Fifty-five days into his 2,190-day presidency, Rodrigo Roa Duterte has delivered—at least on his vow to launch an anti-drugs war.
“Our deal is stop corruption, drugs, corruption, and criminality,” he tells his countrymen. To achieve that, he stakes three things—“my honor, my life, presidency.” “I was never born to protect evil,” he says. “I grew up and was taught by my parents to be on the side of fairness, to protect the good, and to take care of our country.”
With savage fury, President Digong has cracked down on illegal drugs and drug-related criminality. “It will be bloody,” he said before the election which he won with more votes (16.4 million) than any other Philippine president before him and with 6 million more votes than the poor second placer.
Indeed, the narcotics campaign has been bloody—712 killed by the police and 1,067 by vigilantes, or a total of 1,779, from July 1, 2016 to August 22. At least 33 people are killed daily in the government’s anti-drug war. Those are figures of Duterte’s own hatchetman, police general “Bato” dela Rosa, the chief of the Philippine National Police which is at the forefront of the anti-drugs war, which has made the President such a controversial global figure.
At the rate of 33 killings per day, more people will be killed on average per year (12,200) than the yearly average deaths in 47 years of the communist insurgency or in 44 years of the Moro separatist war. Which may explain why Duterte himself has put a timeline to the bloody campaign—three to six months. Otherwise, there is a Reign of Terror as Kit Tatad has observed, or gross human rights violations as the United Nations has warned. Still, don’t bet on Duterte stopping at 12,000 or even at double that. Before his election, the President vowed to drown as many as 100,000 drug lords or drug users in Manila Bay. So 100,000 looks like a working target. Duterte has warned the UN and the United States not to interfere in the Philippines’ sovereign right to deal with its drug problem. The UN in the particular, he sneers, has not solved the hunger problem nor helped stop the war in the Middle East. “I don’t give a shit to them!”
There are 3.7 million drug users, the President reckons. He is probably right. In just two months, more than 600,000 have surrendered and admitted to using or dealing drugs. Duterte says the government has no money “to buy [or provide] beds, blankets, pillows, water, buildings, doctors, and nurses” for them. Which implies that eliminating them is the most expedient and efficient way to deal with them.
If the President proceeds with his 100,000 target, one in every six of those who surrender will die a violent death.
Duterte says after a year on drugs, an addict would have had a damaged brain. “Shabu for six months almost every day would shrink the brain of a person,” he analyzes. “They are living, walking dead.”
In Duterte’s view, addicts behave like an animal or a criminal. As such, they should be neutralized with extreme prejudice. With the stunning success of the anti-drugs war, criminality, or petty criminality, has been halved. According to Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada, as high as 70 percent of crimes are drug-related.
The drug problem has become a pandemic, Duterte bristles. In one town in a province in Southern Luzon, he volunteers, as many as 100 policemen are involved in drugs. “So what am I supposed to do as President? Empower the military and the police. For after all, they are there to protect the integrity and protect the people of the Philippines.”
On another front, Duterte seems earnest in cutting red tape and curbing corruption in government. He has been aghast to find a government so corrupt, so incompetent, and so inefficient under BS Aquino. On early Sunday, August 21, he asked everyone appointed by the president to consider their positions vacant. They have been fired, because of lingering corruption in various government agencies, especially in the provinces.
It is the largest mass firing of presidential appointees since Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law in 1972.
Incidentally, why is the Supreme Court going to decide whether Marcos, who died in 1989, should be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani or not. The law says soldiers and former presidents can be buried at the Libingan. Marcos was a soldier and the country’s longest-serving president. “It’s the law,” says Duterte.
Duterte’s decisions in his first 55 days have been drastic and draconian. They risk making him a pariah before the international community. The President doesn’t care.
He likes Abraham Lincoln, his idol as far back as when he was a law student at San Beda. On his copy of his Revised Penal Code, the then law student Duterte copied in his handwriting this famous quote:
“If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what’s said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
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