Edgar Matobato: Exiting a death squad
READ: Part 1 | The making of Edgar Matobato
In 2013, Edgar Matobato wanted out. The killings were taking their toll, particularly one assignment involving three young women. He was told they were drug dealers, but he suspected they were innocent. Their deaths haunted him. Sleepless nights piled up, and Matobato, then in his fifties, told his superiors he was too old for the job.
When he stopped reporting for work, he knew it was only a matter of time before the squad leaders would come for him. In June 2014, his fears came true. Three police officers took him to the station, where, for a week, they beat him relentlessly — sometimes with their fists, other times with a chair or the butt of a rifle.
They wanted him to confess to the killing of Richard King, a wealthy Cebuano businessman who had recently been shot in a Davao office building. Matobato believed the killing was orchestrated by the police and death squad working together, and he was to be their fall guy.
The beatings were brutal. Matobato lost hearing in his right ear and suffered a fractured chest bone. One evening, a rifle barrel was thrust into his buttocks; he was hit so hard he nearly passed out. He was released the next day on the intercession of his uncle, a retired police officer.
Fearing for his life, Matobato fled Davao with his wife. With money from relatives, they moved between Cebu, Leyte, and Samar. In desperation, he wrote to then-justice secretary Leila de Lima, claiming he had been tortured and wanted to file a complaint.
When no response came, he traveled to Manila, hoping broadcaster Ted Failon, a fellow Waray, would hear him out. He couldn’t get an audience. Back in Tacloban, he sought help from the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), but the regional office, still reeling from the damage caused by typhoon Yolanda, said they couldn’t protect him.
CHR staff advised him to go to the justice department in Manila. He did, telling the security guard at the entrance, “Sir, I am a member of the Davao Death Squad and I want to surrender.”
He was brought to a lawyer who referred him to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). In September 2014, the NBI placed him in a government safe house under the witness protection program.
NBI investigators corroborated Matobato’s story, and in August 2015, recommended filing arbitrary detention and torture charges against five Davao City police officers. De Lima, the justice secretary, knew about Matobato’s torture case but told me she was then unaware of the depth of his death squad involvement.
As chair of the CHR in 2009, De Lima had held hearings in Davao, vowing to end vigilante-style killings. She and her team began exhuming bodies buried in the Laud quarry but could not proceed because a Davao judge denied them a search warrant. (Years later, Matobato would testify that Rodrigo Duterte had ordered her assassination if she proceeded.)
Over the years, efforts to hold Duterte accountable had been derailed by bureaucratic dysfunction and disinterest. Moreover, national politicians turned a blind eye to Davao’s carnage, preferring to rely on Duterte to deliver votes from his vote-rich city. Others thought the Davao killings were localized and not a threat to the nation.
Meanwhile, although safe under witness protection, Matobato could still not go public with his truth.
Sanctuary and salvation
Duterte declared his candidacy for president in November 2015. Not seen as a top contender, he was rapidly gaining support and by April 2016, it looked like he was going to win. Matobato feared for his life. On his lawyer’s advice, he left witness protection on May 4, less than a week before the election.
On the same day, men in barong escorted the couple to the justice department and then a hotel in Manila. Days later, armed men spirited them away to what they believed was their execution. Instead, they were taken to a large house in Bulacan province. The men, members of the Presidential Security Guard, assured them they were safe. Matobato did not know they had been sent at the behest of President Benigno Aquino III. The president kept this operation secret even from his inner circle but later shared it with then-senator Antonio Trillanes IV.
As Duterte’s inauguration loomed, the guards escorted Matobato and his wife to the office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines in Intramuros. The staff were stunned but the clergy hurriedly made arrangements to bring the couple to a church compound in the city. From there, they were moved from one church facility to another.
The decision to shelter them wasn’t without controversy. The Catholic Church has a long tradition of providing sanctuary, especially during Martial Law. But Matobato was no political dissident — he was a self-confessed assassin. Some clergy supported Duterte’s anti-drug campaign and worried they were coddling a criminal.
Priests met with Motobato to discern his sincerity. Father Alejo was convinced. Over and over, Matobato had told him, “I have sinned so many times. I have killed so many. Never mind if I go to prison, or get killed, or sent to the electric chair. Before I die, I want to be able to say what I know.”
Some clergy members supported the hitman’s desire to go public. They worried, however, that their actions would be seen as political, especially as two opposition senators, De Lima and Magdalo co-founder Trillanes, wanted Matobato to testify in a Senate hearing.
Father Alejo was certain Matobato had a mission. He recalled Paul of Tarsus, persecutor of Christians, converted on the road to Damascus. Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced Jesus’ side with a spear during his crucifixion, eventually became a monk and a martyr of the faith.
Redemption is possible, Father Alejo told me as we drove on traffic-choked streets and headed back to Manila.
Testimony at the Senate
The night before his testimony, Matobato was moved to a hotel suite near the Senate. In the morning, he knelt to pray with his wife and Father Alejo, clutching an image of the Virgin Mary.
Raised without religious instruction, Matobato had avoided church most of his life. “I was afraid to go to Mass,” he said. “I would kill again afterward, so what’s the point?” His greatest fear, he said, more than death itself, was dying before speaking out.
The clergy believed there were real threats on Matobato’s life. The church alone could not protect him. The Magdalo party stepped in, providing security and safe houses. A doctor treated the internal bleeding caused by his torture. Lawyers volunteered legal advice. Others helped with safe houses and other support.
Somehow, that ragtag band of clergy, dissident soldiers, and civilians managed to keep the couple safe and alive as they were bundled from one refuge to another. They have done so for the past eight years.
Those early months, however, were the most fraught. The body count in Duterte’s drug war was escalating and the president was polling a high 80 percent approval rating. Even the renowned novelist F. Sionil Jose hailed “Mr. Duterte’s assault on the rotten status quo, which has begun with the war on drugs.” Many in the Left praised the president’s attacks on oligarchs and imperial America.
A Church activist told me that in a Mass held for drug war victims, many churchgoers had refused to light candles for the dead. In the communities hard hit by the war, he said, “some even held parties to celebrate the killing of those they considered salot, a social plague. These places have been neglected for so long, they have not been given justice, and the killings are a form of justice for them.”
Resistance in the shadows
In the face of popular support for the killings, nuns, priests, and pastors improvised ways to respond beyond the usual blessings and condolences. They paid for funeral expenses of drug war victims, supported widowed mothers, and provided scholarships for orphans. They sheltered terrorized families in seminaries, rectories, schools, and orphanages. Some worked to convince police and local governments to spare those in the Church’s care, setting up rehabilitation programs on the fly.
In 2018, I spoke with Sister Crescencia Lucero, a gentle, soft-spoken nun who had spent decades quietly aiding victims of state violence. At the time, she was sheltering dozens of families and was part of a clandestine network of nuns who provided sanctuary. They moved the families between convents, seminaries, and schools, ensuring they were never in one place for long. At one point, they had to evacuate quickly when Duterte’s scheduled visit nearby drew heightened security and the prying eyes of his advance team.
I asked Sister Cres how long she had been doing this kind of work. “Since 1969,” she said — the year she took her vows.
Beyond the Church, resistance took many forms. Just as death squads operated through hidden networks, a parallel ecosystem of empathy and defiance emerged. Lawyers provided legal aid. Doctors treated survivors of torture and assassination attempts. Social workers, artists, and musicians counseled grieving families and preserved their stories. Academics, journalists, and photographers documented the carnage.
On a sweltering July afternoon in 2017, I watched members of a dance company conduct a workshop for drug sellers, many of whom had lost loved ones to the drug war. They had fled their neighborhoods and were sheltering in a church building. The dancers told them to hold each other, to feel the connection, the weight, the touch. There was silence, and then tears.
The University of the Philippines social work school began tracking such efforts, finding 74 groups actively countering the government’s campaign. A 2019 report noted, “Far from a picture of acceptance or helplessness, there is pushback.” These groups ranged from church ministries to human rights advocates, environmentalists, educators, and feminist organizations.
Their work seemed small compared to the state’s vast machinery of violence. But I realized that, just as a clandestine ecosystem of death squads is deeply embedded in the underbelly of society, so is a parallel world of resistance — connected, rooted, and quietly defying the brokenness that surrounds them.
Eight years later
When Matobato first testified, holding Duterte accountable seemed impossible. Eight years later, the International Criminal Court is investigating, and Congress is probing the carnage. Other witnesses, including police officers and former death squad members, have come forward.
Still, impunity looms. Drug-related killings continue. The Duterte family remains powerful, and large parts of the country still support them. In many ways, ours is still a broken country where the mighty enjoy impunity for corruption and human rights abuse.
Individual redemption, as in Matobato’s case, is possible. But what will it take to redeem an entire nation? – Rappler.com