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posted by martyb on Monday July 31 2017, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the drugs-are-dangerous dept.

The mayor of Ozamiz in the province of Misamis Occidental, Philippines has been killed in a drug raid:

A mayor who had been accused by President Rodrigo Duterte of involvement in drug trafficking was killed along with his wife and 10 other people in coordinated police raids early Sunday, the authorities said.

Reynaldo Parojinog, mayor of the city of Ozamiz in the southern Philippines, died in a firefight at his home after his security personnel shot at drug enforcement officers, who had come to arrest him and three members of his family, according to the Philippine National Police.

His wife, Susan Parojinog, and five other people were also killed, and a second raid at another house owned by the family left five more people dead, the police said. Mr. Parojinog's daughter, Nova Princess Parojinog-Echavez, the deputy mayor of Ozamiz, was among "scores" of people arrested, according to Ernesto Abella, a spokesman for Mr. Duterte.

The police said they confiscated high-powered rifles, bundles of cash and an unspecified amount of methamphetamines at Mr. Parojinog's home. A police official, Chief Superintendent Timoteo Pacleb, said one officer had been wounded in the firefight but that his life was not in danger.

Also at the The Washington Post, SunStar, BBC, and CNN Philippines.


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday July 31 2017, @10:50PM (2 children)

    by zocalo (302) on Monday July 31 2017, @10:50PM (#547401)
    On the surface, those who want hard drugs to be made legally available (with or without some form of restrictions on acquisition) might not want to be demonising Duterte but, as you say, he's on the worst possible path to fixing the problem and that's where taking a position of tacit support kind of falls apart. There are really only two possible outcomes to Duterte's tactics; either he wipes out the drug dealers and most of the users, or they tool up and you end up with something akin to Somalia or tribal areas in the 'stans where individual warlords control fiefdoms and the official government fears to go. I tend to think the latter the more likely outcome too but, either way, you're going to have a bloodbath with huge numbers of innocents killed in the crossfire, and if that's not worthy of some vilification then I don't know what is.
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday August 01 2017, @12:16AM (1 child)

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday August 01 2017, @12:16AM (#547439) Journal

    I think the key is if he has popular support. And he was elected in a free election asfaik. So he might actually succeed.

    • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday August 01 2017, @03:07PM

      by quacking duck (1395) on Tuesday August 01 2017, @03:07PM (#547667)

      According to the the wiki on the 2016 Philippine election [wikipedia.org], Duterte won with only got 39% of the popular vote, which is not unusual in a democracy with more than 2 major political parties. Canada's current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, likewise won with only 39%-ish of the popular vote for his party.

      All this to say that although Duterte won the popular vote, it is nowhere near an actual majority of voters who supported him.