[Philippine corruption] Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines #8/204

He built the campaign on the back of his reputation from the southern city of Davao, where he and his family had been running local politics for decades. As he became known for his crackdown on crime in Davao, which earned him the nickname of “the Punisher,” Duterte gained momentum. His strong message of law and order resonated with voters, and he ultimately won the election in a comfortable victory in May 2016. While the actual extent of the drug problem is a matter of debate, Duterte activated fear and anxiety among the population—Curato (2016) referred to this as a “latent anxiety”—through which he successfully inscribed a narrative about a drug crisis by highlighting drugs as the single most serious threat to society (Quimpo 2017).⁶

Immediately after Duterte assumed office, the chief of police signed a plan that put into action the war on drugs. The action plan was dubbed the “Double Barrel”; the first barrel was aimed at the high-level drug dealers and merchants and the second barrel was aimed at identifying and reforming drug addicts. This second barrel became known as Oplan Tokhang (literally, Operation Knock and Plead). In this effort, the police would make rounds in the communities to convince drug personalities to desist from drug use and reform through offers of rehabilitation. The police acted based on so-called watch lists, compiled by local authorities, information from the public, or drug addicts turning themselves in. While the lists formed part of a potentially benevolent and supportive intervention, the watch lists often turned into kill lists. Officially, the police and the government vehemently denied this. However, local policing agents were quite open about the connection between the lists and the killings. One asserted, “The really bad people here, the most bad ones [sic], they hurt people. I give the name to the police, then after a while, maybe two days …[they are] gone” (quoted in Warburg and Jensen 2020a, 10). He made a gesture with his hand across his throat, leaving little doubt as to what he meant. In the early phases of the war, many drug addicts turned themselves in, but as this came to be known locally as a “passport to death,” fewer risked following the advice of the police.

It has been notoriously difficult to establish the death toll in relation to the war on drugs. According to official statistics, the Philippine National Police recorded 27,928 killings between July 1, 2016, and July 31, 2018. Of these, 4,410 deaths occurred in “legitimate antidrug operations,” in which police shot people as they were resisting arrest or in self-defense. “Homicide cases under investigation” accounted for the remaining 23,518 deaths (Philippine National Police [PNP] 2018; Santos 2018). Few of our informants in Bagong Silang, at least, harbored any doubts about the involvement of the police and collaboration with vigilantes in some of the killings. Elsewhere (Warburg and Jensen 2020a), drawing on Erwin Goffman, we suggest that the police and the government made use of a representational front in which they acted inside the parameters of the law, not killing anyone without due process except for a few rogue elements and in cases of self-defense. A practical backstage in which the police acted with impunity complemented this representational front stage. The effect has not been to obscure the violent practices but rather to allow Duterte to escape legal responsibility while consolidating political power and support through his role as the “Punisher,” who single-handedly rid the Philippines of the drug scourge. Duterte and his chief of police had successfully employed the same strategy of oscillating between the front- and backstage in Davao when they claimed credit for more than a thousand deaths (on the backstage) while avoiding any legal responsibility (Altez and Caday 2017).

Besides the thousands of killings, the war has had dramatic effects on society, many of which we will explore through the focus on Bagong Silang in this book. For instance, the war has led to massively overcrowded detention facilities to the point where Philippine prisons in 2018 were the second most overcrowded prisons in the world, at 436 percent of capacity (McCarthy 2018). The justice system has been even more stretched as the number of prisoners awaiting trial increased twenty-two percent in the first year of Duterte’s government (VOA News 2017). Opportunities for corruption within the police have also accompanied the many killings and turned the war into a “murder enterprise” (Coronel 2017). Finally, the war has radically reconfigured relations between state officials and residents and between residents in Bagong Silang as well as in the rest of the country (Warburg and Jensen 2020a). Despite these consequences, Filipinos have largely supported the war on drugs, also in places like Bagong Silang.