Exclusive: Inside the Cell of Leila de Lima, Dutertes First Political Prisoner
The headquarters of the Philippine National Police, known as Camp Crame, sits like a fortress in the middle of Quezon City, the busiest and most populous of the 16 municipalities comprising Metro Manila. Tall walls along its two-mile perimeter separate it from the clamor and chaos of the cell phone shops and passing trucks outside; so quiet is it inside the detention center deep within the complex that its prisoners can, if nothing else, get a good night’s sleep.
Senator Leila de Lima is indeed well-rested. “I prepared myself for this psychologically,” she says on Saturday morning, sitting in the small concrete courtyard outside her cell. Just over 24 hours have passed since she was arrested outside the Philippine Senate on three charges of drug trafficking — charges that she dismisses as attempt to silence her vocal crusade against President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Since taking office last June, 57-year-old de Lima, who previously served as the Philippines Secretary of Justice, has been the brash President’s most prominent opponent, attempting to use her position of power to fight the campaign of extrajudicial killings that has claimed the lives of thousands of alleged drug users and pushers.
Now, she says, she is his first political prisoner.
“It’s an attempt to intimidate his critics — to bring about a chilling effect,” she says. She wears a yellow T-shirt, jeans, and sandals; her expression is uncharacteristically stony. She is one of 26 individuals being held at Camp Crame’s custodial center — some of whom she investigated during her tenure as Secretary of Justice, an irony she appreciates — and the only woman. She is ineligible for bail.
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