A few days ago, recently installed Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano described Rodrigo Duterte’s so-called war on drugs as a “pro-life campaign.” That line was so absurd it almost sounded like a parody. Almost.
But of course, this is Alan Peter Cayetano we are talking about, a man who has built much of his public life on the capacity to say outrageous things with a straight face, hoping repetition will somehow turn them into truth. He did it as Rodrigo Duterte’s running mate. He did it as Duterte’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs. And he is doing it now from the Senate presidency. The venue may change, but the doublespeak stays the same.
People may remember one of his most infamous performances from 2017 when, in an interview with Al Jazeera, he claimed that all those killed in Duterte’s anti-drug operations were criminal drug dealers.
“All,” he said. A breathtaking lie then, and an even more embarrassing one now. It took only moments for that line to collapse under the weight of reality. Kian de los Santos, a 17-year-old student, had already become a national symbol of the drug war’s cruelty. So had little children caught in the crossfire of that madness. Even then, the bodies of dead children were already disproving the script he was pushing.
Now Cayetano is back, trying to slap a new moral label on the same old carnage. “Pro-life campaign,” he says, as if mass killing can somehow be redeemed through a rebranding. As if killing thousands of people, many of them poor, some of them plainly innocent, can be dressed up as an act of social virtue. This is not just dishonest, but grotesque and inhuman. This is a politician trying, one more time, to wash away blood with rhetoric.
And the timing could hardly be more inappropriate. Rodrigo Duterte is now in detention in The Hague, facing crimes against humanity charges arising from that very campaign of killings. His former police chief, Bato dela Rosa, is also wanted by the ICC and recently turned up in the Senate amid a chaotic standoff as authorities sought to arrest him.
Cayetano himself was at the center of that embarrassing episode, with reports describing allied senators giving Dela Rosa refuge inside the Senate building. In other words, while still trying to justify the so-called “drug war” in public, Cayetano was also using the Senate’s power and privilege to shield one of its alleged architects.
That, really, is the point.
This is not some harmless eccentricity, but complicity stretched out over years. Cayetano may not have pulled a trigger, but he helped operate the propaganda machine that normalized murder, excused abuse and tried to sell the world the lie that all the dead somehow deserved what they got. His job was to reframe mass murder into policy language. To turn atrocity into talking points.
And now he wants to call the whole horrifying exercise “pro-life.”
The tragic part is that the lie is already threadbare. The ICC case, the years of reporting and the public record of Duterte’s own words have all stripped away the old cover story. What remains is not a strong defense, but a tired, heavily discredited one. Cayetano is stuck mouthing the same feeble excuses, perhaps because admitting the truth now would mean admitting to the horror of what he helped defend all those years.
So, no, Mr. Senate President. A campaign built on corpses is not pro-life. It never was.
It was murder with a microphone. And your insistence on calling it otherwise only makes your role in it harder to ignore.