MANILA, Philippines — Since taking office six months ago, hard-line populist President Rodrigo Duterte has succeeded in turning this city into one of the murder capitals of the world, authorizing the police and an array of unknown accomplices to gun down at point-blank range anyone suspected of dealing or using illegal drugs.
Authorities claim suspects are fired on only in self-defense, but more than 6,000 have been shot dead in what critics call a flood of “extrajudicial killings” across the country that the Obama administration, the United Nations and human rights activists have openly condemned. The clash of Mr. Duterte’s hard-nosed tactics in the anti-drug campaign is one of the main irritants that has called into question one of Washington’s longest and strongest treaty relationships in East Asia.
But come to ground zero in Mr. Duterte’s drug war on the streets of Manila, and one can find a surprising number of local Filipinos who say their controversial and plainspoken president is totally justified.
The Filipino president even saw his domestic standing jump when he boasted recently that he personally gunned down suspected drug traffickers as mayor of provincial Davao City “to show the [police] that, if I can do it, why can’t you?” Mr. Duterte ran the southern city for over 20 years — interrupted by stints in the national legislature — before winning election to the presidency in June.
And Mr. Duterte has made clear he won’t be backing down despite the criticism he’s getting from abroad.
The Filipino president famously called President Obama the “son of a whore” and told him to “go to hell” for daring to raise questions about the anti-drug campaign. Mr. Duterte has simultaneously been seen as bent on shifting the Philippines toward an alliance with China — as if to send a message to Washington that Manila can always find new friends less concerned about extrajudicial killings and human rights.
A bipartisan move is also underway in the Senate, spearheaded by Republican Marco Rubio and Democrats Christopher A. Coons and Edward J. Markey, to scrutinize and perhaps cut off the $32 million the State Department sends annually to aid Philippine security forces in light of the “horrific violations of basic human rights” that have come with Mr. Duterte’s election.
The question now is whether incoming President-elect Donald Trump plans to shine a spotlight on the abuses or turn a blind eye in the hope Mr. Duterte might respond by tempering his recent flirtation with the Chinese. The two men have already exchanged pleasantries since Mr. Trump’s surprise win in November, with Mr. Duterte telling reporters in Manila, “I don’t want to fight [with Washington anymore] because Trump is there.”
The harsh drug crackdown in a key ally “will be a test for Trump on which is more important,” said Renato DeCastro, a U.S.-Philippines policy specialist at De La Salle University in Manila.
“Trump may well push any criticism of human rights abuses into the private sphere to try and appease Duterte and dissuade him from pivoting totally into the Chinese orbit,” said Mr. DeCastro, who spent recent months on a Fulbright fellowship in Washington. “The ball is going to be in the Trump administration’s court.”
Mr. Trump’s staff was tight-lipped after a December phone call with Mr. Duterte. But the Filipino president claimed Mr. Trump was “sensitive to our worry about drugs,” even reportedly telling the Filipino president that “we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way.”
For his part, Mr. Duterte vowed to press ahead in the new year, even as the number of deaths attributed to the crackdown on drug dealers has topped 6,000 just since his June inauguration.
“My promise to you [is to eradicate] corruption, illegal drugs,” he told voters in a Dec. 29 television interview on the state of his drug war. “I don’t have time to pretend to be nice,” he added.
Night watch
About two dozen Filipino and international journalists gather each evening in the parking lot of Manila Police District headquarters to wait for the carnage to begin in this city of some 13 million people.
The action started about 11:45 p.m. on a recent rain-soaked night, with the reporters piling into cars to speed after police, who had peeled out of the lot moments earlier to investigate a killing reported on Manila’s outskirts.
What followed was a chaotic scene in the slums of Caloocan City, where a black body bag holding the bullet-riddled corpse of a 20-year-old man was pulled from a ramshackle, two-story building.*
Blood glistened on a concrete floor inside, where residents stared wide-eyed at the reporters milling about. “Everybody is afraid,” said 59-year-old Yolanda Vinculado, a neighbor who fretted that the man just killed was “a friend of my youngest son.”
“I’m afraid because even if you say, ‘We are not doing drugs,’ you’ll never know if you’ll be a suspect,” Ms. Vinculado said. “We don’t know if one day it will happen to my son.”
Rain dripped off a rusted tin awning outside, where shocked onlookers said four masked men were seen entering the building about an hour before the pop, pop, pop of gunfire was heard.
But police later claimed what actually happened was an undercover “buy bust” operation gone wrong — that a plainclothes officer had entered to purchase crystal meth from a dealer before the dealer suddenly pulled a .38 caliber revolver. The officer then shot him in self-defense, authorities said.
Rights groups and investigative journalists said it had become a familiar narrative: the basic story the police use — and with little variation — to explain away the deaths of hundreds of suspected dealers in recent months.
Police records combined with local media accounts show more than 2,100 have been killed in police operations nationwide since July 1. A .38 revolver is almost always reported in the victim’s possession, and yet nearly none of the cases ever result in injury to the police.
An investigation by Reuters last month found “the suspects almost always die” because police are actually “proactively gunning [them] down.” Some 4,000 others have perished in unsolved vigilante-style killings, often by masked gunmen on motorbikes.
’You deserve to die’
The vast majority of the victims are “poor urban slum dwellers,” according to Human Rights Watch, which has repeatedly criticized Mr. Duterte’s government for advocating extrajudicial killings.
During his long tenure as mayor in Davao City, Mr. Duterte “was a vocal supporter of a death squad that perpetrated hundreds of extrajudicial killings of so-called undesirables, including children as young as 14,” the rights group has said.
While a heated political fight is now playing out in Manila over Mr. Duterte’s alleged involvement in the death squads, critics claim the 71-year-old leader is trying to nationalize the tactic as a way to shut down dissent during his presidency.
The goal, they say, is to show he has ultimate power over police and could — should he desire — impose a kind of martial law not seen in the Philippines since Ferdinand Marcos ruled the far-flung island nation with a dictatorial fist from 1965 into the 1980s.
“He’s conditioning the minds of the people by elevating the drug problem to a level that is so high that the killing of Filipinos is justifiable,” said Sen. Antonio Trillanes, a fierce Duterte critic in the Philippine national legislature.
“After achieving that, the propaganda machinery will set in to claim this was beneficial to the country, and therefore it must go on,” Mr. Trillanes said in an interview. “Then, should there be political dissidents, political opposition and media critics, likely, they will be the next targets. It’s a slippery slope.
“One thing is sure: It’s going to destroy the Philippine National Police as an institution,” Mr. Trillanes added. “Because he is actually asking them to do away with all the rules of engagement, due process, rule of law and respect for human rights, just so they can achieve their purpose of waging this war against drugs.”
Amnesty International disputes Mr. Duterte’s frequent claim that the Philippines is becoming a “narco-state,” despite “little evidence to show this is true.”
“The Philippines has a low prevalence rate of drug users, compared to the global average,” the group has said, citing U.N. statistics.
“Duterte keeps saying the number of users is about 4 million, but official statistics say there are only about 1.8 million,” said Ronnie D. Holmes, a political scientist at De La Salle University in Manila.
The president is aiming to create a narrative where “he’s stepping in to prevent the Philippines from becoming a failed state,” Mr. Holmes told The Times.
Whatever the international reaction, many Filipino voters appear to buy into that narrative — so far. A Pulse Asia Research poll in October found 86 percent of those surveyed say they trust their president. It’s easy to find people on the streets who support his drug crackdown — even if they are skittish about daily reports of extrajudicial killings.
“Duterte is good because he kills the drug pushers,” said Jericho, a 29-year-old from Manila. “I don’t agree with extrajudicial killing, because you don’t know if it’s a user, a pusher or just a poor kid,” he said. “If you do drugs, you deserve to die, I think.”
One small sign of the change Mr. Duterte has brought came earlier this week, when the government reported a “remarkable” decline in injuries to the crowds in Manila and other cities celebrating the new year. The reason: a sharp decline in the use of firecrackers and celebratory gunfire after the new president suggested he has considered a national ban on firecrackers as part of his war on drugs.
Bare-knuckle politics
Some wonder whether Mr. Duterte’s popularity may stem from growing public trepidation over consequences that might result from criticizing the president.
Mr. Holmes noted that the frequency of the drug war killings taking place already dwarfs what the country experienced under martial law during the 1970s.
“There is fear,” said Mr. Holmes. “People think, if we protest, would the protest be tolerated? You might be branded as someone who supports the drug pushers.”
He pointed to the case of Filipino Senator Leila de Lima, a former justice minister, who spent years investigating Mr. Duterte’s alleged connection to a “death squad” as mayor of Davao City.
Ms. de Lima attempted to lead a fresh probe into the allegations last year, bringing a self-proclaimed former hitman before the Senate to testify that Mr. Duterte had personally ordered about 1,000 gangland-style hits as mayor.
But the investigation stalled in September, when Duterte allies — including Sen. Manny Pacquiao, who’s known more for his boxing fame than his politics — moved to unseat Ms. de Lima from the chairmanship of the Senate Justice Committee.
The committee subsequently issued a report saying there was no credible evidence linking Mr. Duterte to any death squad activity and asserting there is “no proof” of any current “state-sponsored policy to commit killings to eradicate illegal drugs.”
Mr. Duterte himself has launched biting personal attacks against Ms. de Lima, charging that her investigation was somehow motivated by a sexual affair she’d once had with her driver — a man Mr. Duterte claims took money from drug lords.
Ms. de Lima calls that a smear campaign based on “lies.”
“I called him out on his role in the proliferation of summary executions of suspected criminals in Davao City,” she said in a statement. “He has to discredit human rights advocacy in the face of his policy of state-sponsored mass executions of civilians.
“Duterte’s drug war is not a war, it is a plain and simple massacre of civilians using none other than the police force and police officials as assassins on motorbikes and as gung-ho liquidators of unarmed suspects,” she added. “This is what happens when a sociopath takes over the reins of government in a major developing country of the world.”
* The initial version of this article incorrectly reported that an individual named Darwin Canete was killed in a shooting incident in Caloocan City, Philippines. Mr. Canete is a government prosecutor in Caloocan City.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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