There is little reliable data on the killings, but the drug war has mainly targeted the urban poor. Men, who are also the breadwinners, have been most likely to be killed. The families they leave behind often struggle financially to survive. “I was afraid and didn’t know how to file a case because I had no money,” Domingo told me.
Even if families do want to seek justice, the circumstances of the killings often make filing charges against the perpetrators impossible. Many deaths in the drug war are the work of unknown vigilantes. When there is no identifiable perpetrator, victims have little faith in the police to investigate. Human rights groups allege that the police are likely behind some vigilante killings too. According to Ted Te, a veteran activist lawyer with the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), victims have good reason to be skeptical. “You can’t let police authorities investigate their own,” said Te. “Families wouldn't want to come forward. They know it's a waste of time.”
Nanlaban cases at least leave a paper trail because they involve police. Documents like spot reports, if surviving relatives can get copies of them, make it easier to demand charges be filed. But police obfuscate and intimidate families who request documents that should be publicly available, Gavilan said. If a case moves to trial, the prosecution depends on witnesses being willing to testify, because physical evidence from the scene is often limited — or false, according to families of victims who allege a cover-up. “Testimonial evidence is the hardest form of evidence to rely on,” said Te.
Even when the perpetrators are known and there is evidence to suggest the police did not act in self-defense, the country’s criminal justice system is inefficient. Andres’s clients are still waiting for a decision from the ombudsman more than six years after filing with the office. NUPL’s other clients have been similarly disappointed by the criminal justice system. Since the drug war began in 2016, NUPL has filed six complaints, including the one for Domingo, before the ombudsman: three were dismissed and two may still result in charges.
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Deaconess Rubylin Litao, a faith-based activist, was trying to help victims like Domingo. She had been reaching out to parishes in the poorest neighborhoods, where the drug war was ravaging communities. In October 2016, she and others involved in ecumenical social justice work founded Rise Up for Rights and Life to advocate for an end to the drug war and to support victims. Litao would try to persuade the families: “We will document your stories, so that your loved ones … are not numbers. They are people.” She found the families were unwilling to talk.
Rise Up has a small office on the top floor of a building at the intersection of Quezon Avenue and Epifanio De Los Santos Avenue in Quezon City, within sprawling metro Manila. In the weeks after Luis and Gabriel were killed, a banner about justice hung from its façade. Domingo passed by often. Each time, she stopped and wondered if the people inside the building could help her.
One of Domingo’s neighbors was involved with Rise Up and suggested she go to their office. She came prepared, with the spot report and photos saved on her phone. Litao was surprised; families of victims rarely had any evidence to back up their stories. She took copies of the documents and photos to share with NUPL, which relies on Rise Up to identify victims who want to open cases. To both Litao and Conti, it was clear Domingo would be a compelling witness. Still, Domingo wavered. Her relatives were worried about requesting charges be filed against the police, Litao recalled. As for Domingo herself: “I was so scared. I hesitated in moving forward.”
Domingo began inquiring at the ombudsman’s office, every month, sometimes with her grandson — her son Gabriel had become a father ten days before he was killed.
A few months later, she felt ready to go ahead. Domingo’s complaint would be the first NUPL would bring to the ombudsman on behalf of drug war victims. It would test Conti’s hunch that filing strong complaints with the ombudsman, because of that office’s function and independence, would result charges against police. In March 2017, Domingo and her daughter Kaila went to the ombudsman’s office in person to file the paperwork, with their faces covered because they did not feel safe revealing their identities at that time. “When I was walking into the ombudsman, it was like I already had justice in my hands,” Domingo said.
Domingo began inquiring at the ombudsman’s office, every month, sometimes with her grandson — her son Gabriel had become a father ten days before he was killed. She thought going in person to the ombudsman’s office would help expedite the process. She pestered the staff: “Is there still nothing yet? What’s taking so long? Why did the other cases already have their ruling? Why is mine still not ready?” She began filling the office suggestion box with reminders about her case.
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At first Conti, who brings sarcastic good cheer to her work, was frustrated. The police were not responding to requests from the ombudsman. She wasn’t surprised. At the time, Duterte was implying in his public remarks that police would not be punished for their role in the drug war. “I would imagine if you're a policeman…you would think that these charges would magically disappear, right? Or somebody else would take care of that,” Conti said. NUPL filed a motion to wrap up the case.
The police took notice, and began filing documents to defend themselves and prove they had been conducting a legitimate “buy-bust” operation. The paperwork revealed the names of the men who had shot Luis and Gabriel: Four policemen named Johnston Alarce, Virgilio Cervantes, Arnel Cristobal de Guzman and Artemio Saguros. In total, there were twenty officers involved in the operation — from the lieutenant colonel of the special operations unit to the crime scene operatives who NUPL alleged were part of the cover up. Conti and Domingo amended the complaint lodged with the ombudsman; they wanted murder charges filed against every one of the officers the police had named.
In October 2020, the decision from the ombudsman finally came. It recommended that the four officers who shot the Bonifacios be suspended without pay for a year and be charged with homicide. The decision was a partial victory at best. There would be a trial, but only for the lesser charge of homicide, not murder, and only against the direct perpetrators, not their superiors. Homicide implies that the killings were not pre-meditated, which Domingo could not accept. She felt it favored the police and did not reflect the truth. NUPL immediately appealed, and when the appeal was denied, Conti submitted a petition to the Supreme Court to request a review of the ombudsman’s decision. It is still pending.
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A couple of days after I met Domingo at the Caloocan court, we arranged to speak at the Baclaran Church, which sits in a large compound off Roxas Boulevard, beside Manila Bay. Food cart vendors and women selling jasmine garlands crowded the entrance. Parishioners streamed in and out of the gates. The white façade of the church was blinding in the late afternoon sun. The service — one of twelve that day — boomed on loudspeakers, competing with traffic noise and the rumble of planes descending to land at Manila’s airport. I found Domingo at a food truck parked inside the church compound. She had just begun a long shift. The truck is an offshoot of Silingan Coffee, a café in Quezon City that employs the relatives of drug war victims. Above the windshield was a slogan: COFFEE, STORIES, HUMAN RIGHTS.
Domingo is closer to justice than almost all other families who lost someone to the drug war, but she is still unsatisfied. She told me that she had been so disheartened by the ombudsman’s decision that she had, at first, not wanted to attend the trial. She struggled with what to do. “I wanted to tell the police that what they were saying wasn’t true,” Domingo told me. “I will not stand for that. I will not put up with those lies.” In the end, she attends the hearings, which happen every few weeks.
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The trial had an inauspicious start. Neither she nor Conti was informed of the date of the first hearing, and she was not present in the courtroom. In their stead was a state prosecutor named Darwin Cañete, who had publicly questioned the innocence of an earlier victim of the drug war.
When Domingo attended her first hearing in December 2021, she was surprised to see him in the courtroom too. Cañete’s name was also on the spot report, which said he was at the scene the night Luis and Gabriel died to determine whether an inquest was required. Fortunately for Domingo, private prosecutors are allowed in the Philippine system; Conti and NUPL’s other lawyers have led the prosecution on behalf of the state.
“I know that I win every time the police testify. I feel that I win every time they speak,” Domingo said quietly. “I want them to see me always. Look at me! The victim that had their loved ones taken away by you!” Domingo explained. “I feel sad when I see the police, but I am happy when they see me.”
NUPL and Rise Up helped Domingo prepare her testimony early the following year. They discussed the small details—should Mary Ann tell the court what she was wearing when the police entered her home? Domingo feared emotions would overwhelm her when testifying. She went to Baclaran and other churches to pray. “I wasn’t going to be demoralized,” she told me. She worried she would cry on the stand. “But I wanted to be strong,” Domingo said.
When the police accused of killing Luis and Gabriel Bonifacio testified and defended their actions, Domingo listened, but let their words run over her head. “I know that I win every time the police testify. I feel that I win every time they speak,” Domingo said quietly. “I want them to see me always. Look at me! The victim that had their loved ones taken away by you!” Domingo explained. “I feel sad when I see the police, but I am happy when they see me.”
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With the ICC investigation running parallel to domestic proceedings, justice is a two-level game not only for victims, but for the Philippine government too. In November 2021, two months after the ICC judges allowed an investigation to start, the Philippine government requested a deferral, saying it would prosecute drug war killings through its own justice system. To support its request, the government presented documents pertaining to the handful of domestic trials, proceedings before the Supreme Court, as well as reviews by the justice department and by the internal affairs service of the police of cases against police personnel. But in January 2023, ICC judges allowed the investigation to resume because these efforts did not amount to “tangible, concrete and progressive investigative steps,” the ICC ruling said. The Philippine government appealed.
On July 18, the ICC announced that the Philippine government had lost the appeal. The justice secretary, Crispin Remulla, under President Marcos, who had replaced Duterte in June 2022, denounced the ICC for foreign interference. The drug war continues: 342 people died in drug-related killings during the first year under Marcos, according to the Dahas database maintained by the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines. The president seems unlikely to repudiate the drug war, as long as he remains allied with his predecessor, whose daughter, Sara Z. Duterte, is the current vice-president. The ICC decision nevertheless means Duterte and his top officials may one day be prosecuted outside the country. But the path to justice via the ICC is circuitous too. No one knows whether the investigation will lead to a trial. And most families will never have the opportunity that Domingo has had, to be in a courtroom with the people accused of killing their loved one.
When I interviewed Domingo in Manila, she was circumspect about the prospect of Duterte, who had retired from politics and returned to Davao after completing his presidential term, one day appearing in The Hague. “If the ICC keeps on persevering…I would cheer and cheer for them,” she replied. “But as of now, it’s difficult to rely on the ICC.” She was more eager to show me the mural that she and other victims had made along the wall of the church compound. Brightly colored tiles depicted grim events from Philippine history: the execution of the revolutionary Andres Bonifacio in 1897; the sexual slavery of Filipino women during the Second World War; and the killings during the drug war. At one end of the wall, Domingo stopped and took out her phone to illuminate the base of the mural. It was already dusk. There were four disembodied heads made of concrete, one with its eyes taped, another with its mouth stuffed and gagged, like the bodies of victims left in the streets during the height of the drug war. Domingo turned off the flashlight. Now that she had shown me, I could see the heads through the dark.