"I'd be happy to massacre drug addicts": The war of the tyrant everyone loved in the Philippines

If we look at a year in which the world began to show signs of today's world, that would be 2016. It was twelve months in which Donald Trump came to power for the first time in the United States, the United Kingdom elected Brexit and in the Philippines, a former American colony (and no longer very Spanish), Rodrigo Duterte became president. He was a politician who had won the favor of the masses of his town - Davao - as mayor by promising bread and circuses, an end to the Marcos corruption and the soft government of Corazon Aquino . And, furthermore, by assuring that he would kill all the drug addicts in the country.

"I would be happy to massacre millions of drug addicts. Hitler massacred three million Jews (sic). Now there are three million drug addicts here (in the Philippines). I would be happy to massacre them," he said in a 2016 speech with astonishing clarity. And he won by a landslide. During his administration, some 6,200 people died , although human rights organizations say the number could be as high as 27,000. NGOs, on the other hand, indicated that the official number of addicts could be 1.3 million in a country of 115 million inhabitants.

"Hitler massacred three million Jews (sic). Now there are three million drug addicts here (in the Philippines)."

Filipino journalist Patricia Evangelista was well acquainted with that regime, which lasted until 2022, as one of the main investigators of Duterte's war on drugs for the digital media outlet Rappler , directed by Maria Ressa , who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize . Evangelista was at thousands of crime scenes, told the stories of the dead and how that autocracy worked, and has translated this into her journalistic book Reservoir Dogs , in which she analyzes not only the murders but also how (almost) no autocrat rises to power alone. There are always thousands of people who support him. All it takes is to touch the right key (and fear is usually quite effective).

“In 2016, Duterte spoke to the most primal emotions. He said: you've been screwed, everyone doesn't care what happens to you, the cultural elites don't care what happens to you because they're not like you, they don't understand you, but I do, I'm like you, I'm a normal person. So yes, the majority of the people who voted for him voted for a hope for change and for his promises, even if they meant death,” the journalist says in an interview in Madrid, the city she traveled to from Barcelona, ​​where she is doing a residency at the CCCB. “And yes, we could call him the pre-Trump Trump of the Trump we have right now. There are many people who called him the Trump of Asia ,” she adds.

Because the mechanisms are the same—and very similar to those of Nazi Germany—and basically consist of pointing out enemies. We already know what the Nazis did, Trump's with immigration, too, Duterte 's were drug addicts inventing numbers of addicts that, according to all the international organizations that study drug addiction, weren't real, as she adds in the book. "They always have to tell a story about an enemy that will disappear only thanks to them. Duterte's enemy was criminals , drug addicts, democrats, criminals, journalists from time to time, women from time to time... These things are sort of interconnected, they're similar," the journalist explains.

It went wrong

When he came to power, Duterte promised he would end the drug problem in three to six months at the most. And the truth is, the deaths began immediately and grew rapidly, so much so that it surprised even the journalists themselves. However, virtually all of them were small-time drug traffickers, even anyone who could carry a small bag of marijuana in their pocket. This wasn't, as Evangelista records in the book, a fight against big-time drug traffickers or large drug structures. It was something else. In fact, another fact during this war campaign highlighted by the NGOs working in the country: during that time, investment in social care for addicts was reduced.

Of course, the issue, if you think in terms of public health, wasn't resolved in those six months, despite the massive deaths . “I don't know if people believed the six-month thing. I didn't believe it because no war on drugs has been successful to this day. At the end of the six months, they already started saying it would be at the end of the year. And at the end of that year, they said it would last until the last day of my presidency,” says Evangelista, who insists that, on the contrary, the state 's violence, with all its police and military machinery against the citizenry, has generated more violence today: “Hundreds of people continue to die. And now we also have the children of those who were murdered, the children who saw the dead on TV, in the street, and thought, this is normal.”

The journalist witnessed the violence unleashed by her country's government between 2016 and 2022. Many nights she attended the scenes of drug addicts (or those rumored to be addicts) murdered in Manila , virtually all of them belonging to very poor and vulnerable families . It was almost always the same: “You arrive and start asking: How many bodies? Where did they come from? Who are they? Who raised the alarm? What happened? How did all this happen? Then the family arrives, which is a terrible moment because you hear them screaming. There's a kind of initial shock when they realize they recognize the body. It's a specific tone of scream. But that whole part is a bit mechanical. Then you go to the funeral and interview the officer who was there at the time or the police officers who were at the crime scene. You try to find out who fired the shots and maybe try to interview them. And then I would go home to write, which is the hardest part because it's not mechanical,” she says.

"You have to use whatever you need to tell a story. If my emotions suddenly get in the way, you have to use them."

That's where the journalist's craft comes in: detachment, but also compassion. " I don't pretend to be objective or unbiased, but I do try to be fair," she says of her way of working. "I think you have to use whatever you need to tell a story. If my emotions suddenly get in the way, well, you have to use them. While I'm working as a journalist, I'm working with human beings. And I believe that what matters to me, if I do it well, is what will matter to others," says someone who was monitored by the police and the government itself. I ask her, precisely, how she keeps a cool head with that like the sword of Damocles, how she confronts fear: "I don't. I was afraid every day , but I think fear is a good thing for journalists, for people in general, because if you're doing something dangerous, you always have to think that something could happen," she answers quickly.

Tik, tok, attention, journalism

Since receiving the grant to write this book, Evangelista has stopped working for Rappler , a digital outlet that quickly garnered a large audience in the Philippines for its investigative work and innovative formats. The journalist now prefers to focus on essays that delve deeper into the topics, although she also acknowledges that these are not the best of times for this or forjournalism in general.

“It's a challenging time, especially in terms of attention. How do we decide which story matters most to people right now? Because people have a limited attention span, and also a limited capacity for compassion. Which stories should we care about? And what's the approach to capturing attention? And then there's the biggest challenge, which is the economic one. We have to be clear: journalism is expensive. So yes, I think it's a difficult time to be a journalist , but it's the most important time to be a journalist,” she maintains firmly.

And what do we do with TikTok and all those microsecond videos that people get hooked on? I ask him with some skepticism.

“I don't know, I don't know,” he concedes. “But my hope is that the stories, whether through TikTok or Facebook … Look, a thousand years ago people sat around a campfire and told each other stories. We do that now too, but on phones. Still, I hope the format I use, the long-form narrative, survives.”

By the way, after Duterte and his dirty war on drugs, for which he could end up in The Hague, the Philippines elected Ferdinand Marcos , the son of Ferdinand and Imelda, as president, and Sara Duterte, Duterte's daughter, as vice president. “It's the same old story. People have hope that this will work. It's the same thing that happens in many countries around the world, it's a constant cycle. The story that was told about the golden age of the Philippines , with Ferdinand Marcos Sr., the story that was told about Rodrigo Duterte , who put an end to crime. And if you're not a journalist, if you're not informed, you might decide, well, if they promise me that rice is going to be cheaper, what do I care about that dead criminal , who probably killed his sister. In the end, it's about telling a good story because everyone needs a hero,” Evangelista concludes. Yes, it's something we've seen countless times.