“They are Slaughtering Us Like Animals” was the attention-grabbing headline of the New York Times’ graphic photo essay in 2016 which showed the world the terror and anguish felt by victims’ families horrified by Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war.
Shortly after his administration took power and unleashed what many viewed as a wave of extrajudicial killings (EJKs), one unsettling question loomed then: Why wasn’t there any collective uproar or massive protest against the bloodshed happening all around?
Why people seemed to have sunk to a point of having very low regard for human life can form an interesting study for sociologists. From a legal viewpoint, however, a logical reason was offered recently by Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile (JPE) who said that many of Duterte supporters saw the bloody drug war as “legitimate law enforcement policy.”
Such reason could provide answers to many questions arising from the lack of widespread indignation here amid the global attention the killings have gained in 2016. Have we lost our moral compass? Were people so desensitized and unable to feel petrified by violations of human rights and rule of law? And with the public desensitized, has Philippine society simply descended to barbarism?
During that period in 2016, the killings in major cities across the country quickly gained global attention with the persistent efforts of international media. Aside from the haunting photo essay of the New York Times, there was an investigative report of Reuters which analyzed 51 killings that revealed “police killed 97 percent of those they shot—33 dead for every person wounded.”
“The kill ratio is much higher than in countries with comparable drug-related violence,” Reuters explained, saying that violence in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, where police have also been accused of EJKs, “pales next to the Philippines under Duterte.” How so? In Rio, one person was injured for every five killed by police between 2013 and 2015. In the Philippines, for every person wounded, 33 were killed.
“The figures pose a powerful challenge to the official narrative that the Philippines police are only killing drug suspects in self-defense. These statistics and other evidence amassed by Reuters point in the other direction: that police are pro-actively gunning down suspects,” the report revealed.
Then there was CNN’s Amara Walker who, in a live broadcast, struggled to comprehend why Filipinos overwhelmingly supported Duterte despite the rising death toll. Did the world see us as a people whose moral compass had collapsed? Had we become numb to human rights abuses? Are we seen as a people who have become bloodthirsty as well, like the killers who usurp the authority of courts to determine guilt as they render an irrevocable judgment of death?
To be sure, most Filipinos wanted dug suspects taken alive, and to remain alive while in custody. A September 2016 SWS survey showed that while eight of 10 Filipinos supported Duterte’s drug war, an overwhelming 94% still believed suspects should be caught and not killed. Yet, despite being opposed to summary killings, many Filipinos refrained from openly speaking out against them. Was it due to fear? Apathy?
The absence of massive public protests at that time tended to show people seemed to accept the killings as collateral damage, or what a Cabinet official termed as “necessary evil” in pursuit of success in the drug war.
Thus, JPE’s striking assessment of the mindset of Duterte followers, given more than eight years later, is quite interesting.
Here’s what he said in a Feb. 1 Facebook post: “Many of the former PRRD followers are advocates and supporters of strongarm style of government. They think that the PRRD drug war was a legitimate law enforcement policy. It was not.
“The anti-drug law did not, to my recollection, authorize killing suspected people with impunity. No Congress under our constitutional law ever authorized summary killings of suspected people. Even criminals caught red-handed are not authorized by law to be killed summarily, unless they resisted with violence. Police power in this country is not licensed to kill suspected people with impunity. Police power is generally controlled by LAW and DUE PROCESS. Our Constitution abhors the death penalty,” JPE said.
For a seasoned political figure with a brilliant legal mind like Enrile to explicitly denounce the drug war as illegitimate underscores a fundamental truth: Duterte’s war on drugs was not just violent—it was unlawful. Extrajudicial killings directly violated a core principle of the Philippine Constitution: no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.
Under the Marcos Jr. administration, which has taken a vastly different approach to battling the illegal drugs menace, there is cautious hope that the country is regaining its moral compass. But justice remains elusive for the thousands who perished. Will our current leaders stand for hapless victims whose families still cry out for justice and accountability?
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