A place where ‘tokhang’ means zero killings

BOGO CITY, Cebu – The drug rehab was taking place at a manicured beach resort. As vacationers frolicked not far away, an outdoor pavilion was filled with the earnest confessions of addicts and the occasional applause of spouses, health workers, cops, and children. Yes, children – the offspring of addicts.

It was family day for this free community-based drug rehab program in Bogo City in northern Cebu, far in distance and approach from the now 17-month-long massacre that passes for a drug war in Luzon and a few cities outside of it. When recording the session, our documentary team took pains to hide the participants’ faces, but none appeared to mind the cameras. There seemed to be no stigma; there was in fact pride in being part of the activity.

I came because I had heard that the Bogo City police had declared success in the drug war without killing anyone. And they were doing it through a combination of drug rehab methods designed by public health specialists, resources committed by the city government, and an enlightened attitude of the local police. The resort owner had allowed free use of the venue for family day for what they call Re-Re, or the city’s Rehabilitation-Reintegration Program.

Families were encouraged to be involved, as compassion and understanding were hallmarks of this approach to drug addiction. That’s what experts have been telling the government since mid 2016. Bogo is one place where people took that advice to heart.

When the group broke for lunch, it was boodle-style, where cops, with some even wearing SWAT uniforms, mixed with addicts with no trace of menace. Aldwin Alburo, who calls himself a “recovering addict,” agreed to be interviewed and wanted his real name used.

“Hindi ko po ikinahiya ang pag-aadik ko dati,” Aldwin told me. “Sumali po ako sa Re-Re program para po magbago… Dito sa amin, sir, may life after drugs pa po.”

In 2007, he had been earning good money buying and selling photocopiers in Mandaue, a major urban center in Cebu, when he fell in with the wrong crowd that would mix drinking and shabu.

“Sabi nila 'pag lasing daw, mawawala 'yung lasing ('pag gumamit ng shabu). Yun nga sinubukan ko, sa simula ay konti lang po tapos lumaki  na ung dosage ko.  Hindi na po ako tinatablan ng one sachet po,” he said.

Like Aldwin, Lea Ando, 30, talked about how her addiction nearly destroyed her family. “It was so difficult at home,” she said in Cebuano while her family looked on. “I hurt my family – my children and husband, my mother.”

Aldwin, Lea and other participants spoke freely about their drug use. The thought crossed my mind that in other places, they could be dead.

'Don't kill'

As in other cities in the country, fear gripped Bogo residents in the weeks after President Duterte’s assumption to power, when his vows to kill drug users and pushers were followed by murders in historic numbers.

When Bogo’s voluntary rehab program started in October 2016, only two users showed up, with hundreds of others known to the police staying away. But word spread that it was a bona fide rehab program and not simply a source of police intel, with health professionals, spiritual advisers, and the occasional pampering at beach resorts.

Besides, a new police chief had arrived. Police Supt. Byron Allatog, an Igorot native of the Mountain Province, has already become famous as a cop who eschews killing, rejecting it as a facile solution. In fact, the Bogo police boast of zero killings in the drug war, implicitly refuting the widespread belief that police are given kill quotas in the war against drugs. I could not find anyone in Bogo to dispute the goose-egg metric.

“I just told my officers, ‘Don’t kill…’ I’m not saying anything against the President. I’m just trying to do the right thing,” he told the Washington Post, which took pains to contrast him to police on Luzon who routinely trot out the “nanlaban kasi” reason for police killings of suspects.

It was a comparison that horrified local officials in Bogo, who feared heat from pro-Duterte forces and sought to play down Allatog’s outlier role. Yet I had found out about him because of Facebook posts about a petition he had initiated where he appealed to his fellow policemen to “declare our support for community-based drug rehabilitation as a critical intervention in the war on drugs.”

Some took it as a rebuke of the drug war’s brutal methods in ground zero NCR. Allatog justifies it as his mandate, and doesn’t see the word neutralize as a euphemism for exterminate. “When we ‘neutralize’ suspects — the thing is, they are alive. They are in jail,” he told the Post. “The others don’t know how to use Google to find the meaning?”

Allatog, 39, was not in town during my visit to Cebu, the demands on his time having multiplied ever since the rise of his profile. But his winsome community relations officer, SPO1 Mary Joy Ilanan, has imbibed the ethos of dialog and persuasion over brute force. “Kasi mismong barangay kumikilos. Nakikiusap kasi si hepe na ganito yung gagawin natin para walang casualty,” Ilanan, a young wife of another policeman, told me. “Kasi pag makikinig sila sa atin sa pakikiusap natin, bakit kailangan pa tayo gumamit ng dahas?”

When told that the Bisayan term “tokhang” has come to mean something frightening in Manila, Ilanan reminded me that in their place tokhang retains its original meaning, “kumakatok at nakikiusap.”

Over 200 grads

Residents say that Allatog visited nearly all 29 barangays of Bogo in the months after his assignment there last year, after training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, convincing residents of his benign intentions. Soon hundreds of drug users were showing up for rehab. Re-Re has graduated over 200 already, and Bogo has been declared “drug-cleared” by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, the first such city in central Visayas to receive the recognition, which only means that PDEA can attest that Bogo has identified all users and pushers, and is on its way to eradicating the shabu retail trade. Local officials are less sanguine about the port city’s role as a northern landing point for shabu headed for bigger population centers in Cebu.

Allatog claims to have had to search for Bogo on a map when he learned of his next assignment, but he seemed a perfect fit for the Martinez ruling clan in the city, Mayor Carlo Martinez and his sister Maria Cielo, the vice mayor, who likewise espouse the community approach and abhor the bloodbath in Luzon.

The Martinezes have allocated a modest budget for the community rehab program, but seem to have aligned the right people for the job.

One of those who conceptualized Bogo’s rehab approach was Errol Duaso, a mental health nurse whose commitment is rooted in his own family experience. As a grade schooler, he watched helplessly as his older brother became addicted to drugs. It motivated Duaso to become a nurse and do precisely what he was doing now, advising his hometown to treat drug users compassionately because addiction is a disease.

“Most drug addicts just want to be loved, that’s why they started using drugs in high school,” Duaso said, as we observed family day rehab at the beach resort.  “Hindi sila napapansin sa bahay, pero yung barkada nila na pumapansin sa kanila, gumagamit ng droga. Kaya nga dito nagsa-succeed sila kasi binibigyan sila ng atensyon ng gobyerno. Binibigyan sila ng suporta ng pamilya nila. Kaya may success talagang nangyayari.”

As a journalist based in imperial Manila, I’ve been reminded more than once that those like me don’t get the new tone and language of the year-old dispensation, that we misinterpret the threats and jokes disguised as profanity and insults. It’s a Bisayan thing, a cultural difference that I’d never fully grasp.

I had to spend time in Cebu recently to realize that it may not be cultural at all, for I felt I fully understood where people in Bogo were coming from, and what their message was for everyone: It’s possible to solve a major social problem without killing. —JST, GMA News

Howie Severino traveled to Bogo City earlier this year for the documentary program I-Witness. Watch the full episode below: