Death comes to all in Manila’s war on drugs

President Rodrigo Duterte’s promise to clean up the streets has led to nightly killings by police and vigilantes.

Two months ago, Jeremiah Magno gave himself up to the neighbourhood captain of his south Manila shanty town as a user of the ubiquitous street drug shabu — a gesture he was convinced to make for his own ­safety.

If not for yourself, do it for your three-year-old daughter Natalie, his oldest brother John Paul begged him, so that we never have to scrape you off the pavement — another statistic in The Philippines’ deadly war on drugs. Bodies of alleged drug pushers and addicts, some with hands tied behind their backs, others with their faces tightly wound in packing tape, were ­already turning up nightly as newly inaugurated President Rodrigo Duterte began making good on his election promise to clean up the streets.

Yesterday Duterte raised the rhetoric on his anti-drugs war even higher, comparing it to Hitler and the Holocaust, and saying he would be “happy to slaughter” three million addicts.

Jeremiah’s family believed that by surrendering to authorities, as 700,000 other drug users and dealers have done since June 30 when Duterte took office, he would be safe from the nightly killings by police and vigilantes that at last count have claimed some 3400 lives. Instead it made him an easy target. On Tuesday morning, the devoted single father lay outside his home in a slow-spreading pool of his own blood, a few metres from the thin wall that separated his sleeping daughter from his bullet-ridden body.

A four-hour drive away in ­Dagupan City, recently noted for having one of the largest groups of what Filipinos are now calling “surrenderers”, another family is in mourning. They too had a surrenderer in the family. Maximo Garcia, a 53-year-old ailing tricycle rickshaw driver, had turned so fiercely against drugs in recent months he had voted for Duterte on the basis of his promised crackdown. But Garcia was forced to give himself up to his barangay (neighbourhood) captain on ­August 19 after his wife Gemma was told he was on a watch-list of alleged “drug personalities”.

Like Magno, he signed an affidavit confirming his past drug use and undertaking never to take or sell drugs again. Three days later, when two gunmen on a motorbike opened fire as the couple sat with their grandchildren in their bamboo hut, it wasn’t Maximo who died, but his five-year-old granddaughter, Danica Mae.

Duterte’s brutal drugs crackdown

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The girl, who just weeks earlier had graduated from kindergarten wearing a pink mortarboard, was bathing behind a tarp in preparation for school. She died instantly when a bullet intended for her grandfather hit her in the face.

No one knows who is killing the surrenderers. Police chief Ronald de la Rosa says it is drug syndicates, fearful that those who have surrendered will give up their dealers and suppliers.

A Dagupan source with close knowledge of the deaths in his city says there is “no spontaneity” to the surrenderer deaths of recent weeks. “They are systematic per neighbourhood,” he says.

Of the 20 men named on the same police watch-list as Garcia, one is dead and the rest are in hiding, including Garcia, who is inconsolable over Danica’s death, says Gemma.“If my granddaughter had not been killed, the assassins would have targeted more people on the list,” Gemma adds.

Duterte told supporters on the campaign trail last April: “All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you.”

After his inauguration on June 30 he told an audience in a Manila slum: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.”

The message has played well with millions of Filipinos tired of feeling insecure in the face of an undeniable drug problem, crime, rampant corruption and chronic poverty. In polls last July Duterte registered a 91 per cent approval rate, though polls due this month will show whether he has maintained that popularity.

Surrender or die has been the consistent message to drug users and pushers in the months since the former Davao city mayor, known as The Punisher, came to office. But across the country the mass voluntary surrenders that occurred in the early weeks of the war on drugs have dried up.

In their place are regular police operations — known as Oplan Tokhang (Operation Knock and Surrender) — in which police sweep predominantly poor neighbourhoods knocking on doors and demanding residents give up any drug users or sellers inside.

“People in these communities now feel very vulnerable that police could ram through their door and shoot any one of them,” says Antonio Trillanes, a senator and outspoken critic of Duterte who ran unsuccessfully for vice-president this year. Trillanes says police must now prove they are making progress in the war on drugs. “We have heard police are under pressure to meet quotas,” he says. “These surrenderees give up their names, their faces, their ­addresses and that makes them targets.”

Senior police officers have told him “they are being pushed into producing dead bodies”. Last month the chief inspector of ­Manila’s Malate district admitted his precinct was in trouble for having failed to kill any drug pushers.

Inspector Paulito Sabulao told US National Public Radio: “My ­colonel was under pressure from his bosses and asked me why we haven’t killed anybody. He told me to start killing people who were known drug personalities. But I told him I didn’t want to make any mistakes. I need to make sure that these people are really criminals.”

Trillanes says that culture of impunity is forcing out good police and destroying the institution. “Once they embrace this culture of impunity and summary executions at some point it will become arbitrary and we won’t be able to control it anymore,” he says.

Human rights lawyer Jose Manuel Diokno says he too fears Duterte’s methods are permanently eroding an already weak justice system. His Free Legal ­Assistance Group (FLAG) hopes to challenge Duterte’s methods but has so far failed to convince a single family of a war-on-drugs victim to file a case. “People don’t want to put their families at risk,” he says. “We want to question the existing practices but without live clients we can’t do much.”

FLAG is also seeking details on how the government is compiling its watch-lists on “drug personalities”. “We have been given ­information that some people are on the list because others are jealous of them, others because they were not in the same political alignment as local officials,” Dio­kno says. “If your name is on the list the burden is on you to clear your name. It’s so easy to accuse and so hard to defend yourself. There’s definitely pressure being put on officers in the field to come up with results.”

This week the Duterte administration chose Quezon City, the most populous area in metro ­Manila, to launch its drive to recruit communities and neighbourhood authorities in the reporting and rehabilitation of drug addicts.

Its vice-mayor, Joy Belmonte, says her city was better prepared than most for Duterte’s crackdown, having implemented its own anti-drug campaign. Yet it too has been overwhelmed by the number of people cramming ­already overflowing jails and treatment centres. Quezon City has its own drug rehabilitation clinic — one of fewer than 50 ­government-­accredited centres around the country. It has counsellors and mandatory drug testing for government employees, from the mayor to the barangay captains and tanods, the deputised neighbourhood watchmen who have assumed inflated powers since Operation Knock and Surrender.

Barangay captains and tanods nationwide are now helping collate watch-lists. The same tanods are also policing and drug testing those who surrender. They are key to the Duterte administration’s community anti-drug drive. Yet in Quezon City at least, tanods have been testing positive for drugs in large numbers. “A lot of those who turned out testing positive, at least at the village level, were the tanods,” Belmonte says. “That was pretty shocking.”

The city has 8000 surrenderees and the list is growing. Everyone who surrenders is supposed to join a program, says Belmonte, though until recently no one was clear what the program was.

In Quezon City those who surrender are now being “profiled” at the barangay level and then ­assessed by accredited physicians for whether they should be treated as outpatients or in institutional care. The city only has 10 accredited psychologists to evaluate the needs of 8000 surrendered.

At its 150-bed drug rehabilitation centre, Alvin Vergares says there is another 300-bed facility ready to go, if only it could find enough accredited physicians to staff it. Right now there are about 100 physicians across The Philippines accredited to evaluate 700,000 people who have surrendered, he says.

Meanwhile addicts are turning up at the centre, desperate to be admitted. “People openly say they are scared,” Vergares says. “Those I’ve spoken to who were apprehended by the Philippines Drug Enforcement Agency say they ­believe they would not still be alive if it had been the police. They have a bargain with the PDEA — they will voluntarily go into treatment and a case will not be filed so they don’t end up on a police list.”

The lucky ones end up in rehab, the less lucky in a wretched and overcrowded prison.

Last month the population at Quezon City jail peaked at 4052. It has a maximum capacity of 800. Almost two-thirds of the prison population is there on drug charges. Its own community relations officer pulls no punches. “We are supposed to have one officer for every seven inmates but right now I guess we have one personnel to 200 inmates,” says Lucy Abarca.

At night prisoners occupy every available space — the floors, the stairs and the open courtyard. There is no visitors’ room. Female visitors must sit among the prisoners. Abarca says the jail has seen a sharp increase in new inmates since Duterte was elected. Inmates now closely follow the rising death toll from the war on drugs. “They’re frightened,” Abarca says. “Some say they feel safer in jail. I don’t know if that’s a joke or if they’re serious.”

Jeremiah Magno was not worried when he surrendered in July. “He was confident something better would come of it,” his mother Evelyn said this week.

He had not taken drugs since his surrender. Instead he threw himself into renovating the ground floor of the family’s two-storey shack and was on the verge of opening a shop there. All that was left to do was stock the shelves. By late Wednesday evening those shelves had been removed to make way for the 32-year-old’s glass-topped casket while his family maintained a four-day vigil under a marquee outside.

Magno’s daughter Natalie, dressed in pink with a Hello Kitty headband, played around the casket on which mourners had placed offerings — a glass of beer, a plate of fried chicken and rice, some money, a packet of Marlboros. Her father used to comb her hair and buy her trinkets, says Evelyn.

“She can’t sleep without her Daddy. This morning she kept saying ‘Is Papa coming over?’”

Magno’s girlfriend, the only mother Natalie knew after her own ran off while she was an infant, died of smallpox in the same house last January.

Occasionally Natalie asks to be lifted up to look at her father’s waxen face.

“Papa is dead,” she says guilelessly, betraying little understanding of what that means.

Magno had no memory of his own father. He was just two when he died, leaving Evelyn with four boys and another on the way.

His own daughter is destined to suffer the same fate, with the added trauma that no one will ­likely ever be punished for taking her father from her.

The family has decided not to press for an investigation.

“We are broke to the core. I do want justice but we can’t afford it,” John Paul says.

But even if they had the money to do so, they would not pursue it.

“We don’t want to file any case because the security of our family is at risk,” he admits.

“We don’t know who our ­enemies are, but they know us.”