In the months leading up to the 2016 elections, a then-officemate of mine said, “I’m voting for Duterte for president because he has promised to kill drug pushers and addicts.”
This same fellow agrees with Ferdinand Marcos’s atrocities against those who protested his dictatorial regime, saying the extreme measures were necessary to instill and maintain peace and order.
This is a soft-spoken, kindly man, whose home life is peaceful and harmonious. It was jarring to see the bloodthirst that lay lurking in his otherwise calm demeanor.
“Pero, kuya, mali ang pagpatay ng wala sa proseso. Imagine ninyo kung kayo iyan o anak niyo iyan na biglang dinampot na walang kasalanan!” I said. He shrugged and denied that could happen to him nor his family. No, he shook his head, the killings are necessary “para matakot ang mga masasamang loob.”
I could not fathom how he completely bypassed the part where I said that EJKs subvert due process and trample human rights. No matter how long we argued, we never got on the same wavelength and each conversation left me baffled and dismayed.
Now take this same scenario and multiply it by 16 million or so. That’s how many voted for Duterte with that same mindset. Even subtracting several million from that figure —those who’ve been disenchanted with his bloody style of governance over the past year—there are still a great many who condone and support this lawlessness that has taken over our country.
Why are Filipinos now so cruel to each other?
What is occurring is state-sanctioned dehumanization of a particular sector of society.
Dehumanization, as defined online, is “the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities.” To dehumanize is to demonize certain individuals, an out-group, or an enemy. It is to strip them of their humanity until in the common view they are no longer persons as such; this leads to violence, human rights violations, war crimes, genocide.
In the Philippines, the dehumanized are drug addicts and pushers, although it is never the big fish and the affluent who are targeted by the police. Only the poor small fry are slain in the streets, many of them supporters of Duterte.
Over time, as such attitudes and behavior are reinforced, they replace the old norms and become the new norms. People become desensitized to the killings taking place around them; they just walk a little faster under the streetlights, get home sooner than they used to, skip the nights out they used to enjoy, keep their children in the house.
The dehumanized are stripped of their rights—right to life, right to due process. Think of the Jews under the Nazi regime, the Tutsis under Hutu rule, the Rohingya in Myanmar. They are placed outside the bounds of morality and justice, treated as subhumans or like animals, stigmatized as incorrigibly evil and beyond redemption, such that death is the only way to deal with them.
The dehumanization of poor drug suspects can be traced back to Duterte’s chillingly consistent inflammatory rhetoric on the matter: “I’d be happy to slaughter” them, “Help me kill drug addicts,” “Let’s kills addicts everyday.” He has even vowed to protect policemen from the legal consequences of his illegal drug war.
It is from this point that the normalization of state-sanctioned murder began. EJKs are now commonplace. Because of this some policemen have changed the way they perform their jobs; funeral parlors have changed the way they do business; people have changed the way they live their lives.
What’s important to remember is that it was not like this before June 2016. There were random killings—“riding in tandem” was the crime en vogue—but blood was not spilled to this extent. Despite Duterte’s promises, the situation has gone from bad to worse.
If I could talk to my former office mate again, I’d say this: Kuya, what about the rule of law, human rights, compassion, mercy, and pity? What about treating all Filipinos, without exception, with respect? What if it is you or your family that becomes a victim of the drug war? What then?
Dr. Ortuoste is a California-based writer. FB: Jenny Ortuoste, Twitter: @jennyortuoste, IG: @jensdecember, @artuoste