Rodrigo Duterte is living up to his promise to fight crime by shooting first and asking questions later
THE Philippines’ kill-list of suspected drug-pushers shot by the police or unknown gunmen gets longer by the day. By one count more than 600 people have died since Rodrigo Duterte was elected president on May 9th; another puts the total at nearly 1,000. Inaugurated on June 30th, Mr Duterte has taken to naming senior officials publicly as suspected narcos: generals, policemen and judges have been told to resign and submit to investigation. Or else? The kill list speaks for itself.
Mr Duterte is unabashed at international criticism, boasting that he does not care about human rights or due process. He was elected on a promise to eradicate crime, even by killing 100,000 gangsters and dumping their bodies in Manila Bay. More worrying still is that the bloodletting is popular with Filipinos, many of whose lives are blighted by poverty and crime.
That satisfaction will not last. Wholesale extrajudicial killing is no solution to the Philippines’ many problems. Instead, it will lead only to more misery.
From Davao with bullets
Mr Duterte has been schooled in the violent politics of Mindanao, the southern and most lawless large island of the archipelago. A region historically influenced by Islam and progressively settled by Christians, Mindanao still has the feel of a restless frontier. It has been plagued by both communist and Muslim insurgencies, now more or less quiescent apart from splinter groups affiliated to al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Assassinations and death squads have been endemic. Davao City, of which Mr Duterte was mayor for 22 years, has been a byword for violent crime.
Mr Duterte claims to have cleaned up Davao by being the baddest man in town. But his tenure is hardly the success he claims it to be: crime rates are high and the city is still the country’s murder capital. Now he is bringing the methods of Davao to Manila (see article). That so many should find this appealing speaks volumes about how far Filipino institutions have rotted, under both the dictatorship of the late Ferdinand Marcos and successive democratically elected presidents.
A guide to the Philippines, in charts
Mr Duterte would have the world believe that the Philippines’ corrupt and ineffective police have suddenly become omniscient—able to tell innocence from guilt and decide who may live and who should die. When he menacingly read out the names of more than 150 officials deemed connected to the drug trade, at least two of those whom he fingered were already dead. It would be comical were the consequences not so horrifying. One recent picture shows a distraught woman cradling her husband lying dead next to a sign, pusher ako (“I am a drug pusher”)—a tropical version of Michelangelo’s “Pietà”.
Right now Mr Duterte seems beyond restraint. When the chief justice demanded proper arrest warrants, Mr Duterte threatened to impose martial law. And when the American ambassador expressed misgivings, Mr Duterte labelled him bakla, a pansy. But Filipinos and their foreign friends must keep exerting pressure on him.
The lesson of the drug wars in Latin America, and of previous dirty wars, is that extrajudicial violence resolves nothing and makes everything worse. Innocent people will be killed; and denunciations will also be used to settle scores and exploited by gangs to wipe out rivals. Filipinos’ desire for instant retribution will, surely, turn to horror, hatred and revenge. The rule of law will erode. Investors, who have made the Philippines one of globalisation’s winners in recent years, will flee. The only winners will be the still-lurking insurgents. Mr Duterte’s ill-conceived war on drugs will make the Philippines poorer and more violent.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "A harvest of lead"
