Leni‘s options: To be or not to be

I commiserate with former Vice President Leni Robredo.  Now that she is the City Mayor of Naga, the heavy load of leading, planning and seeing things to fruition is upon her shoulders.

Being a lawyer and having been a member of the House of Representatives, a Vice President, and the wife of the late Jesse Robredo — one of the best, if not the best, secretaries of the Department of the Interior and Local Government — Leni Robredo is best equipped to run a tiny city with a population of about 211,000. Naga is an independent component city of Camarines Sur.

Along the way, however, are impediments — some things you’d least expect.  

With the resurgence of the drug menace and what looks like the unimpeded smuggling of drugs into the country, the Bicol Region included, Naga is not shielded from drug syndicates that, according to Leni herself, have penetrated school campuses to peddle their wares.  

And it looks like the Philippine National Police is not able to address the growing threat of drug syndicates and the menace in Naga. 

Leni is up in arms and apparently unable to contain the problem, ridiculously passed the blame to the administration of former president Rodrigo Duterte.  

Like many other critics who make an issue of “Operation Tokhang,” she, like the ICC prosecutors, thinks it is an order to kill. The opposite, in fact, is true. 

Tokhang is a Cebuano contraction of Toktok, meaning “knock” as in knock on the door and hangyo, meaning “plead.”

It should be made clear that in the drug campaign, the enemy was the drug syndicates and not the victims or drug users; hence, the rehabilitation centers established by the Duterte government as a parallel solution to addressing the alarming drug problem, which was pushing the country to the brink of a narco-state. 

Oplan Tokhang was distorted by prosecution lawyers in the pre-trial deliberations at the ICC who denied the fact that more than a million drug victims were rescued and rehabilitated.  

This could be the reason why, when former president Duterte was kidnapped and turned over to the ICC at The Hague, the charges that were read to him were for “crimes against humanity” for the so-called extrajudicial killing of 43 victims.

The absurdity of the situation delayed the trial of PRRD. Forty-three victims throughout the six-year term of Duterte means seven each year.  The policemen involved in either an unfortunate mistaken identity or in a crossfire had been convicted. 

 That hardly fits the description of a crime against humanity. Duterte, in fact, saved not a few communities, and yes, school campuses, which the drug syndicates fed with methamphetamine or shabu. 

Mayor Leni Robredo and the PNP have found themselves in the unfortunate position of having to deal with drug syndicates. It’s either they have to deal with them gently, like Marcos’ strategy of “no killings or casualties,” or by dealing with them the Duterte way… end them.  

Shakespeare’s Hamlet or PRRD’s war against drugs had shown the way.