Why would a President Kill his Citizens?

Recently, Duterte shocked the world with his very public confession of three murders perpetrated as mayor of the city Davao. Looking through his history with drug addicts, however, this should not come as a surprise; some of his classic mottos include, “Shoot him and I’ll give you a medal,” “Sons of whores I will really kill these idiots,” and “My campaign on drugs will not end, until the end of my term six years from now when every drug pusher is [killed].” If he ever finds his children doing drugs, Duterte swears he will show no mercy. He will kill them with his own hands.

"The deeper I dove into the issue of sin-laden narcotics, however, the more I realized that the perceptions of drugs are culturally sensitive."

From a broader perspective, Rodrigo Duterte is just following in the footsteps of many authoritarian leaders who see the war on drugs as a surprisingly convenient instrument to target minority groups and social pariahs to gain the support of the majority. In today’s world, drug users are severely stigmatized to the point where they are at risk of losing their humanity. In a Vietnamese middle school civic education class, which is the country’s youth propaganda factory, I was warned again and again how insidious teenagers raised by morally corrupted parents were waiting just behind street corners with white-powdered fingers, poised to convert any gullible passerby to their reprehensible faith. Cocaine, crack, marijuana, pipe tobacco, hookah— that was the list. In the Philippines, the focus is mainly on cocaine and shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride). The deeper I dove into the issue of sin-laden narcotics, however, the more I realized that the perceptions of drugs are culturally sensitive. Back in the nineteenth century it was cool for Sherlock Holmes, a perfectly respectable middle-class London detective, to constantly smoke tobacco and regularly inject himself with cocaine. Even in the enlightened modern era, it is normal for my parents to receive wine bottles encased in pretty pink heart wrappers for Christmas, even though legal wine is deadlier than outlawed marijuana. But the notion of revoking temperance laws is so absurd that no one even gives a serious thought to it. Over time, wine has been woven into our mainstream culture, and it is likely there to stay. Alcohol consumers make up roughly two thirds of the population in the U.S., and according to Gallup, the majority of them are white males with high positions in business. And who would want to put those people behind bars?

Now back to President Duterte and the Philippine’s unrelenting massacre of drug users—the vulnerable minority. True to his vicious nature, this dictator has taken it even further than all other iron-fisted leaders have, by urging police officers and civilian patrollers to instantly shoot anyone suspected of involvement in the drug trade. According to Al Jazeera, this has resulted in six thousand extrajudicial killings from Jun. to Dec. 2016 and a new type of police tactic sardonically known as “riding in tandem.” Type in Duterte War on Drugs and you will likely find a myriad of articles written, with lurid details and gory images, about wives holding dead husbands with bullets in their skulls. Blue-collar laborers shot on the way home. Families torn apart. Children shrieking as their parents are murdered. And if you are still convinced that these people do indeed deserve to die by the law anyway, take this: at five years of age, Danica May Garcia has officially become the youngest victim of the Philippines War on Drugs. On Aug. 26, she was hit by a stray bullet while playing in her family’s store. The shooters had most likely aimed for Danica’s grandfather who, after turning himself in and being officially pardoned by the Pangasinan provincial police, was attacked several times by patrollers following Duterte’s call to kill whenever they can. Yet Danica is not the only one—just three months later seven-year-old San Niño Batucan got shot in Cebu while watching TV on his front porch. Only dead one child of many from failed police operations.

Heart-wrenching as these incidents may be, as long as Duterte and his policies still have an eighty percent approval rating among his constituencies then gunshots will likely continue to be heard in the rundown neighborhoods of inner-city Philippines. In order to change the status quo, the mass has to mobilize in opposition. And this applies to us, too. But the question remains—are we willing to change?