MANILA // Business has never been busier for undertaker Alejandro Ormeneta but, after five months on the frontlines of the Philippines’ brutal drug war, he just wants the killings to stop.
Ormeneta and his colleagues at one funeral parlour in Manila say they are retrieving an average of five corpses a night, mostly from slums, and his grisly new routine has left him questioning the savage forces unleashed by president Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown on crime.
“This shouldn’t happen, they are people, not animals,” Mr Ormeneta, 47, says as he recalls taking out three nails hammered into the skull of an alleged drug trafficker.
“I think he was still alive when they hammered the nails. They tied him up first, put tape around his head, then hammered the nails in ... that must have been so painful. I felt so sorry for him.”
On a typical night recently, Mr Ormeneta walked down a narrow slum alleyway into a shanty where masked assailants had shot a man dead, the victim’s body still smelling of the alcohol that he must have been drinking shortly before being killed.
The victim’s sister wailed as police turned over his body on the concrete floor soaked in blood and revealed multiple gunshots to his head and body.
Police later said that Danilo Bolante, 47, had sold shabu, the cheap crystal methamphetamine that Mr Duterte says is ruining society and must be eradicated.
But his sister, Chona Balina, insists he had stopped selling the drug and had even reported himself to police as part of Mr Duterte’s campaign to pressure drug traffickers and users into surrendering, known as Tokhang.
“Why launch Tokhang if that’s what they are going to do with people who are already changing,” she says.
Mr Duterte won presidential elections this year in a landslide after promising an unprecedented war on drugs in which tens of thousands of people would be killed.
Part of his stump speech on the campaign trail was tongue-in-cheek business advice for people to set up funeral homes in preparation for the killings.
“The funeral parlours will be packed ... I’ll supply the dead bodies,” he said, to cheers and laughter at one campaign rally.
Mr Duterte has been true to his word with police reporting killing more than 2,000 people they accused of being drug suspects. Another 3,000 people have been murdered by unknown gunmen, triggering fears of widespread extrajudicial killings.
The deaths look certain to continue with Mr Duterte saying in September he would be “happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts and repeatedly vowing no let-up until the illegal drug trade has been eliminated.
While there are vocal critics of the drug war at home and abroad, surveys show an overwhelming majority of Filipinos support Mr Duterte’s crusade.
Still, funeral parlours, while busy, are not necessarily making lots of money, with relatives of many victims often too poor to be able to pay for a funeral.
“I don’t know how we can afford this because I have no job,” Ms Balina says after agreeing to a funeral package worth 62,000 pesos (Dh4,570) with Veronica Memorial Chapels for services that include embalming, a casket and the wake.
Funeral director Rico Teodocio says prices range from 18,000 to 400,000 pesos, but that he often gives discounts, especially for families of alleged drug users, some of whom pay in coins or raise money from gambling at wakes. He says some also beg cemeteries for free caskets.
“I don’t know if pathetic is the right term to use but you really pity them. We suffer too because we give our lowest price,” he says.
Veronica and other funeral parlours say bodies are frequently left unclaimed because relatives of the victims do not know about the death, are afraid of being linked to drugs or are simply too poor.
In these situations, the bodies are kept for two to three months then buried in public cemeteries, at the expense of funeral homes.
“It’s sad. They die without anyone coming for them,” Mr Ormeneta says, pointing to black corpses at the back of the morgue.
Some undertakers treat the profession as just a business, but Mr Ormeneta, a father of four and Catholic who has been in the industry for 18 years, has been emotionally impacted by the drug war.
He says he often thinks about the person with nails in his skull, and has a firm conviction that small-time traffickers did not deserve to die.
“They are victims of drugs. They needed to stave off hunger, perhaps for their children. They should have been given a chance to change,” he says.
“Isn’t that written in the Bible? Thou shalt not kill.”
* Agence France-Presse
