Under Marcos, the Philippines drug war drags on

Tin (name changed), 27, hails from a neighborhood in the northern part of Metropolitan Manila, the capital region of the Philippines.

Her locality was not spared from the spate of killings that resulted after Rodrigo Duterte, the president from 2016 to 2022, unleashed an all-out war against illegal drugs.  

But it never crossed her mind that she would experience a drug-related death in her own family. After all, her husband was not involved with illegal drugs at the time.

Still, a year after Duterte stepped down and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took over as president, on October 3 last year, her husband, Chrismel Serioso, was shot at, chased and beaten by a police officer for alleged drug peddling.

Footage of the incident showed Serioso, 29, lying on the ground as the policeman walked away.

It took about an hour for a police patrol to bring the victim to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. 

"The policeman's alibi was that my husband was selling drugs, but authorities didn't recover drugs from the scene," Tin told DW.

She denied that her husband was selling illegal substances.

The police official, Patrolman Edwin Rivera Sibling, has been dismissed from the force and is now facing criminal charges.

Drug-related killings continue

The incident is not an isolated case, as drug-linked violence continues in the Philippines despite Marcos saying his administration has altered its approach and made progress in curbing the illegal drug trade.

In a recent visit to Germany, the Philippine president told Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the drug campaign has "completely changed" to prevention and rehabilitation during his tenure.

But the numbers of the continuing drug-related killings paint a different picture. Data from the Dahas project, an initiative of the University of the Philippines, show that the drug violence continues at the same level as it was under Duterte.

Dahas recorded 342 drug casualties from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, at an average rate of 0.9 deaths per day, a tad higher than the 0.8 daily average during Duterte's last year in office.

The project logged 165 more deaths during the last six months of 2023, and 29 each in January and February this year.

Philippines rejects investigation

Duterte's yearslong anti-drug campaign left thousands of people dead, as a result of either police operations or vigilante killings.

According to the government, police killed about 6,200 suspected dealers, who resisted arrest during the anti-drug operations. But rights groups say the toll could be much higher.

The International Criminal Court launched a probe into the killings, prompting Duterte to officially withdraw the Philippines from the international tribunal in 2019.

Last year, the ICC rejected Manila's appeal to stop its drug war probe and cleared the way for the investigation to continue.

Rise Up for Life and for Rights, an organization that supports families affected by the extrajudicial killings, said the development had given hope to people who cannot seek redress in court. 

Marcos, however, has said his administration will not cooperate with the ICC probe, which he described as "a threat to our sovereignty."

Duterte's policies remain

Joel Ariate, the lead researcher of the Dahas project, told DW that there has been a notable difference between the drug-related killings under Duterte and those under Marcos: the involvement of law enforcement agents.

During the Duterte administration, he said, about 70-75% of the killings happened during buy-bust operations by the Philippine National Police and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency.

But the deaths from such drug stings have gone down now, constituting about 45% of the total tally, Ariate said, adding that killings by unidentified groups have gone up.

"There's no doubt that there has been less involvement of the state in the killings," Ariate said. "But what's alarming here is that the average number of killings in the Marcos administration has not been different, with 0.8 to 0.9 deaths per day, and we think this is not going down."

Carlos Conde, senior researcher at the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), told DW that Duterte's anti-drug policies remain in place despite the government's assertion of a change in approach.

"The executive orders and issuances that operationalized the drug war are still in effect," Conde said. "Mr. Marcos has not abolished those, so it should really make you wonder what he's talking about when each time he says the drug policy of his administration is different."

He said the problems that plagued the drug offensive under Duterte, including the lack of due process and the disregard for international human rights laws, haven't disappeared under the new administration.

Declaring an end to war on drugs?

There are also regional variations when it comes to its implementation. In the southern Davao City, where Duterte's son, Sebastian Duterte, is currently serving as mayor, police or anti-narcotics agents are involved in almost 99% of drug-related deaths, said Ariate. 

Though the Manila region previously accounted for most of the killings, Ariate said, they are now increasingly happening in provinces such as Cebu and Negros Occidental.

Conde said Marcos would need to publicly declare an end to the war on drugs to stop the killings.

He called for the Philippine administration to adopt a holistic approach in its efforts to combat illegal drugs, arguing that it should be tackled from a public health perspective instead of being viewed as a public safety problem.

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru