The meeting took place on June 28, 2016. They were compartmentalized into one room each at the second floor of the Department of Public Works and Highways in Davao City. Was it because they were given distinct areas of operations? It was in that building that then president-elect Rodrigo Duterte held office.
In two days time the president-elect was to take his oath of office as president of the Philippines. The meeting with the graduates of the Philippine National Police Academy’s (PNPA) Class of 1996 and 1997 was a critical one for the incoming president. His program of government was extrajudicial killings, what is today known as the Davao Template because of his previous record in protecting police killings in Davao city.
Did they discuss how to export the template to the national theater of action? That was discussed, said Class 1997 alumna Royina Garma. She was part of the killing machine in Davao, according to Davao Death Squad leader Arturo Lascañas, in his affidavit to the International Criminal Court. Interviewed by this writer face to face in his country of exile, Lascañas said that Garma actually led the supposed Bong Go Death Squad that Duterte allegedly allowed to operate in parallel with the DDS because Go was so successful in obtaining from the city’s Land Transportation Office the personal information data of their targets.
With Garma in the alleged Bong Go Death Squad was another PNPA alumni, Edilberto Leonardo of the Class of 1996 (but who later graduated with the Class of 1998). Irony of ironies, Leonardo was head of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, the PNP branch that investigates and prosecutes all crimes.
That meeting eight years ago would have been buried in secrecy, were it not for the superb research of the House of Representatives’ Quad Committee investigation into EJKs, human rights violations and POGOs under the Duterte regime. True enough, the June 28, 2016 meeting was not fake news. Grilled by the incessant questioning at the Quadcom, members of both classes present admitted that indeed the meeting took place.
The other personalities in that meeting, such as Leonardo for example, said he could no longer remember if the Davao Template was discussed. He admitted to the Quadcom, however, that he was present in one of the rooms.
Most of them are now saying that the meeting was just a courtesy call on the President. Yet they could not explain how two classes of the PNPA’s graduates were purposely and deliberately gathered in Davao City to see the incoming president. More suspicious was who reportedly came with Duterte for those meetings. They were Go and the then-incoming PNP chief Bato dela Rosa (all denied Dela Rosa’s presence).
That meeting was in fact a crucial piece of information. The origin of the Duterte drug war was born in that meeting. For all intents and purposes, the police who came to that meeting would comprise the Philippine Death Squad.
By latest deductions from comparative official records, more than 30,000 were killed in that drug war. The Quadcom had its nose on the right instinct – the meeting laid the blueprint for Duterte’s killing pogrom.
However they deny to death, the members of the two classes overlook one thing: how they figured in the killing orders of the Duterte regime through Dela Rosa. All of them were probably of the thought that where mystery begins, justice ends. They had never predicted that someday, the real tale of their crimes will come from those they had unprotected — the victims, the witnesses to their evil deeds, their own peers who saw the crimes being planned.
Now comes the juicy part. Who were the members of those two PNPA classes? Their names are a veritable Who’s Who of notorious police in the six years of the Rodrigo Duterte regime.
Edilberto Leonardo was Class 1996. Royina Garma was Class 1997. Both now face the specter of murder charges for their alleged involvement in the August 2016 killing of three Chinese inmates in the Davao Penal Colony (Dapecol). The three were serving time for drug-related crimes (were they silenced because they knew Duterte’s involvement with the chinaman Michael Yang’s alleged drug trade in Davao?).
Notice who were telling the story here — two inmates of Dapecol who were tasked to perform the murders and who were promised P1M each and freedom. The freedom never came. But prison superintendent Gerardo Padilla testified that the plan was hatched in Leonardo’s CIDG office with the presence of Garma.
Here’s the twist: corroborating the testimonies of the two prison inmates was inmate Jimmy Fortaleza, actually a classmate of Garma in Class 1997. Fortaleza was serving time in prison for murder and arbitrary detention.
Lascañas, however, told me that the Leonardo-Garma EJK partnership had a third member. That was Marvin Marcos, the police officer who headed the November 2016 dawn raid inside the Baybay, Leyte city jail that killed detained Albuera mayor Rolando Espinosa. The Marcos team claimed Espinosa had fired back; he had a gun inside prison? Marvin Marcos was present in that Davao city meeting as member of the Class of 1996. (A Rappler report puts him in Class 1995, but Quadcom sources have said Marcos was in that Davao city meeting).
At the time of the Espinosa murder, Marcos was chief of the Eastern Visayas CIDG. Charged with homicide, he was later reinstated twice by Dela Rosa upon orders of Duterte.
The Quadcom should continue to investigate Marcos, especially that he has also been alleged to have received drug money protection. Kerwin Espinosa must now spill the beans on Marcos.
Why was Duterte angry with the slain Espinosa? Lascañas revealed to me information never before made public. Espinosa, he said, had sent feelers to Duterte to bring his drug trade to Mindanao. That was not possible to Duterte. Lascañas related that the Mindanao drug trade was already in the hands of Michael Yang and his brother in Cagayan de Oro. Reynaldo Parojinog, Lascañas claimed, was eliminated to ensure a competition-free drug dominance of Yang in Mindanao.
There were two other members of Class of 1997, classmates of Garma, who also figured with much notoriety at the height of the Duterte regime. The killing of retired police general Wesley Barayuga (Philippine Military Academy of 1983) on July 30, 2020 when he was board secretary of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office was, in fact, said to have been hatched by Leonardo and Garma, as made evident by the Quadcom.
But there was an alleged third participant in that murder who came from Class of 1997. He was Hector Grijaldo, at the time the police chief of Mandaluyong city. Grijaldo was also present in that 2016 Davao city meeting. Garma tasked him to make the police spot report after the killing. Instead, the report led investigators away from the truth. The Leonardo-Garma-Grijaldo triumvirate also added Barayuga’s name to the Duterte drug watch list AFTER Barayuga was killed.
The other classmate of Garma was the infamous Lito Patay, who figured as the officer of Quezon City Poice Station 6 documented in detail by the Reuters report The Boys From Davao. Patay denied he was at that Davao city 2016 meeting.
Lest we forget, however, there was another member of Class 1996 who probably figures as the most disreputable of them all. The fugitive from justice Gerald Bantag was Leonardo’s classmate. He is known to be an expert in covering his tracks. When he was Bureau of Corrections chief, inmates were declared dead from the Red China virus during the pandemic lockdown. Postmortems, however, found no traces of Covid.
Two of them were witnesses against the Leila de Lima charade by Rodrigo Duterte. These were Vicente Sy and Jaybee Sebastian. A subsequent report of the National Bureau of Investigation established that the inmates were murdered by an inside job at the New Bilibid Prison.
There is more to Bantag. The Bucor official charged with him for the October 2022 assassination of journalist Percy Lapid was senior superintendent Ricardo Zulueta. In March 2024, Zulueta was reported to have died of heart failure in Dinalupihan, Bataan. But Roy Mabasa, Lapid’s brother, intimated to this writer that Zulueta’s dead body was never accounted for. Was he made to escape under a new identity?
The killer members of PNPA’s Class of 1996 and 1997 obviously operated under the gangsterism principle that dead men tell no tales, forgetting that the living can tell the secrets they thought they had buried. That is what is happening now in the House’s Quadcom hearings.
The hearings infuse us with hope that someday, sooner or later, Rodrigo Duterte and his police thugs will pay for their crimes in jail where they belong. The days of impunity must be over. – Rappler.com
