EDGAR Acebuche made around $32 a week driving a garbage truck and selling old bottles and papers in his Manila shantytown. It wasn’t enough to provide for his two children, help his younger sibling through school and pay for his mother’s hypertension medicine, so he sold drugs.
When Acebuche, who dreamed of opening a billiards hall, realized that President Duterte might win the Philippine presidency with his pledge to start a merciless war on drugs, relatives say he stopped dealing. “He left Manila” to lay low, said his cousin Alicia Danao, returning home occasionally to see his kids and wash their clothes.
On one visit on July 18, Danao said the police took Acebuche, 42, away. Two hours later they returned with his body. According to the police report, Acebuche “suddenly grabbed” an officer’s gun. Sensing “imminent danger,” the officer shot him. Danao said in an interview in the shantytown in early August that when the police returned Acebuche’s body, one of them told her: “Sorry, the President ordered this.” Manila police did not answer calls for further comment.
Acebuche is one of 756 people killed in police operations since the tough-talking President Duterte was sworn in on June 30 and launched his war on illegal drugs. A further 1,100 have been killed outside police operations, in echoes of a crackdown in Thailand over a decade ago.
Despite criticism from the United Nations and human-rights groups, Mr. Duterte has vowed to continue with the campaign that has proven popular with a public sick of prior leaders failing to tackle crime.
As mayor of Davao City, President Duterte earned the nickname “The Punisher” for his shoot-to-kill crime crackdown that left hundreds dead. As President, Mr. Duterte is after bigger fish. He has already named and shamed over a hundred government officials as allegedly involved in the drug trade, among them five retired or active senior police officers.
That raises potential political risk for Duterte from powerful forces in the country. Already there is a Senate inquiry into extrajudicial killings and Duterte has picked a very public and messy fight with the senator heading that probe.
‘Honeymoon period’
“It is hard to see how this can continue and be beneficial for the president,” said Malcolm Cook, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Local political opponents, once Duterte’s honeymoon period is over though, could easily make use of this campaign to attack the President.”
Duterte has defended his efforts, calling illegal drugs a pandemic. “In life, there’s always a price to pay,” he said in a speech this week. “Is it the comfort or safety of the population or the lives of the criminals, you choose?” He questioned why he was being given grief over how many people were killed.
Still, “no state leader in history was ever successful in employing such methods,” said Senator Antonio Trillanes, a Duterte critic and member of billionaire Manny Villar’s Nacionalista Party who was jailed for more than seven years for his involvement in several attempted coups against former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. “None of them ended up well. All of them ended up either ousted, imprisoned later on or killed.”
For now, overseas investors don’t appear overly concerned. Since the May election, foreign funds have pumped $1.2 billion into the nation’s shares amid optimism Duterte will accelerate infrastructure development and spur economic growth, though some of that money has recently been taken off the table.
“As long as corruption isn’t endemic and the economy grows at 7 percent per annum, I don’t see problems,” Alan Richardson, a Hong Kong-based fund manager at Samsung Asset Management Ltd., said by phone. “World history is full of atrocities and nature itself is a killing field. Yet, life moves forward.”
Neighboring Thailand may provide a cautionary tale for Mr. Duterte in his goal of wiping out drugs. Then-Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra embarked on his own drugs war in 2003 that included blacklists and ultimatums for officials to capture or kill those named. Figures at the time showed 2,200 people died violently, though the government said only a few dozen were killed by the police, and in self-defense.
The military ousted Thaksin in a 2006 coup, and his opponents said the drug war was one of the reasons he was unfit to return to politics.
Despite the campaign, illegal drugs continue to flourish in Thailand. Justice Minister Paiboon Koomchaya is considering decriminalizing methamphetamine, saying abuse should be treated as a health issue rather than a crime.
“It has been wrong all these years,” he told a forum this month, according to the Bangkok Post, referring to antidrug efforts. “If not, why do 70 percent of drug offenders remain in prison? Why does the problem persist despite thousands of deaths? And why do people still complain about drugs in their community?”
‘Culture of impunity’
Thaksin’s campaign emboldened police and government officials to use “heavy-handed” tactics, said Sunai Phasuk, Human Rights Watch’s senior researcher in Thailand, who investigated the deaths. One effect “is the culture of impunity that kind of lingers on.”
Image credits: Bloomberg