PHILIPPINES
Commonweal Magazine
February 8, 2019
By Adam Willis
At La Loma Cemetery in Caloocan City, Manila, Bishop Pablo “Ambo” David’s cassock curled behind him as he stepped through the iron chapel doors into the morning light, half-past nine on All Souls Day last November. Mass was over. So were the blessings, greetings, and photo-ops that always follow, and he stepped away from the stone chapel with warlike urgency. At the bottom of the chapel steps, he was whisked off in a white van, and I jumped into an SUV with two other journalists, speeding out of a parking spot to keep pace.
Ambo was headed for the grave of Kian Delos Santos, the most famous of the nearly twenty-five thousand victims in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. In August of 2017, security cameras in Caloocan City captured uniformed officers dragging the seventeen-year-old into an alley, and multiple witnesses watched as the officers forced a gun into his hand and shot him as he kneeled on the ground in his boxer shorts. Whatever veneer of justice still hung over the anti-drug operations was stripped away with Kian’s death. Though the Philippine Catholic Church was slow to respond to the vicious, violent anti-drug campaign, Kian’s death galvanized marches in the streets and spurred calls to activism in the church.
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