Panelo insists ‘drug czar’ offer for Robredo legit, shows off text to prove it

President Rodrigo Duterte’s offer for vocal critic Vice President Leni Robredo to take over law enforcement as the country’s  “drug czar” is serious, Malacañang spokesman Salvador Panelo insisted on Wednesday, showing reporters a text message he allegedly sent her to drive his point home.

Read: Miffed at comments, Duterte dares VP Robredo to take over law enforcement for six months

Duterte issued the challenge earlier this week, after Robredo told Reuters in an Oct. 23 article that the president should allow the United Nations to investigate the government’s war on drugs, and that the deadly campaign should be abandoned. Robredo later clarified that she was not against “the drug war as a whole,” but she said the government needed to reassess what has gone wrong with the campaign because the number of addicts and drug-related deaths has continued to rise.

The comments prompted a testy Duterte to offer to turn over his law enforcement powers to Robredo, saying on Monday, “Let her carry it. Let’s see what happens.”

Panelo yesterday insisted to reporters that he had texted the vice president about the drug czar offer as early as Monday, showing them a delivered message from his phone sent to “VP Leni Robredo” which read, in a mix of English, Visayan, and Filipino, “There’s an offer from you from PRRD [President Rodrigo Roa Duterte] to be Drug Czar for six months, will you accept?”

Robredo had said on Tuesday that she would respond to the president’s challenge when she receives a formal invitation to the hypothetical post. (She also noted that if there were no failure in the country’s anti-drug campaign, then the government wouldn’t be delegating it to her.)

Duterte had earlier said he would ask Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea to draft a letter formalizing Robredo’s appointment as drug czar, but Robredo said this has yet to reach her office.

Panelo yesterday dismissed Robredo’s accusations that the drug war is a failure and saying in a statement that the president’s offer for Robredo to helm the anti-drug campaign “is a sincere gesture” from the president to consider new ways of handling the problem as Robredo might have “a better solution.”

“This is an enticing opportunity to show her mettle as a public servant in destroying the drug apparatus, as well as helping people freed from this fatal threat to society.”

The Duterte government launched its bloody drug war in 2016, and thousands of drug suspects have since allegedly been summarily executed by members of the Philippine National Police (PNP). As of June, the PNP said that there have been 6,600 suspects who were killed in the drug war, but other put the figure much, much higher, with the Commission on Human Rights saying that as many as 27,000 have died.

Duterte had vowed to put an end to what he characterized as the scourge of illegal drugs plaguing the country within three to six months. A year later, however, he said the six-month deadline was a mistake, and that he had underestimated the gravity of the drug problem.