PEOPLE POWWOW

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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Thursday, January 12, 2017
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MONDAY this week, President Rodrigo Duterte shocked the nation anew when he asked “shabulized” mayors to resign. But first, they would have to see him in Malacañang where they would be shown a list of narco-politicians.

“If your name is there, you have a problem. I will really kill you,’” he threatened, as if killing were lawful.

If that appointment with the mayors had transpired as scheduled yesterday, then details would be in today’s newspapers. Right now, we are waiting with bated breath for the reactions of the mayors whose only fault is landing in a judgmental list.

I don’t agree with fellow media men who believe that “clean” mayors have nothing to worry. They do have something to worry: the President’s tendency to play accuser, prosecutor and judge at the same time. Take the case of Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog. Since the only available evidence against the Iloilo City mayor is a photograph where he stands beside an alleged drug dealer, why is he in the list?

Wasn’t Duterte himself photographed while receiving into his office an alleged big fish, Peter Lim, sometime in July 2016?

By the government’s own admission, around 6,000 individuals have died in the “war on drugs” without due process. Most of them are small-time pushers and users, if not plain by-standers caught in the crossfire.

Incidentally, under the existing laws, drug addiction is not a crime but a disease that should be treated.

Alas, if we go by the propaganda perpetuated by the untrustworthy SWS and Pulse Asia surveys, Duterte still scores incredibly high in his performance, approval and trust ratings! The surveys showcasing only 1,200 faceless respondents could have been contrived to make him appear more popular today than on election day when he won the presidency with a plurality (not majority) of 16 million out of the 55 million votes cast.

Although I was one of the 16 million, today I could not in conscience embrace his consequential authoritarianism. By riding on the “war on drugs” to achieve a personal ambition, he does not have to declare martial law.

In fact, Duterte does not want martial law because of the constitutional provision that it should get the approval of Congress and the Supreme Court.

For whatever “porky” reasons, most “honorables” in the Senate and the House of Representatives see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. They also “wait and see” for another reason: Identification with an aging leader suffering from Buerger’s disease might work against them in the next wave of change.

Duterte’s style is not original. Any Internet researcher could discover the parallelism between him and the late chairman Mao Tse-tung of the Chinese Communist Party vis-a-vis the prohibited drug trade.

In pursuit of his “cultural revolution” in China in 1949, Mao had his People’s Liberation Army execute the drug dealers and forced millions of addicts into compulsory treatment, gradually resulting in the death of 30 million people. Unfortunately, that protracted “Great Leap Forward” failed to solve the more pressing poverty problem.

It was indeed extreme poverty that had forced the “enterprising” Chinese masses to gamble their lives in drug-dealing.

The death of Mao in 1976 saw the rise of his ideologically different successor. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping ridiculed his predecessor’s slogan that it was “better to be poor under socialism than rich under capitalism.”

“Poverty is not socialism,” Deng said, encouraging the creation of a market economy and capitalist-like enterprises. By the early 1990s, his reforms had helped lift an estimated 170 million peasants out of extreme poverty.

Of course, by pivoting to shabu-rich China, Du30 does not really expect to end the local shabu problem. As in China, the “survival of the fittest” prevails among unseen drug lords. Where competition is restricted, the price of China-sourced shabu jumps higher./PN
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