Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: Life in the Shadow of the Philippines' Drug War

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

"They can just kill anyone."Since 2016, thousands have been killed in the Philippines' war on drugs. The bloody campaign began under the Philippines' last president, Rodrigo Duterte, who said he would be "happy to slaughter" three million drug addicts in the country. When current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office in 2022, he promised to end this spree of state-sanctioned killings of alleged drug users and sellers, and focus on rehabilitation instead.In today's episode of The Sunday Story, NPR's Emily Feng travels to the Philippines to see what has come of Marcos' attempt to burnish the country's international reputation and to put an end to what most people in the Philippines now refer to as EJKs, or "extrajudicial killings." She found that the killings have continued. And she spoke to researchers, doctors, advocates, and victims' families to try to understand why.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. More than 8,000 people have been killed in the Philippines since 2016 in the country's so-called War on Drugs. The war began under the Philippines' last president, Rodrigo Duterte. While in power, Duterte claimed that at least 3 million people in the Philippines were addicted to drugs. There's 3 million drug addicts. There are. And starting in 2016, he vowed to eliminate them. I'd be happy to slaughter them.

That year, 2016, and the following year, the killings reached their peak, with thousands dead. Bodies were sometimes left out for people to view as a warning. The International Criminal Court is now investigating Duterte's campaign. But Duterte is no longer in office. In the Philippines, presidents are only allowed to serve a single six-year term. And in 2022, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took over. He vowed to end the killing and restore the country's international reputation. The campaign against illegal drugs continues, but it has taken on a new face.

To understand more about what's happening now in the Philippines, I'm joined by NPR's Emily Fang. She recently returned from a reporting trip there. Hi, Emily. Hey, Aisha. It's been two years since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became president. How have things changed under Marcos? It has changed much less than I expected. The pattern of killing continues. Hundreds of people a year are still being murdered in their homes, on the streets, over any suspicion that they use or sell drugs. And in fact, last year, there were more people killed than during the final year of Duterte's presidency. And very few of these murders under either Duterte or Marcos have actually been successfully prosecuted. It's pretty striking to me the severity

of the punishment, especially because in the U.S., we have started to move away from punishing drug users as we learn more about addiction as a disease. I'm thinking about the opioid epidemic, for example. There's been an effort to avoid villainizing people who use drugs. Absolutely. And a lot of the people still being killed are only suspected of using or selling drugs. They're being killed without due process. So tell me more about drug use in the Philippines. Like how prevalent is it and what types of drugs are we talking about? So people are mostly using marijuana and this drug

called Shabu, which is a mix of methamphetamines and caffeine that's very popular. Former President Duterte recently upped his estimate and he says he thinks there are about 4 million drug addicts. But the Philippines Dangerous Drugs Board says the number of people using illegal drugs is actually far lower, closer to 1.7 million. I should mention that Duterte intentionally mixes the term addicts and user, and I think in his mind all users are addicts, but researchers on this typically focus on long-term drug use. Okay, so all it takes is an accusation that you've used or sold drugs and you could be killed. Why is that the reaction to drug use in the country? What do ordinary citizens think about drugs in the Philippines?

Social stigma around drug use is extremely high in the Philippines. This is a very Catholic country and the church does not condone drug use. So it's perceived as a plague on society and a root cause of poverty. And as a result, police are given a lot of latitude, especially under Duterte, to take matters into their own hands outside of courts, and in many cases, hiring vigilantes themselves to execute anyone they suspect of being a drug user or seller. Also, the killings are highly concentrated among the urban poor, so it's possible if you're living in the Philippines to never know about or hear about killings if you live in a middle-class area. And so I knew I needed to visit some of the neighborhoods that were most policed during Duterte's war on drugs and which

remain hotspots for death under Marcos, where most of what are called extrajudicial killings still happen. These killings that are still so commonplace, Filipinos have a shorthand for them. They call them EJKs. One of the first places I went to was Nuevo Liches. It's just north of Metro Manila, the capital region, and one of the most densely populated parts of the Philippines. Nuevo Liches is a bit of a down-on-its-lock neighborhood, full of twisty, steep alleyways which seriously flood during storms. I came here to meet a woman named Tin.

Tin is this wafer-thin young woman with big eyes staring out of a round face. When I meet her, she's balancing one of her children, a fussy baby on her hip. And what's your child's name here? Her name is Casitina Serioso. She's constantly caring for others. And until recently, that included her husband, Chris Mills Serioso. She often worried for his life, mainly because police in their neighborhood here operate with impunity. She says it's a fact of life here that the police mount drug bust operations. Nothing really changed under Marcos. In Duterte's time, the police were killing people. And she says under Marcos, if the police say you are doing drugs, they can also do whatever they want.

And Tin knew her husband could be a target because he sometimes used shabu. She says it took his mind off their financial troubles. Like many young men, he could not find a stable job. Last fall, she says a police officer shot dead an alleged drug seller who lived next to them. Tin pulled Serioso aside. She says she warned her husband to stop using. She said, look at this woman who was just killed. This could be you. Her husband had already narrowly avoided death.

In 2020, he turned himself in to police for drug rehabilitation, believing this vague promise from the Duterte administration that those who sought rehab would receive perpetual amnesty. Tin says he was scared he'd be gunned down like so many young men. Tin says Sirioso briefly quit Shabu for a few years. He wanted to stay alive for their two children. But she says the stress of trying to make do and raise a family in the slums caused him to occasionally turn to marijuana and more Shabu. Death was still waiting for the 29-year-old, and it struck last October. At 3 a.m., my husband went to a bar.

Chrismel Sirioso had been out late and then gone out drinking at a bar in the neighborhood. A police car pulled up. What I saw on CCTV was just commotion. Tin says CCTV cameras show her husband being dragged into a police jeep. An hour later, Sirioso was brought to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. She says the official cause of death was lack of blood due to two gunshot wounds. The initial police report said the cop had shot Sirioso because he'd been selling drugs, a charge his family denies. Yes, he sometimes used shabu. But Tin says just because you use drugs does not mean you deserve to die.

Sirioso is one of 342 people killed in drug-related operations in 2023 alone, entirely without due process. This statistic, it's not coming from the police or the Marcos administration, but from a small group of independent researchers. They've made it their mission to document the true toll of the drug war on Filipino society. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. Now, our change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change,

this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. In the Philippines, getting official data on drug killings isn't easy, but one group has made it a priority. NPR's Emily Fang picks up the story. So this is where we input the weekly killings. This past March, I went to the University of the Philippines in Manila and wound my way through the sunny campus

to a shady office tucked in the back of one of the buildings. Because I wanted to understand more about how we have these numbers about extrajudicial killings. And it turns out they have been meticulously documented by this small team of researchers here. I'm Joel Ariate. I'm a university researcher of the Third World Study Center. I met Ariate and his colleague Lara Del Mundo

just as they were about to release their weekly report on the latest state-sanctioned drug killings. The figures for those seven days alone that March was 11 people killed. Everything is double-checked by Del Mundo and based on police reports, media reports, and security cam footage. Some weeks are more difficult than the others. Some weeks are more violent than others. This week, you get to see, well, you're forced to see photos and videos of killings, so it's not easy to go through that on a bi-weekly basis. In April of this year, current President Marcos touted the new direction his crackdown on drugs

is taking, insisting that it is bloodless. But given what he sees each day, Joel Ariante does not buy it. It's utterly untrue under the Marcos administration. I mean, the average is from 0.8 to 0.9 killing a day, meaning one Filipino gets killed a day. And in the first quarter of 2024, we've counted 75 killings, and that's for 73 days. So there's even a bit of a surge there. Ariyate is a philosophy professor, and he kind of fell into this work as a volunteer and just found he could not stop even when it basically became a full-time job. Because we're the only one left counting, so might as well continue. And if you don't do it, no one knows the real scale of the problem? No, because I have some friends in the media and they tried asking data from the Philippine National Police.

Actually, we got into a bit of trouble with the police because we're issuing particular numbers and they're denying it. The Philippines police does release its own data on drug killings, but their figures are inconsistent and they're not released regularly. For example, for all of 2023, the police said about 47,000 people surrendered, were arrested, or died in drug operations, but did not break that figure down. They also did not respond to repeated requests for comment from NPR for this story. Even Ariante says his figures

are almost certainly an undercount. Another reason why it's hard to count is, while stories of killings are common, especially in poor neighborhoods, many of these killings go unreported. But they're well known within the community. I met with a man named Romeo Grutas. He's the neighborhood president of a community watch organization in a region called Bulacan on the northern outskirts of Manila. When I spoke to him, Grutas said just the week prior, he heard five people were killed. NPR confirmed the deaths with the families, but there are no media reports and no police reports of the deaths.

This is the kind of news that spreads through word of mouth, in large part because those who are killed are from these poor areas. Their lives are seen as dispensable. And also, in these areas, selling drugs is often the most reliable source of income. Because of lack of jobs, lack of employment, even the grandmothers are forced to sell drugs just to augment the economic. Grutas describes corruption and a reign of terror by police in Bulacan.

They are very afraid. So their house, they padlock their house. Grutas switches to Tagalog to say people are desensitized to all this death. When a killing happens, it's just an everyday tragedy.

People barely take notice anymore. When current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took over, he set to work trying to burnish the Philippines' international reputation and differentiate himself from his father, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. The elder Marcos was ousted as president after a decades-long reign marked by violence and massive corruption. His wife Imelda is famous for having over 3,000 pairs of designer shoes. Part of a vast collection of wealth, the Marcos family accrued before going into exile. Bongbong, as the current president is nicknamed, is painting himself as a progressive leader, especially in the war on drugs.

His office did not respond to a request for comment for the story. But President Marcos Jr. did hold a press conference this past April when the police had a huge drug bust. And he pointed out there that the police did so without killing anyone. Not one person died. Marcos Jr. also wants to focus more on drug rehabilitation, setting up more local treatment clinics to treat addicts, not kill them. This is a Sunday Story. Stay with us. Do you have outpatient cases today?

I paid a visit to this public rehab clinic in Manila, one of the most established clinics the state funds. At any given time, it might have two or three dozen inpatient cases, people brought in by their families or, more commonly, ordered by the court to serve part of their sentence here, rather than face potential death on the streets. The clinic offers addiction counseling and therapy, and as one patient told me, moral counseling and so-called social etiquette classes. Social etiquette means what I should, behavior that I should have, especially when I finish this program and I'm going outside the world,

and how I will interact with other people efficiently. So I must learn how to interact properly. We can't use his name because he is still a patient and protected by medical data laws. He says he was sent to the clinic after turning himself in. He said he was using LSD, cocaine, and marijuana and knew the police were tailing him already. First of all, I might be killed or I might be arrested. That's why I asked for help from my parents. I told them, Mom, Dad, I have a problem. The man's doctor is Dr. Jose Bienvenido. He runs this clinic and is at the forefront of the country's efforts to

mainstream drug rehab. But of course, the extrajudicial killings of the last eight years have made people fearful of coming forward. Social stigma will always be there. So we try to educate and teach people, let them learn that our drug users are victims and they're patients. It's a medical condition that we can help them through it. The stigma should not be there. It's going to take a while. It's going to be continuous. Dr. Bienvenido is cautiously hopeful at the turn in policy under Marcos, but says they need more support. In terms of drug rehabilitation centers, it's still the same. No additional funding has been given,

but we are lobbying for additional funds and infrastructure. And he needs more doctors. And when you produce them, you need to train them for specializations. Like in drug rehab, they have to be trained in addiction medicine. There's very few trainings. We have to go abroad for that. So rehab as a policy will take years to implement. And there's been a lack of judicial oversight. The number of court cases that successfully found a police officer

guilty of extrajudicial killings, or EJKs, is in the single digits. The Philippines left the International Criminal Court in 2019 after the court said it would investigate EJKs. Perhaps the biggest complication, however, is people here still support former President Duterte. Duterte and his daughter, Sarah, who was also a politician, remain highly influential in their base and Davao City in the southern Philippines. Yeah, I love him.

Even by drug users themselves. Like this other patient we met at the rehab clinic, a former scuba diving instructor caught last year for dealing large amounts of shabu. We're not naming him because of medical privacy laws as well. I feel, in my case, when my country is safe with him, I just feel good at him. I just feel he's real man. This is despite the fact that he says he's had friends shot dead for selling drugs

and he could have met the same fate. What about people who were killed under the war on drugs? Did you see that as an issue or feel unsafe because of that? Maybe... Sorry, I can say some of these mistakes is maybe it's a mistake, but it's a people's choice. They did that. As in, it's the victim's fault. They should have known the price of doing drugs was potential execution.

They already know. Our president already warned them. War on drugs he gave time he warned but it's people's choice they did still they do what they want so maybe that's

that's also get back and return I think, yeah. I also went to Novotas, a slum neighborhood outside Metro Manila that has had one of the highest concentrations of killings under Duterte. Along the sewage-clogged river in Novotas, residents show me where a 17-year-old boy named Jemboy Baltazar was shot to death by police last August, during the second year of Marcos's presidency. Jemboy had been with a friend,

cleaning his fishing boat that morning when he was shot by police. His uncle dragged the body out of the water. Jimboy's father, Jesse Baltazar, also ran over when he heard the news. He says he saw his son's body floating in the shallows of the river and cried to the police, I thought you said you'd only fired warning shots. Police later said they'd gotten intel his son was an accomplice to another crime, and possibly selling drugs, something a court later found not true. But Baltazar's sister Jessa says casting the victims of extrajudicial killings as drug sellers is pervasive and is used so law enforcement avoid prosecution. She says when Gemboy's body was in the river,

she saw someone connected to the police try to plant drugs on her brother's body. The Baltazars brought the police to court. Turns out the police had mistaken Gemboy for another guy. And Gemboy's case made national headlines when the five officers involved were fired, with one given an extremely rare sentence of four years in prison. That officer is appealing. Jemboy's family fear he may win his appeal. And they point out that there is still plenty wrong with the case. For example, that the same police unit who killed Jemboy also investigated the killing.

The Balthazar family and the case's star witnesses are now in hiding. They fear the same police officers who killed Jemboy will take revenge on them. I visited them at their hiding place. It's peaceful, by the ocean. Sonny Agustillo, Jemboy's childhood best friend who was in the boat with him when he was shot, is hiding here too. Just 20 years old, he says he does not know what his future holds. He says the police are like the gods of Novotas. They can just kill anyone. Jamboy's mother, Rhoda, says her only mission in life now is revenge.

She says she cannot accept that Jamboy's killing was a mistake by the police. My son was shot 10 times, she says. If it were a mistake, he would have been shot once. But he was shot 10 times by different officers. How can you call that a mistake? And the cycle of violence continues. Less than a month after her son's funeral, Gemboy's friend, 20-year-old Daniel Soraya, was shot dead by an unknown assailant. Daniel Soraya, another death, and this time an unsolved murder. We met his mother, Irina Soraya, another death, and this time an unsolved murder. We met his mother, Irina Soraya, the night before what would have been her son's 21st birthday. She looked so young herself.

Dyed blonde hair, flushed face, nervous hands. Soraya says, I could not believe my son was dead. It was like my world was ending. We were sitting next to the San Lorenzo Ruiz Parish Church, where several Catholic brothers and priests have set up a cooperative making votive candles to give the families of the dead some meaningful employment. Despondent that she may never get justice with law enforcement,

Soraya has instead turned to the Catholic Church for solace. As she tells us her story, the women around her cluck in sympathy while they shape votive candles. They're melting and shaping raw wax and cutting candle wicks. Every one of them has lost loved ones in the war against drugs. One of them, who everyone calls Mother Marianne, cannot are the same even though we've changed presidents. The culture is still the same, as is the culture of impunity in the police and the government.

It's the status quo. They did something right that other Filipino people don't know how to do. For us, it's hard. Soraya is silent. I don't think she has the energy to agree or disagree. She shuffles the bags of rice noodles with her, her son's favorite snacks. She had actually been on her way to his grave to wish him a happy birthday before she sat down with me. But she stays a bit, starting to make votive candles even though she's not yet officially part of the cooperative. The week before, she tells me she submitted her

application to join the circle of grieving women. The application is being processed. Candle making is a way for her to make some extra cash and to be around people who give her comfort because they've been through the same kind of pain. This is where she thinks she belongs now. there's so much grief there just really unimaginable as a mother to lose your child something that that sticks with me about this story's just the feeling of powerlessness that these family members feel about the safety of their loved ones, you know, whether they are drug users or sellers or not, because it could all be so arbitrary, like with Jim Boy.

Just a case of mistaken identity, right? Yeah. I mean, so zooming out for a moment, what, if anything, has international scrutiny in the wake of Duterte's presidency done for the victims and their families? There has not been much done. The International Criminal Court did open a probe on the war on drugs, but no one has been charged. Marcos is not cooperating with the court, and the Philippines is no longer part of the ICC, actually, despite the fact that more than half of Filipinos in a recent poll said they are in favor of the court's investigation. Meanwhile, Duterte and his daughter, Sarah, who was also a politician, remain highly influential from their base in Davao City.

This is in the Southern Philippines. And listen, compared to the dozens of people a day who were being killed in 2016, 2017, during the height of the killing, the numbers of EJKs now are lower. But three to 400 people are still being killed a year. And that's probably three to 400 people too many. What also struck me was that there isn't a culture of rehabilitation in the Philippines yet.

What they have instead is a culture of punishment. What are some of the challenges of shifting from punishment to rehabilitation. One of the challenges is this normalization of violence. People become desensitized to it. They become more willing to tolerate brutal policing policies because they think it may end this cycle of death and violence. But based on my reporting, I don't think it does. Well, Emily, thank you for bringing us this story. Thanks so much for having me, Aisha.

How did the current president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., come to power? Our friends over at ThruLine made an episode telling the story of the Marcos family, one of the Philippines' most infamous political families, and how they rewrote history to come back to power in 2022, despite being overthrown decades ago. It's about how melodrama and nostalgia can create a myth capable of resurrecting a dynasty. And it's got a lot to say about the dangers democracies around the world are facing. You don't want to miss it. Listen to ThruLine wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Thanks to Marjorie Rosas and Ashley Westerman. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. The Sunday Story team also includes Abby Wendell and Andrew Mambo. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.