Duterte's controversial drug war: 6 months, 6,000 deaths in the Philippines

MANILA — Sammer Torculas had just returned home from playing with his children outside in Pandacan, a lower-middle-class district in the Philippine capital, when he heard a knock at the door.

Several men with guns drawn stormed into the house.

The target of the incident Dec. 7 was Torculas' mother — an admitted dealer of shabu, the local name for crystal meth. Torculas' girlfriend, Chilotte Flaviano, took their five kids into the bedroom. She heard loud voices, then gunfire.

Torculas, 27, died, struck by eight bullets on the street. Police said he fired first, but Flaviano insisted Torculas didn't own a gun. His mother was arrested.

Like many cases in the Philippines' war on drugs, details are murky, and no official police report has been produced. All that is left behind is fear over how Flaviano will raise the young children.

“What are my options right now?” she asked. “I'm the only one left.”

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Similar scenes have played out here and in other cities under President Rodrigo Duterte's controversial drug war. The total body count of suspected drug dealers or users tops 6,000. More than 2,000 were killed in police operations, and the other 4,000 died in vigilante or extrajudicial killings.

Duterte has made the drug war his signature issue. After taking office June 30, he vowed to clean up the problem in six months. He recently told a local news station that he had “miscalculated” and that the problem was larger than he realized. He vowed to continue the drug war "until the last pusher is out in the streets, until the last drug lord is killed.”

The spate of killings has drawn condemnation from human rights groups that contend many of the deaths amount to illegal executions.

Duterte — who boasted to the BBC in December that he personally killed three suspects while mayor of the southern city of Davao — has remained defiant. He called the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein an “idiot” for suggesting the president be investigated for murder after that admission.

As nightly images on television show bodies lying in the streets, public support for Duterte's approach is strong. A poll in December by Philippine research group Social Weather Stations found 85% of Filipinos were satisfied with the anti-drug operations.

But 78% of respondents said they feared that they or someone they know would be killed in the wave of extrajudicial killings. There have been numerous news accounts of bystanders killed in shootouts or unrelated killings taking place under the cover of Duterte's drug war.

One widely publicized example was the killing of Mark Anthony Culata, 27, in October in the town of Tanza in Cavite. Culata's body was found mutilated, taped up and bearing a sign that read, "I am a pusher."

Culata had no record of drug use and was scheduled to head back to Saudi Arabia, where he worked. A surveillance video showed him being picked up by police, and many in his family are convinced his death was connected to a jealous policeman who was dating Culata’s ex-girlfriend.

Eva Culata, the slain man's mother, said the family didn’t want his name to be forgotten. “We want to seek justice for Mark,” she said. “He does not deserve to die like this.”

The National Bureau of Investigation, the Philippine's FBI, is looking into the incident, and four policemen from the town were suspended in September.

Police and criminal violence predates Duterte’s presidency, according to Philippine Sen. Richard Gordon, who led a judicial committee that cleared Duterte of culpability for the extrajudicial killings in December. Gordon said the president’s rhetoric inflames the violence, but its roots run deeper.

“I think people have missed the point that our system is rotten,” Gordon said. “The whole prosecution system is rotten. The whole investigation system is rotten. There's not enough money for more investigators. There's not enough money for crime laboratories. There's too many passes being issued to people who do crime, and that's what gives them impunity.”

The public’s distrust and frustration with the system allows Duterte’s message to resonate, said John Gershman, a professor of public service at New York University and an expert on the Philippines.

“I think he's effectively tapped into this dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system,” Gershman said.

Perhaps the biggest question looming over Duterte's drug war is whether he will win it. Duterte claims the country of 102 million has 4 million drug users and is in danger of turning into a narco-state. Many drug policy experts say that without a public health approach to addiction, drugs and crime will not go away.

“You can't kill your way out of this problem or jail your way out of this problem,” said Sanho Tree, director of the drug policy program at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Washington. “You can temporarily drive down the market or suppress it, but the moment you let up the pressure — because you haven’t treated these people — it’s going to cause a huge backlash.”

A comparison can be drawn to nearby Thailand, which launched a crackdown on drugs in 2003, killing 2,800 people during the first three months of a campaign by then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The campaign initially reduced drug consumption, but the prison population soared, and methamphetamine use rose again.

Thai Justice Minister Paiboon Koomchaya recently proposed that meth be taken off the list of dangerous narcotics, saying measures to suppress drug use have failed.

“Once Duterte has driven away or killed a lot of these gang members, he's creating turf wars that eventually will come back to haunt him and haunt Philippine society in my opinion,” Tree said.

Many living in drug-ravaged neighborhoods in Manila said they feel safer. Others who have seen the violence up close were fearful.

"I'm afraid now,” Flaviano said. “Anyone could be a victim. ... All of a sudden, you could be next.”