Diego Bello case: five years of struggle and a gun that reveals a police plot

Five years later, these three Philippine Police officers – two sergeants and a captain – share space in the Manila City prison, baptized as ‘the prison of terror’, awaiting a ruling that, given the slowness of the Asian country’s judicial system, could take “between a year and a half and two years” to be drafted. The information is pointed out by the lawyer of Diego’s family, Guillermo Mosquera, who He travels every six months to the Philippines to closely follow the trial for the Galician crime. Trying to measure time with the Western clock introduces the agony of parents who have been demanding justice for their child for years, “it is a mistake.” He speaks with knowledge of the facts, knowing that the resolution will take time to arrive, but aware that his goal is closer every day, and that the path has not exactly been smooth.

When Diego’s family received the news of his death, it was marred by a crude accusation. The country’s authoritieswhich in 2016 declared war on drugs with the help of its president Rodrigo Duterte— They called the man from A Coruña a drug trafficking kingpin and published that they had shot him down in self-defense after Diego took a gun out of his fanny pack to shoot them. According to the official version of the death, which they settled in a two-page reportthe young man fell into the trap that had been laid for him when he tried to sell a few grams of cocaine to one of the agents, who at that very moment would have stopped him.

At the door of Diego’s house, next to his body, several bullet casings appeared, matching the weapon that the Galician was carrying in his hand. next to a fanny pack without a drop of blood. The victim’s friends, who arrived at the scene of death a few minutes later, were the first to suspect that this did not add up. As the security cameras of the place where they had just said goodbye would demonstrate, Diego was not wearing a fanny pack that night, much less a .45 caliber pistol.difficult to camouflage given its dimensions. The suspicions that their friend had just been the victim of an ambush, and the certainty that the success of the businesses they had undertaken on the island was not liked by certain groups – who had let them know this – made them leave Siargao in question. of 48 hours. Nobody felt safe anymore on the island that the man from A Coruña fell in love with.

From his hometown, Diego’s entourage began a battle to discover how he had died, beyond the official thesis that reverberated in the country’s media. According to the autopsy, The young man had six gunshot wounds, all of them directed at vital areas of the body.. However, despite the small distance that separated them, none of the three police officers were injured, nor were there signs of a rebound on the walls of the house. The case, due to the doubts it raised internationally, soon fell into the hands of the Philippine Human Rights Commission, which prepared a first report on the circumstances of the death that destroyed the police plot. In essence, these independent investigations found that Diego was not on the list of traffickers, not even on the list of consumers.which was managed by the local police. They also showed that a minute and a half before being shot, in the last images preserved of him, he was not wearing the controversial fanny pack, and that the shots that hit his body had a downward trajectory, from top to bottom. That is to say, Diego was finished off when he was already on the ground.

The findings of this first investigation not only called into question the police version, but also placed the death in a different context that human rights organizations have been denouncing for years: summary executions carried out in the name of the fight against drugs in the Philippines. In total, more than 30,000 deaths whose explanation always follows the same pattern. Police who shoot to defend themselves from traffickers who try to flee. But in Diego’s case, the investigation managed to turn around this story told a thousand times and forced the country’s Prosecutor’s Office, the NBI, to begin its own investigations. Because, the family’s lawyer explains exclusively to ABC, The gun they placed in Diego’s hand “is the same caliber, a 45of those that had been used in other extrajudicial executions. Also in the name of the fight against drugs. The police officers who surprised Diego that night, Captain Vicente Panuelos and sergeants Ronel Azarcón and Nido Boy, fled when their arrest was ordered, and ended up turning themselves in months later, after their activity on social networks came to light.

The judicial process in which their provisional release is assessed and at the same time they are prosecuted, according to the complex operation of the law of the Asian country, began last October, but since then only a dozen sessions have been held. Some of the appearances are left half-finished because the scheduled time is exceeded, and others were canceled with a few hours’ notice due to elections in the neighborhoods or Christmas itself. “The normal thing in this country is that for a case like this it takes ten years to go to trial” clarifies the Bello family lawyer, who trusts that the truth they are pursuing thousands of kilometers from Diego’s grave will end up arriving, albeit late, from the island of tears.