Evidence Doctors May Have Doctored Duterte Drug War Death Certificates To Hide Murder

Dead men can tell tales, thanks to forensic science, and on Tuesday the Philippines’ leading forensic pathologist released a bombshell finding that casts President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs under an even more damning light.

At least seven of 46 exhumed remains of drug war victims bore bullet holes despite their death certificates indicating they died of diseases, corroborating families’ claims of a violent death, forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun told reporters in Manila on April 12.

The finding implies there could be more people killed in Duterte’s drug war than the official body count of roughly 6,000 since he came to power in 2016—a figure that rights advocates have long disputed, saying the death toll is at least 20,000. It also further incriminates the drug war’s operators, including Duterte, who are under an International Criminal Court investigation for crimes against humanity.

Fortun’s findings also reveal how haphazardly authorities dealt with the drug war dead, and how funeral parlors and doctors who processed the bodies for burial may have helped cover up the carnage. 

“You have doctors staking their reputation, their name, their license [by] falsifying death certificates. There’s a law against this,” said Fortun of those who signed certificates authorizing the bodies’ release to families. She did not name those doctors. “Were they not complicit in the killings?”

From July last year to February this year, Fortun’s collaborator Flaviano Villanueva, a Catholic priest and human rights activist, has been facilitating the exhumations of drug war casualties whose cemetery leases were up. In the Philippines, some families can’t afford permanent graves for their dead, and the decomposed bodies are either cremated or transferred to mass graves. 

Fortun is examining 46 exhumed bodies entrusted by families to Villanueva, who will have them cremated and buried after the examination. The bodies are of drug war victims killed between June 2016 and August 2017, the opening salvo of the violent campaign that would underscore Duterte’s administration.

Along with the police, vigilantes and masked assassins were among those who carried out the drug war, Duterte’s main political platform that promised crime-free streets and a purge of social ills that he said were rooted in narcotics.

The victims examined by Fortun were overwhelmingly poor, with their death certificates stating they either were jobless or had menial jobs. Fortun also noted the bad state of their teeth. 

“They probably never saw a dentist in their lives,” she said. Most of the victims were male. The only two female victims were killed along with their male partners.

Fortun has so far finished examining 36 of the bodies, finding gunshot wounds on 32 of them and “probable gunshot wounds” on the other four. However, of the death certificates that came with those bodies, only 28 stated gunshot wounds as the cause of death. One had no death certificate, while seven stated death by natural causes such as sepsis, myocardial infarction (heart attack), cerebrovascular accident (stroke), pneumonia and hypertension.

Poverty and desperation may have led to the victims’ families relinquishing their chance at justice by not documenting murder or homicide as the cause of death. An investigation by local news outlet Rappler found that funeral parlors talked some of these families into citing illnesses as the cause of death in order to cut expenses and processes—often bogus—so they could get on with the funeral and burial.

This means there could be many unregistered drug war deaths, and that private parties such as funeral parlors and clinics worked with agencies, like the police, that carried out Duterte’s drug war.

Fortun noted that “incompetence” may have also been a factor in the drug war death documentation mess. The Philippines lacks a proper death investigation system, and Fortun said crime scene and forensic investigators often lack the training and equipment to do their jobs properly. Still, she said her findings show there is “no intent” by the government to resolve drug war death cases.

“Is that a cover-up? I wouldn’t say ‘no’,” Fortun said. “What I am seeing is really impunity.”

The justice department said on Tuesday it will investigate Fortun’s findings of alleged falsification of drug war death certificates, and claimed it came across similar cases in its own investigation. The agency is under pressure to mount a credible probe into Duterte’s drug war, as intervention by the International Criminal Court is premised on a government’s inability to deliver justice on its own in cases of widespread atrocities.

Duterte’s mandatory single 6-year term is ending in June, stripping him of immunity from lawsuit and opening him to domestic prosecution for killings in his drug war. His daughter Sara Duterte is running for vice president in the national elections set for May.

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