We do not have the exact figure but around 6,100 people have already been killed since the war on drugs started. The President, in a statement a few days ago, said that this drug war would continue until the last day of his term.
This statement could be interpreted in many ways. First is that the police do not have any idea when it is safe to declare victory. It could also simply mean, as the President also said, that so long as there is one drug lord left, the war will continue until all of them are killed. Since we can safely assume that the government cannot neutralize all drug lords, there is no end in sight.
If we calculate the number of people that will die by the end of the President’s term, we would come to a rough figure of about 72,000, more or less. This calculation is admittedly too simplistic and it might be that within a period of a few more months the campaign will somehow simmer down. After all, if the rate of killings continue at this rate, very soon, it will become harder for the police to justify the killings and the so called vigilantes groups will find it harder to locate drugs users to neutralize.
In the news the other day, the number one drug lord in Davao City was reported to have been neutralized—and this is a place where the drug war has been going on far longer than the current drug war. In China where the law enforcement methods are even more severe than ours, the illegal drug trade is flourishing even if the public does not read so much about it.
There must be a level wherein government can say that the war is won. What could this be? If the government has eliminated public officials either elected, the executive or the judiciary who are involved in the illegal drug trade? This is doable because we are dealing with a lot less people compared to the entire population. President Duterte is of course right in targeting these people. He should really focus on them rather than the small-time users living in squatter areas.
A lot of questions inevitably arise when the public sees only the poor users and not the big time distributors who are getting killed. The latest poll showing that 78 percent of the public fear that they, their friends and families could get killed anytime in the drug war while approving of the war on illegal drugs show how conflicted the public is on the number of people getting killed.
The public is scared but at the same time still approves of what the government is doing. It also means that the current sentiment could change easily.
One of the things that can trigger the change could be the number of people getting killed. The latest poll should also give the police or government the opportunity to pause and review what has already been done. They might realize that it may be time to shift to other strategies that can also work. It cannot be that the only solution is killing. At a certain point, the killings will take its toll on the country as a whole as it is already beginning to do.
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Voters normally vote for candidates that they like. It also depends on what these candidates promise the electorate that they would do once elected.
In the case of President Duterte, he also vowed to do a lot except one. He promised to bring back the death penalty, work for the establishment of a federal form of government, bring peace to the island of Mindanao and end the problem of illegal drugs and corruption.
What he did not say was that he would bring the country closer to China at the expense of our long-standing alliance with the United States. Together with his war on drugs, his frequent tirades against the US in particular and the West in general, together with the United Nations, has been hogging the headlines in the last six months. Why he is so against the United States and so embracing of China and Russia is somewhat difficult to pinpoint.
For the US, it ranges from the sad experience about the extraction of an American treasurer hunter from a Davao City hospital while awaiting charges of exploding a bomb in his hotel room to the treatment he received while applying for a visa at the American Embassy. There were also reports that his children’s applications for a US visa were rejected on account of the president’s human rights record while he was mayor of Davao City.
Whatever his reasons are, it is worrying people in the country with close ties with the US, both economically and personally. No poll has yet been taken on whether the public endorses this move of the President or not. It would certainly be interesting to see how the people will decide on this particular issue.
Dependence takes many forms. For the US, it is the strength of their social institutions that Filipinos have embraced over more than one hundred years of relationship that is providing the strong bond between the two countries. If this is broken, what would be the price of such a break?
One of the strongest traits of the President is his sincerity. This is perhaps one reason why he feels confident that the people are willing to allow him to chart the country’s destiny.