I remember the first time I heard about the killing of three youngsters in Barangay Overview, Liloy, Zamboanga del Norte in 2016. It was described to me in the familiar language of the drug war โ nanlaban. They fought back, the police said. Case closed.
But something about it refused to rest.
In those years of reporting under the shadow of former president Rodrigo Duterteโs drug war, the word nanlaban had become both explanation and erasure. It was a script. A stamp. A shield. And in many communities across Mindanao, it ended conversations before they even began.
In Barangay Overview and among the victims’ families, however, whispers persisted.
The decision to look closer
Investigating the case meant stepping into dangerous territory. The suspects were not faceless criminals. They were police officers โ men armed not only with guns but with institutional protection. The killings happened at the height of a campaign that rewarded results, numbers, and unquestioning obedience.
I spent weeks poring over documents: volumes of reports from the National Bureau of Investigation, medico-legal findings detailing entry and exit wounds, and records from the prosecutorโs office. I studied ballistic trajectories, inconsistencies in sworn affidavits, timelines that refused to align.
The more I read, the more the official narrative began to unravel.
The three youngsters were painted as dangerous drug personalities who had violently resisted arrest. But the forensic details told a quieter, more troubling story. Angles did not match. Distances contradicted police accounts. Witness statements hinted at fear long before gunshots were fired.
My family warned me.
They reminded me that this was not just a story. It involved officers who had shown they were willing to pull the trigger. They asked whether it was worth the risk. I weighed their fear against my calling. As a journalist โ and as someone who believes truth is a moral obligation โ I knew silence would haunt me more than danger.
In the end, I wrote.
From local pages to national spotlight
The story first ran in the Daily Sun Chronicle. It mattered to us. It mattered to the families of the victims. But the breakthrough came when my editor at Rappler accepted the piece and its follow-up investigations.
With a broader platform came sharper scrutiny. The reporting reached lawyers, human rights advocates, and international observers tracking patterns in the drug war killings. What had once been dismissed as a routine police operation began to look like something else โ part of a larger design.
Each follow-up required returning to the documents, double-checking every assertion, strengthening every line with evidence. When you challenge a powerful narrative, precision becomes protection.
When the ICC took notice
Then came the moment I never expected.
The case of the three youngsters in Barangay Overview was documented by the International Criminal Court as one of 52 nanlaban cases included in its records. It was no longer just a provincial tragedy. It had entered the language of international justice.
For years, these killings had been obscured by statistics and slogans. But now, they were evidence.
I have had small victories in journalism before โ corrections secured, local officials held accountable, policies amended. But this one stands apart. Because it proves that even from a remote town in Zamboanga del Norte, a story can travel across borders. That a report written in a modest newsroom can reach The Hague.
More than anything, it affirms that documentation matters.
The families of the three youngsters may never fully recover from their loss. Justice, in its legal sense, may take years โ or may never arrive in the way we imagine. But their story is no longer buried under a single word: nanlaban.
It lives in court filings. In international records. In the growing acknowledgment that what happened during those years demands reckoning.
I took a risk in telling that story. I wrestled with fear. I listened to my familyโs warnings. But I chose to write.
And in seeing that once-obscured case become part of the charges examined by the International Criminal Court, I felt something rare in journalism: the quiet, steady confirmation that the pen is still relevant in the search for justice.
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