The Duterte administration’s war on drugs became famous shortly after its launch.
For all the wrong reasons, though. The campaign meant to eradicate the drug menace in the country—an objective with which nobody could disagree—soon degenerated into a notorious police operation that appeared to target the poor, encourage excessive force, disregard due process and pay no heed to the sanctity of life.
Local human rights groups, foreign governments, global media, representatives of international groups and quite belatedly, the church, slammed the campaign.
Since its launch during the second half of 2016, Operation Double Barrel—one of whose components is Project Tokhang —sent more than 7,000 people to their deaths. Those who perished were suspected drug users, pushers, lords, bystanders, family members and others referred to as “collateral damage.”
Tokhang, which literally means to knock and then to plead, was not even that at all. The plan was for cops to knock on doors of suspected drug users or pushers and invite them to join a rehabilitation program meant to restore them to good sense and reintegrate them into their families and society.
What actually happened, according to most accounts, was that poor communities were raided, and suspected drug users and pushers gunned down for supposedly fighting back and resisting arrest.
Even the jails were not safe, as was shown in case of a Leyte town mayor, a self-confessed drug lord, who was killed inside his cell in November. It took the case of a foreigner, however, a Korean businessman who was abducted from his home in Pampanga and killed inside the PNP headquarters in Camp Crame, to prompt the President to suspend the campaign. Shady activities and excesses committed by the police gave the drive a bad name, he said.
But now it’s back and the police are promising it would be different this time around. It would be the PNP Drug Enforcement Group that would take the lead, after the Anti-Illegal Drugs Group was dissolved in January.
How so?
There would be more personnel. There would be an in-house counter-intelligence unit. There will be satellite offices across the country, with people more knowledgeable in the work and without the baggage of cases on illegal drugs.
PNP-DEG’s Senior Superintendent Graciano Mijares also said they were focusing on their list of high-value targets for greater impact. HVTs are the other barrel that was supposed to complement Tokhang. They are financiers, manufacturers, distributors, traffickers and protectors.
For a while there was talk that church representatives would be invited to join the operations, perhaps to lend it legitimacy and uprightness. Thankfully the idea has been ignored.
However the police try to portray this second version of the anti-drugs campaign, it would live in the shadow of its predecessor. No amount of reassurance can ease the public’s worries that it might again be used as an excuse for the plain crimes of extortion and murder.
We will have to wait several months to see whether the administration has combated the evil of illegal drugs while steering clear of the greater evil of impunity and abuse of power. For now, the fear remains.
