Pubdate: Mon, 01 Aug 2016
Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer (Philippines)
Copyright: 2016 Philippine Daily Inquirer
Contact:  http://www.inquirer.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1073

WIDOW TELLS DUTERTE: KILL DRUGS, NOT PEOPLE

Case of 'Cardboard Justice' Assailed

That is the message of Jennilyn Olayres to President Duterte, whose 
war on illegal drugs had taken the life of her husband, Michael Siaron.

Olayres (not Olaires as earlier reported) will bury her husband on 
Wednesday, 11 days after motorcycle-riding men shot him dead at Pasay 
Rotunda on Edsa and Taft Avenue.

She conceded Siaron, 29, was a drug user, but she said it was 
impossible that he was a dealer because they were too poor and could 
barely pay for their next meal.

Siaron made money by driving a pedicab-a bicycle with a sidecar-and 
did odd jobs.

He voted for Mr. Duterte in the May 9 presidential election, Olayres 
said in an interview with the INQUIRER yesterday.

Olayres, 26, is not a registered voter, but she said she, too, would 
have voted for Mr. Duterte "because we wanted an end to crime."

Six weeks after Siaron cast his vote for the candidate who promised 
to wipe out the illegal drug trade, he became part of the statistics, 
falling along with five other men gunned down by suspected vigilantes 
in Pasay and Manila early on July 23.

The night before he was gunned down, Siaron had dinner at his 
father's fruit stall at the rotunda and bought a P30"lumpiang 
shanghai" meal for his wife. Then he returned to his job, never to 
come home again.

 From their shack built on a trash-clogged creek in Barangay Santo 
Nino in the rundown part of Pasay City, Olayres ran barefoot to Taft 
Avenue when a friend called out that Siaron had been shot.

'Nobody helped him'

Recalling the moment she found her husband's body, she said she 
thought he was just hit by a stray bullet and could still be alive. 
But he was dead.

"When I was cradling him, I was thinking, 'How long have you been 
lying here?' Nobody bothered to help him. I was furious," Olayres 
said, speaking at the Santo Nino barangay hall under the elevated 
tracks of the LRT where the body of her husband lay in a white coffin.

"Thoughts were running in my mind. 'It can't be you. You don't 
deserve this. There are others who deserve this more than you,'" she 
said in a separate interview with Reuters.

"If only I had wings, I would quickly fly to his side," she said.

Photographers surrounded her behind a police cordon as she cuddled 
her husband's body. A piece of cardboard was left next to his body 
with the words "drug pusher" written on it.

The next day, the INQUIRER published a front-page photo of a weeping 
Olayres cradling the body of Siaron, a heartbreaking image that went 
viral on the internet, sounding a global alarm over human rights 
violations in the Philippines.

But that picture failed to touch Mr. Duterte. He mentioned it in his 
inaugural State of the Nation Address to Congress on July 25, calling 
it melodramatic and seeking to evoke "Pieta," the 1499 sculpture of 
Michelangelo depicting a heart-rending scene from the Deposition of Jesus.

"You are portrayed in a broadsheet like [the Virgin] Mary cradling 
the [body] of Jesus Christ. Let's do drama here," Mr. Duterte said in 
his speech in response to the public outrage inspired by the photo.

Church groups, rights advocates and some sections of the media have 
criticized Mr. Duterte's war on drugs and expressed alarm at what 
they have termed extrajudicial killings.

More than 500 people, mostly poor drug users, have been killed since 
Mr. Duterte was elected.

As of July 30, the statistics stood at 525 killed: 170 in vigilante 
attacks and 355 during police operations.

'No mercy'

In his maiden policy speech, Mr. Duterte declared there would be no 
letup in the campaign, ordering police and local officials to "double 
your efforts, triple them if need be."

"We will not stop until the last drug lord, the last financier and 
the last pusher have surrendered or put behind bars or below the 
ground if they so wish," he said.

He vowed to show "no mercy," warning criminals that priests and human 
rights advocates cannot protect them from death.

"If you don't want to die, if you don't want to get hurt, don't rely 
on priests and human rights [advocates]. That won't stop death," he said.

Such words from the toughtalking former mayor of Davao City draw 
cheers from his supporters, hurting Olayres, who lamented that some 
people were unperturbed by the killings.

'Difficult to accept'

"They're happy because it hasn't happened to them. What if they lose 
a loved one, someone who is not guilty of the offense?" Olayres said 
in the interview with the INQUIRER. "It's difficult to accept."

"President Duterte hates pushers. I hope he himself will investigate 
the killings of people who have been judged with a cardboard," she 
said, referring to the cardboard signs that read "drug pusher" left 
by the killers beside the bodies of their victims.

In the war on drugs, "they should go to the root," she said, adding 
that her blood boiled after she saw the INQUIRER photo in a blog that 
branded it as fake.

"I hope they think first before they judge. That kind of situation 
when you see someone you love slumped on the road, are you going to 
think of drama?" she said.

"I am not expecting justice for my husband. I know we won't get that, 
especially since people believe the cardboards-cardboards that can 
never prove if the slain person is really a pusher. I just want to 
clear my husband's name," she said.

- -Reports from Reuters, AFP and Erika Sauler
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom