Today, Explained - The president's hit list

Episode Date: September 12, 2019

“I’d be happy to slaughter them,” President Rodrigo Duterte said about three million drug users in the Philippines. It appears he is following through. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In June of 2017, there were these two friends who had grown up together in a shanty town in Manila, in the Philippines. They had known each other almost since childhood. You know, they played basketball together. They hung out. Now they were in their 30s. And both of them had been entangled in the drug trade. So that night, there was a power failure, and both of them couldn't sleep. So close to midnight, one of them, Manuel Borbeck, walks over to the house of his friend, Jefferson Soriano, and says, come let's talk. And as they

were sipping their coffee, a car passes by and its headlights illuminate the other street corner where there were two men wearing balaclavas, face masks, and dark jackets. So Jefferson told his friend, bro, cops, he said, because he knows cops. He'd had run-ins with him most of his life. He thought they were cops because they were tall, well-built, and they held their arms, he told me, you know, like sort of to their sides, like very close to their waist, like they had guns in their waist. When he turned again to his friend, one of the men had shot his friend and his friend

fell over. Manuel Borbrio was on the pavement. So Jefferson ran, but what he didn't know was that there were other shooters in the nearby street corner and they shot at him. He was hit in the neck and in the leg. So he fell face down on the street and pretended to be dead because he feared they would come back to shoot him.

By then, you know, he was in and out of consciousness and he was gagging on his own blood because he had been shot in the neck. The gunshots, of course, wakened the neighbors. People started looking at what happened, and no one dared to help because they were afraid that the gunmen were still around. They were afraid, you know, who the gunmen were. And the ambulance driver, who was, you who was an ambulance hired by the local council, refused to take him to the hospital

because he too was afraid. The police investigated the crime scene. There was a police report. So this was not something secret. And yet, this killing was never counted by the police as a drug-related killing. It was simply a homicide under investigation, one of 30,000 since the drug war began. Sheila Coronel is the director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School.

In 2016, when he had just been elected president, Rodrigo Duterte declared a war on drugs. And even before he was formally sworn into office, alleged drug users and drug dealers were being shot in the streets in Manila, usually very late at night, both by the police or by unidentified assailants. She's been asking one question about the president of the Philippines. I wanted to find out how many people had been killed. And as you can imagine, It was not easy. She told me how one goes about looking into a president's hit list.

We started out looking at police documents. And I went to different journalists who'd been covering the drug war killings and asked them for their records. Then she literally hit the streets. I started going street by street and started looking for the victims and then started collecting information from parishes because the dead had to be buried and the churches kept quite detailed files about everybody they had helped.

And we put all of that together. In the end, she published a bombshell. We found that the police were not only not recording many killings, but that they were not acknowledging that these killings were drug war related. They were deliberately understating the number of people killed as a result of the president's war on drugs. Do you have any idea, after conducting this investigation, how many people have been killed as a result of the president's war on drugs?

We couldn't say for the entire country. We limited our data gathering to just three municipal areas in Metro Manila. Metro Manila is a big city. It has 13 million people. We chose the biggest cities where most of the killings were taking place. And our estimate is that the real count is about three times more than what the police say. We just looked at the first 18 months of the drug war in just three cities. We recorded 2,320. The police say there were about just over 900. We worked with a human rights statistician, Patrick Ball, who looked at our data. And by analyzing both the gaps and the overlaps in the

data, he was able to build a probability model that said the actual number of deaths is close to 3,000. The police say it's about 965. So the police are seriously understating these numbers. How many of these killings are done by cops? A good number of them are killed by the police. There are two types of killings. There are those who died from police operations. Usually these are sting operations. And the suspects are killed allegedly because they fired at the police first. So the police say they fired in self-defense.

There are thousands of those. The rest of the killings are killings by, you know, like the story of Manuel Borbe and Jefferson Soriano. These are by masked gunmen. And we don't know who they are. Human rights groups say they are off-duty policemen or contract killers hired by the police. The police say, no, these gunmen are members of drug syndicates and they are killing these people because they may inform them or that they are members of rival syndicates. Do you buy that argument? Not really, because drug dealing in the Philippines has never really been violent until now. The Philippines is not like Central America where you have armed gangs that sell drugs and have high-powered

rifles. Drug-related killings in the past have never been, you know, at this magnitude. It's possible some of those killings are by drug syndicates themselves, but I think those do not account for the vast majority of the killings. Is there any hard evidence that these masked killers are connected to the police? There have been some interviews by human rights groups and by other journalists where these so-called vigilantes admit that they have been paid by the police. Amnesty International released a report more than a year ago where they interviewed a couple of these contract killers

and this killer said that they had been paid, you know, sometimes as little as $200 for every drug user that they killed, and that the price was higher if it's a drug dealer. What is the drug situation like in the Philippines? Is it pervasive? What drugs are people doing? Is it a widespread problem? Drugs were not really a big problem in the Philippines until around the early 80s when crystal meth that was smuggled in from China started streaming into the country. The Philippines is a call center hub, so it is said

that many people, in order to stay awake, because they work through the night, they use crystal meth like others would use Red Bull. There were grocery baggers, there were taxi drivers, pedicab drivers, you know, the small three-wheelers that wound around the streets of Manila. But if you look at the UN numbers, meth use in the Philippines is actually lower than it is in Thailand or the U.S. It is a problem, but it's not that big a problem. How do you go from having not that big a problem to having unarmed young men in their pajamas being shot in the streets?

Duterte started talking about drugs and crime. Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. Now, there is 3 million, there's 3 million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them. Even before Duterte came, the usual conception was that drug users steal so that they could support their habits. But what Duterte did very successfully was to frame drugs as an existential threat, the root of all crime. These drug dealers know fully well that their business is against the law. They know that illegal drugs waste away lives,

dysfunctionalize families, and ruin relationships. They know that once hooked, addicts will die slowly, slow deaths, and yet they persist in doing what they do, oblivious to the terrible

harm that they cause to the people and communities. Before Duterte came, the opinion polls showed that most people thought their main problems were jobs and livelihood. After Duterte, drugs and crime was top of the list of people's concerns. So by constantly hyping and playing on pre-existing fears, Duterte came to power. I will save you, is basically what he said. I will make sure your children can walk the streets and that they will not become drug addicts themselves. And that resonated. Up next, this president who's killing people in the streets,

he's doing it with an 80% approval rating. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. Today Explained. To be continued... know who to talk to, what to say, when exactly to say it, and the best channel to deliver the message? MailChimp can feel your pain. They have an all-in-one marketing platform that they want to offer you as a solution. It's going to help you grow your business. How, you might ask? Their all-in-one marketing platform eliminates the need for multiple tools by giving you everything you need to create, publish, manage, and measure multi-channel campaigns. Their all-in-one marketing platform is powered by a marketing CRM

so you can collect, organize, understand, and act on all your audience data. Their all-in-one marketing platform has everything you need to start marketing your business today. Let MailChimp help you market smarter, y'all. Learn more at MailChimp.com. Sheila, I think a lot of people hear bits and pieces about Rodrigo Duterte, but could you tell us where he came from? Where did he get his start in politics? Where was he born? Duterte comes from a city in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. That city is called Davao.

And he was a public prosecutor there. And in 1986, after Marcos fell and all the local officials were changed, he was named the acting vice mayor of Davao City. And for those who don't know, Marcos was kind of a big deal, yeah? Ferdinand Marcos was the Philippine dictator. He was ousted from power in 1986. There is a mutiny, military and civilian, against President Marcos and his government.

The defense minister of the Philippines and the second-in-command of the army are holed up in a fort surrounded by friendly troops demanding that Marcos resign. And, you know, after Marcos fell, second in command of the army, are holed up in a fort surrounded by friendly troops demanding that Marcos resign. And after Marcos fell, the Americans were very concerned about the strength of the communist insurgency. And so part of what they did was that they funded this counterinsurgency operation that was composed largely of vigilantes. These are civilians, these are anti-communist vigilantes

who took it upon themselves to run after the communists themselves and supported the Philippine military's efforts in reining in the insurgency. I was actually there in Davao City at that time and I saw these bands of men, you know, carrying long knives and guns, walking down the streets looking for suspected communists. And so there were these two armies battling each other in Davao, the communists and the the vigilantes and the Philippine military. And Duterte became vice mayor at that point.

And he takes credit for restoring peace and order in Davao. And he is remembered for that and appreciated for that. And it was on the basis of the Davao model that he became president. He basically told Filipinos, you know, I made Davao the ninth safest city in the world and I will do that for the country. And how did he make Davao so safe? There was the Davao Death Squad,

composed of thugs, former communist rebels, former paramilitary troopers, and they were allegedly paid by the Davao City Hall and by the Davao mayor. Duterte has denied sometimes that he's the father of the death squad. Sometimes he jokes that he's with the death squad. But it's generally believed in Davao and the rest of the country that he had something to do with the death squad. He just kills the criminals. He kills criminals, yes.

I killed about three of them because there were three of them. I didn't really know how many bullets from my gun went inside their bodies, but it happened. And I said, I cannot lie about it. And so when exactly does he become president? 2016, exactly 30 years after the fall of Marcos, at a time when Filipinos were getting tired of democratic politics. The Philippines woke up to a vastly different political landscape this morning after the all but certain victory of a brash, outspoken mayor in the presidential election.

Politics was corrupt. The same families that had ruled the country for many years were remained in power and in fact were more deeply entrenched in power. And so the country was very ripe for a populist disruption. Mr Duterte was viewed as a wildcard candidate who would at best bring some colour into the poll. But his pledge to kill criminals and to end crime and corruption had nationwide appeal. He sort of ran a rather insurgent campaign. He didn't have much money at the start. He had a sort of dark charisma. He cursed a lot. He threatened a lot. His language was often violent and crass. And that resonated among a lot of Filipinos because he seemed authentic.

And he exuded sort of hyper-masculine authority, a little bit like Vladimir Putin. He would be photographed in his Czech shirts and aviator sunglasses. He had photos of himself, you know, slinging guns. He would be in target practice. And he would tell stories about shooting people, including how he shot a classmate during his senior year of law school because that classmate made fun of his provincial accent.

Yikes. Yes, and he started that story with, I am used to shooting people. And, and he started that story with, I am used to shooting people. And you can construe that as a joke or a fact or a threat, but it was very effective. What has he done as president other than have this drug war? You know, his main constituency are the aspiring middle class in the Philippines. These are, you know, the families of

overseas workers, call center workers who work till late at night and so also worry about their safety and they aspire to a better life. And so Duterte has appealed to them because he talks about things that they like, you know, safety on the streets, traffic, better urban amenities. And Duterte is a mayor. That's the stuff he knows. And so he says, I will fix the traffic. I will make you safer on the streets. I will give you better quality of life. Like, you know, he's given free Wi-Fi in public places. He's given free college education in state-funded schools and colleges and universities. So that has played well. How popular is he? 80% popularity, according to the latest survey. Wow. You talk about his brash attitude, his masculine persona, and it's easy to compare him to people like Trump or Putin. But you talk about

free college and free Wi-Fi and he sounds like a different kind of guy. Is he a populist leader who actually delivers? I mean, he hasn't delivered on all of his promises, but he's delivered some. It was the same thing that he did in Davao. You know, he cleaned up the streets. He provided infrastructure. He did a very successful 911 emergency line thing. He even provided shelters for abused women. I would say he's like a withholding patriarch. I will take care of you if you obey the rules, if you don't smoke in public, if you obey the traffic lights, if you behave.

What if you don't follow his rules? What if you speak up? Well, the count is that 1,400 petty criminals were killed in Davao during his mayoralty. The military certainly has gone after communists who've now become critical of his rule. A number of human rights lawyers and priests have been gunned down by masked assailants. So it's not clear who killed them, but it's clear that they did speak out against the president. And Filipinos still like him. Well, you have to understand how broken the country has become. Even policemen feel this. They say that we jail a drug dealer, the drug dealer calls up his politician friends,

and then we have to set him free. Something drastic has to be done. And that is a popular perception. People feel that extreme measures, you know, they support the kind of vigilante justice that Duterte represents because the justice system is so broken. So we should also understand it from the other point of view, is that this is a broken society. And there is this man who says, I will take care of it. And this is the price that we will have to pay. And people think, well, let's give it a try and see whether it works. And the 80% of Filipinos who support Duterte, do they know about all these killings? Duterte himself has said that when he becomes president, the fish in Manila Bay will grow fat with the carcasses of criminals.

So they know. For as long as there are drug pushers in the streets in my country, for as long as there are drug pushers in the streets in my country, for as long as there are drug lords, this campaign will go on until the last day of my term. And until all of them are killed. The photographs of the dead are on the news. There have been accounts there. But most Filipinos would I think rather look away

just as they did in Davao It would be better to kill drug suspects or persons who are generally involved with drugs rather than seeing civilians or innocent people getting killed He's part of a global populist moment I must say In the Philippines, there is an othering or demonizing of drug dealers. In other countries, it's migrants, whether they're legal

or not. And people have looked away, just as they have done here when migrant children are separated from their parents. They put their hands to their ears so that they will not have to listen to the cries of the children that have lost their parents because of this immigration policy. So we've seen it elsewhere. Do you think he's changing the Philippines or changing the nature of Filipino democracy? I'm worried about institutions such as the police,

where abuses of the kind that we've seen in the drug war have become routine and go unpunished. I'm worried about his hold on the justice system. He will have the majority in the Supreme Court. I'm worried about Congress, whose independence has really been damaged. There is no re-election in the Philippines. He will be out of office in three years. So it's really more the integrity

and further deterioration of our institutions I'm worried about. I don't know how permanent, whether this kind of vigilantism will survive in the long run. I hope we will learn our lesson from this. And part of the reason why we are documenting all of these killings is to say, you know, the safety has a cost. There is a price. We have to come to terms with this. We cannot just bury all of these deaths and forget about them. At some point, we would have to account for them and acknowledge them. And I think that time will come. Sheila Coronel teaches at Columbia's School of Journalism.

The piece she wrote about this story is called The Uncounted Dead of Duterte's Drug War. You can find it over at The Atlantic. Thanks to MailChimp for supporting the show today. One last reminder that MailChimp has an all-in-one marketing platform that allows you to manage more of your marketing activities from one place so you can market smarter and grow faster. You'll know who to talk to, what to say, when to say it, and the best channel to deliver the message.

What a dream. Learn more at MailChimp.com.