Garma’s metanoia

In Congress’s hallowed halls, Friday evening, Oct. 11, 2024, at half past 8, retired police Lieut. Col. Royina Garma had a metanoia. A changing of her mind, a breakdown, an epiphany.

She implicated President Rodrigo “Roa” Duterte as the mastermind behind his horrific regime’s thousands of extrajudicial killings with huge cash rewards liberally doled out, for three purposes: one, for officers who executed the kills; two, to finance the operations, and three, refund operational expenses, while replicating nationwide, the so-called Davao model of EJKs, Death Squads that seemingly solved the southern city’s illegal drugs problem.

Victims numbered between 6,200 (police admission) and 30,000 (claims by Human Rights Watch). Most victims were poor, died helpless. Cash rewards (“no secret in the PNP,” said Garma) ranged from P10,000 (for street level pushers and minor government personnel) to P2 million (for illegal drug financiers, wholesalers, and ranking police and military officials).

At P50,000 per kill and 10,000 victims, authorities spent up to P500 million in cash dole outs. The illegal drugs war was not service for country and people. It was “service for profit,” sneered QuadComm member Rep. Romeo M. Acop, a retired police general.

It all began one morning, at 5 a.m. in May 2016. President-elect Duterte summoned Garma to his Doña Luisa subdivision house. He wanted a capable officer to implement a nationwide war on drugs. She suggested Major Edilberto Leonardo, PNPA Class ’96, of the police Criminal and Investigation Group who devised a Luzon-Visayas-Mindanao plan submitted to Duterte’s right hand man, Bong Go. To implement the plan, Leonardo was transferred from Manila to Davao as regional police chief of Region 11 (Davao region).

While mayor of Davao in 1998, Duterte had taken a liking on the beauteous young police officer, then Lieut. Garma, 23, a 1997 graduate of the Philippine National Police Academy, and who was a city police station commander. She would enjoy a rapid rise, from senior officer of the Davao Police, to regional police chief based in Cebu, Central Visayas, where she was accused of her own EJKs, then to a cushy job inside Malacañang’s Office of