Press Release
March 14, 2018

Dispatch from Crame No. 262:
Sen. Leila M. de Lima's statement on the DOJ dismissal of charges against Lim, Espinosa and Co

3/14/18

The travesty of the fake war on drugs is that it has never eliminated drug lords or the sources of drugs. It has always targetted those at the lowest level of the drug chain, dealing on them the capital penalty of death without trial and on mere suspicion. In the meantime, big-time dealers like Peter Lim, Kerwin Espinosa and Peter Co are given a free pass for supposed lack of evidence, even if two of them admitted to being drug lords under oath.

There can be no excuse to both the PNP's and the DOJ's failure to bring real drug lords to court and before the bars of justice. They seem to have no problem filing fake drug cases against political opponents of the Duterte administration like me. It appears that the law enforcement and justice machinery of the government under this administration has already forgotten how to file and prosecute real drug cases. They have become such experts in filing fake drug charges that they have become completely incompetent in the case build-up and the filing of real ones. This makes the drug war useless, as it is fake.

The dismissal of the cases against Lim, Espinosa and Co--and let's not forget the exclusion from the Criminal Informations filed against me of the other self-confessed Bilibid drug lords who turned witnesses against me--is just another instance of the fake drug war, after the failure of government to go to the bottom and find the mastermind of the 6.4 billion smuggled shabu shipment.

If the Duterte government is consistent in anything in its drug war, it is in the lack of interest in going after the drug lords and drug deals that matter. In the meantime, thousands are killed for possession of a few ounces of shabu, most of it even planted after a supposed shootout.

It should be clear by now that Duterte's drug war is a big joke, except that the thousands killed in its name are not laughing. Because they are all dead. It is only the real drug lords like Lim, Espinosa, Co and the other Bilibid drug inmates who are laughing--laughing all the way to the bank.

And the biggest joke of all? The government tried to hide the dismissal of the cases from the public since December of last year. And now Duterte is pretending to huff and puff at this dismissal.

It's either they were hiding it because they were complicit in the deal with the drug lords (including the deal for the perpetuation of their lies against me), or they are so incompetent as to be completely ignorant of the dismissal a full three months after the fact. The corruption, or the incompetence--pick your choice--is incredible.

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