Former Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office General Manager Royina Garma —PHOTO BY NIÑO JESUS ORBETA
A former police official has dropped what could be the biggest bombshell in the ongoing House quad committee hearings when she told lawmakers on Friday that former President Rodrigo Duterte offered cash rewards for every drug suspect killed in his administration’s brutal war on drugs.
In an emotional tell-all testimony on Friday night, a tearful retired Police Col. Royina Garma said it took her a week to “make reflections” that supposedly helped her realize that it was time for her to “speak the truth” about the bloody antinarcotics campaign of her former boss.
Garma, a graduate of the Philippine National Police Academy (PNPA) Class 1997, has been previously identified as one of Duterte’s trusted aides after serving as a police station commander in Davao City when he was still its mayor and later as Cebu City police chief.
Duterte appointed her as general manager of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) in 2019 after her early retirement from the police force.
“I am afraid (for) my life and (for) the lives of my relatives, my friends and classmates (in the PNPA),” Garma said as she broke down in tears.
Reading from a prepared affidavit, she said Duterte phoned her in May 2016 and instructed her to find him a PNP officer who would lead the government’s drug war similar to the “Davao model.”
“This Davao model referred to the system involving payments and rewards,” the former PCSO chief said.
Recruits from PNPA
“The Davao model involves three levels of payments or rewards. First is the reward if the suspect is killed. Second is the funding of planned operations, or Coplans (case operation plans). Third is the refund of operational expenses,” she added.
According to her, Duterte had specifically directed her to choose a police officer who is a member of the Iglesia ni Cristo sect, but did not explain the need for such qualification.
She said she eventually recommended Police Lt. Col. Edilberto Leonardo, an INC member who was then assigned with the PNP Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG)
She said they also recruited other PNPA graduates, particularly those who belonged to the members of Class 1996 and 1997.
After a few months, she said Leonardo, who is now one of the commissioners of the National Police Commission, started meeting with other police officers in establishing a group that would implement the drug war on a national scale.
Garma said Leonardo prepared a proposal to create a task force, which he supposedly submitted to Duterte through then Special Assistant to the President Christopher “Bong” Go, who is now a reelectionist senator.
Duterte, she noted, wanted the group to be patterned after the defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force, now known as the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission.
“He (Leonardo) conveyed that the task force would be structured differently and that he submitted a document to Bong Go detailing the task force’s operations, including an overview of the current drug landscape in the Philippines,” Garma said.
After the task force became “operational,” she said that she learned that all funds, refunds for operation expenses and rewards for agents were processed through the bank accounts of a certain Peter Parungo in Metrobank, BDO and PS Bank.
The “drug structure,” she said, came from the Bureau of Corrections “where numerous drug lords are incarcerated, and that it has three branches (Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao).”
‘Operatives’
It was Peter Lim, a businessman based in Cebu City, who was behind the illegal drug operations in the Visayas, she said.
Garma said the “rewards” were only given to the police officers who killed drug suspects.
For those who had arrested drug personalities, she said “only the funding of the Coplan and a refund for the expenses was given” to them.
Leonardo had told her that he had recruited his “trusted personnel” to help him carry out the war on drugs as “operatives.”
Among them were Lester Berganio, Rommel Bactat, Rodel Cerbo, Michael Palma and Parungo.
Garma said Bactat, Cerbo and Palma were former police officers who were discharged from the service in 2015 for their participation in a police operation in which a person was killed.
Berganio was a private citizen while Parungo was a rape suspect who was formerly detained at the CIDG.
“Rommel Bactat, Rodel Cerbo, Michael Palma and Peter Parungo were charged with the task of collecting and verifying information provided by police officers in the field concerning arrests and/or deaths of individuals named in the list of drug personalities, and creating a summary report,” she said.
“All of these reports would then be encoded and compiled by Lester Berganio. The compilation is thereafter elevated to Leonardo who will decide what ‘level’ the arrest and/or killing was and its corresponding reward,” she said.
The Duterte administration has reported that more than 6,000 people were killed in the drug war, but human rights groups said that the number of extrajudicial killings was closer to 30,000 during the six-year campaign.
Direct role
In a statement, the human rights group Karapatan said Garma’s testimony “bolsters the observations” of relatives of many of the drug war victims, local communities and rights groups that Duterte and the PNP had a direct role “in the mass murder of thousands in their sham drug war.”
“Her account also affirms the assertion that the government incentivized the police to undertake and legitimize the state-sanctioned killings of the poor,” said Karapatan Secretary General Cristina Palabay.
“With this, alongside the strong arguments laid before the International Criminal Court by the families of victims, we call on the Court to issue a warrant of arrest against Duterte and all those who perpetrated the mass murder of Filipinos through the war on drugs campaign,” she said.
In one recent quad committee hearing, a police officer said Garma was behind the murder of PCSO board secretary Wesley Barayuga and Leonardo allegedly was tasked by Garma with looking for a hitman.
Both Garma and Leonardo denied his allegations.
Garma also was implicated in the deaths of three Chinese drug lords who were serving time at the Davao penal farm in 2016.
Former prison warden Col. Gerardo Padilla told House lawmakers that he was “subjected to intense pressure” by Garma to go along with the murder plot, and that Duterte personally called him later to “congratulate” him after the three men were killed by other inmates who stabbed them.