Duterte’s drug war and democracy

President Duterte’s war on drugs—a shameless, class-discriminatory state policy that has used the poor as disposable political capital to immediately fulfill an impossible campaign promise—is a war on human rights, a war on democratic institutions, and a war whose destructive logic threatens, among others, to tear apart the moral and institutional compass of Filipinos.

This war based on the Davao City model of extrajudicial killings was explicitly promised during the election campaign and is being eagerly anticipated by the millions who voted him to victory.

In order to meet his self-imposed deadline—stopping the trade in illegal drugs in three to six months—an invisible army of death squads and the all-too-visible Mafia-like police have gone on a national rampage to show everyone that Mr. Duterte means business.

But in this war, it is the poor who must do the dying. Without recourse to lawyers, without media savvy, without the mobilization of the national democratic Left now cozy with Mr. Duterte, without the sympathy of the upper classes, without the stronger intercession of the Catholic Church, without the humanity snatched from them by the simplistic demonization of the drug problem, and without the resources to fight the police, many of whom, by the admission of the police chief himself, were their protectors, hundreds of small-time pushers and users have been reduced to body bags, packing tape, and torn cardboard signs. Their corpses are the showcase of the new murderous power that now calls the shots for the state.

The public’s strong support for these extrajudicial killings is partly borne by its frustration at seeing the ordeal that crime victims and their families undergo to extract justice from the flawed criminal justice system. But ironically, the public’s embrace of Mr. Duterte’s summary justice, where petty drug pushers have become both cipher and scapegoat for the level of criminality in this country, exchanges one injustice for another, and one set of families for another; it also seriously undercuts key institutional reforms needed by our laws, police, courts, prisons, local governments, and support services to make the criminal justice system more effective and more just.

An aspect of this dilemma is illustrated in the case of the police, the state’s all-important frontline service for combating crime. Because of the combination of close contact with criminals and of the state’s coercive power that they wield, the police are prone to similar regulatory capture problems (e.g., corruption, predatory behavior, and collusion with criminals) as other regulatory institutions of the state. Hence, to make them more effectively assume their crime-fighting functions, the police need similar institutional design reforms (e.g., professionalization, capacity-building, transparency, accountability, and rule of law measures).

But the police are unique because their coercive power can be physical and even lethal. This problem is salient in countries like the Philippines that went through democratic transitions from authoritarian regimes, where the police were part of the repressive apparatus that preyed on their own citizens, arbitrarily arresting, routinely torturing, and summarily executing them. Thus, there is need for “democratic policing” reforms where the police are retrained to respect human rights and to be accountable to democratic institutions, such as legislative and constitutional bodies, as well as the communities they serve.

The resurgence of extrajudicial killings by the police under Mr. Duterte, at a scale not seen since the Marcos dictatorship, has rolled back the limited gains of democratic policing since Edsa I. Following the rhetoric of the President, the police now boldly speak of human rights as if these were another enemy to be eliminated, and of congressional inquiries on police abuse as harassment of police operations.

The same lethal shortcuts in the drug war have resulted in the deinstitutionalization of the police in key aspects. Mr. Duterte’s constant exhortations to the police to ignore Congress and the Commission on Human Rights, his repeated assurances that he will protect them from these institutions, even promising to pardon them if convicted by the courts because of his drug war, and his carrot of doubling police salaries have veered dangerously close to the repersonalization of the police force akin to an authoritarian regime. In this drug war, they have become his quasiprivate army that is accountable only to him and his minions.

Critics have correctly pointed out the incongruity of Mr. Duterte’s hardline approach to illegal drugs, citing the experience of other countries that tried ironfisted approaches and that have realized their folly and shifted to holistic, humane approaches. The latter have been more successful in lowering crime rates associated with drug addiction and, equally important, are less injurious to human rights and democratic institutions.

But in the final analysis, the drug war is not really about winning the war on drugs but about controlling the Filipinos’ political soul through it. This strategy relies on the bleak argument that the country desperately needs Mr. Duterte and his “unorthodox” methods more than its democratic institutions and its human rights, to save it from the supposed existential threat of narco-politics. The constant spectacle of bodies in the streets is but a necessary confirmation and visual reminder of this argument that was first brewed during his election campaign.

Gene Lacza Pilapil is an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Philippines Diliman.