Global Comparisons

The Filipino government, spearheaded by the authoritarian president Rodrigo Duterte, is carrying out what they call a ‘war on drugs’. Duterte has built a highly punitive narrative towards a similarly constructed ‘drug epidemic’ in the Philippines.

The United States has tacitly allowed President Duterte to enforce his militant approach, even outwardly endorsing it at times. The Philippines does share economic ties with the United States; in 2017, over $26 billion worth of imports and exports switched hands. However, there may be deeper ulterior motives at hand; the Philippines claims they rule over several islands in the South China Sea, including the Spratly Islands, Paracel Islands, and more. On the other side is China, who also claims these islands.  An estimated $5 trillion worth in global trade passes through the South China Sea - meaning that the Philippines holds a huge amount of strategic importance to the United States.

However, much of the political discourse surrounding the Philippines tends to disguise that strategic importance. President Trump has struck up a bit of a bromance with his Filipino counterpart; in 2017, he lauded their “great relationship” and outwardly praised his militant approach to combating drug addiction. From a bystander’s perspective, they seem to be best of buds; in the context of the Philippines’ location though, that friendliness may be more pragmatic than organic.

The United States has remained mum on condemning the Philippines. But what should we be condemning?Since Duterte’s war on drugs began in 2016, thousands of Filipinos have been killed. The numbers are hotly contested; Duterte claims only a few thousand, but human rights groups like Amnesty International have estimated the number to be closer to 22,000.

As for who is being targeted, Duterte claims he is cleansing the nation of drug abuse and addicts. There are multiple issues with his claim, the first being the supposed presence of a “drug epidemic” in the Philippines. The Philippines actually has a lower rate of drug usage than the global average, yet Duterte still claims that the country could become a “narco-state” - a user and conducer of illicit narcotics. Another issue is the reality of his policies and who is affected; instead of solely affecting drug users, state violence has directly impacted other vulnerable populations in the Philippines. In a speech in front of the Philippine Senate, Filipino senator Trillanes cited the Duterte administration’s own report - that barely 4,000 drug personalities had been killed, leaving more than 18,000 still ‘under investigation’. This statistic is testament to the uncontrolled breadth that this militant strategy has had. Among the disproportionately targeted are the poor, Catholics (the atheist Duterte famously said that God is “stupid”), and Communists.

Related to the war on drugs are several other human rights issues. Dissenters have been forcibly silenced; Senator Leila de Lima was jailed on politically-motivated drug charges, in retaliation for leading a Senate inquiry into the ‘drug war’ killings. On a broader scale, the Philippines Department of Justice issued a petition that named more than 600 people as members of the Communist Party of the Philippines, putting them at risk for extrajudicial execution. Children’s rights are also vulnerable under Duterte’s policies; the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency announced that it was seeking to impose annual unannounced drug screening tests on school children starting in 4th grade, which would violate children’s rights to bodily integrity.

We can connect several themes between the situation in the Philippines today with Guatemala’s history. One theme is the falsification of narrative in order to meet a need of the state. In Guatemala, the state saw the indigenous Mayan population as insurgents, and persecuted them accordingly. In the Philippines, Duterte has essentially framed the war on drugs as an operation to protect the state. It should be noted that what is happening in the Philippines is not genocide, for it does not fall along ethnic lines; on the other hand, the Guatemalan massacre of Mayans should be considered genocide.

Another similarity is the failure of a weak judicial system. While retired generales Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez have been effectively prosecuted for their roles in the genocide, a weak judicial system allowed the military to exert enormous amounts of influence over the Guatemalan executive branch. In the case of the Philippines, the judicial court has been burdened with the task of prosecuting accused drug users; yet an absurdly low amount of attorneys are employed by the state to do so. The average Filipino public prosecutor handles 500 cases per year, and the average public defender handles 5,000.

While it is certainly easy to account the war on drugs in the Philippines as nothing more than a totalitarian president’s inhumane practices, we must critically consider the role that the United States itself plays in such a situation. By our implicit and explicit encouragement, President Duterte has been increasingly emboldened to pursue his goals.

The Rwandan Genocide was the product of a long-standing ethnic dispute between the Hutus and the Tutsis (the major ethnic groups of Rwanda). The "stages of genocide" below were developed in 1996, shortly following the Rwandan Genocide. This model has acted as a base to compare and understand the similarities between international human rights crises. In identifying how these "stages of genocide" were present in the Rwandan case, we can develop an understanding of the consistencies between our major case studies (Guatemala, Rwanda, Philippines, and Sri Lanka):

1. Classification: Hutus and Tutsis historically separated ethnically, and the discord between the two groups gradually crescendoed throughout the 20th century.
2. Symbolization/Dehumanization: Tutsis were broadcasted as “cockroaches” needing to be exterminated
3. Discrimination/Persecution: In 1980s, Milton Obote returned to power and stripped Tutsis of civil rights and ordered them into refugee camps into Rwanda, where the Hutu dominated the government
4. Organization: On one hand, the Tutsis created the Rwandan Patriotic Front. On the other hand, the Hutu government began to organize and train armed paramilitary gangs in early 1994. The Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC: the government-allied private press) had been preaching ethnic hatred and anti-Tutsi propaganda, and when the plane was shot down, it called upon the Hutu population to commit genocide to avenge his death (Negative Ethnicity: From Bias to Genocide by Koigi Wa Wamwere).
5. Extermination: When a missile shot down president Habyarimana’s plane (who had agreed to a UN enforced peace agreement with the RPF), the Hutus began their extermination campaign. Militias were reported to be extremely efficient, using the RTLMC to coordinate mass killings and to tell other soldiers where the “graves were not yet full”
   1. “You have missed some of the enemies in this or that place. Some are still alive. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet quite full. Who is going to do the good work and help us fill them completely?”
6. Denial: The Tutsis eventually overcame the government and Paul Kagame (who once lead the RPF) became President. There is evidence that there have been “revenge killings” by Kagame’s government and the RPF (sponsored violence, killing of political dissidents, authoritarian power, and ethnic autocracy)although they formally stopped the genocide. These tensions - which have been present for many years - have put Rwanda in the top 15% of countries most likely to see state-led mass killing.