Category Archives: War On Drugs

Duterte ordered the military to play a role in his crackdown after police drug squads were suspended last month over corruption charges and the murder of a South Korean businessman.

De Lima, who denies the charges against her, has called in the past for an international investigation into state-inspired extrajudicial murders. She has expressed fears that her own life is in danger because of her outspoken views.

I have long prepared myself to be a political prisoner under this regime, she said in a statement over the weekend after the charges were filed.

If the loss of my freedom is the price I have to pay for standing up against the butchery of the Duterte regime, then it is a price I am willing to pay, she said. But they are mistaken if they think my fight ends here. It has only begun.

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Philippine's Rodrigo Duterte urged to drop charges against leading war on drugs critic - Telegraph.co.uk

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War on Drugs | The Huffington Post

Clarence, a client of mine, should have never been prosecuted for a felony drug offense. He is a 54 year old African-American man who has always lived in Baltimore.

He has a tight knit family and several part-time jobs. He also suffers from mental health problems and a drug addiction that he's labored with for years. His criminal record is non-violent.

Clarence should not have spent four months in jail awaiting his court date for allegations that he aided two individuals, half his age, in selling heroin in a public market- which he disputes. The State ended up dismissing his case.

Legislative

Most criminal laws, at the state or federal level, come about as a reaction to fear. Drug laws are no different. High profile, headline capturing stories of pain, loss and despair are powerful tools that force legislators to act.

Lawmakers act by making laws. As a society, we've been conditioned to believe that creating new crimes and increasing penalties for existing offenses will deter future crimes like the high profile instance for which the new law was enacted.

There is no better response to this fallacy than the fact that the death penalty, the ultimate sentence, is proven to be an ineffective crime deterrent. In the early 1980s, fears of drug epidemics and crime waves spilling out of urban areas coupled with blatant racist motivations allowed for the passage of stiff drug laws across the country.

Mandatory sentencing based on the amount of drugs involved in a case or someone's prior record combined with new ways of charging drug cases like possession with the intent to distribute (to close the gap between dealing and possessing) to become foundations for drug laws that underlie our War on Drugs. The laws don't account for someone like Clarence.

Law Enforcement

Once strict laws are in place, police serve as the government's enforcement soldiers in the war.

But policing in cities, particularly in black neighborhoods, is much more visible and aggressive than elsewhere. Quotas and arrest numbers drive cops to carry out too many stops and searches. Even after the release of a scathing DOJ report detailing illegal activities of the Baltimore Police department, black people are still being stopped in ways that don't happen to white people. I see it on body camera footage in my cases.

Police violations of people's' rights can never be rectified in hindsight with evidence cops recover. This rationale has driven a wedge of mistrust between entire communities and law enforcement. The reality though, is danger exists for both sides. Civilians are brutalized and killed by police all too often, but cops risk their lives as they make arrests, go undercover or search residences.

Yet, cops faithfully enforce drug laws by fishing with a large net, and if that net nabs someone like Clarence, so be it.

Prosecution

Prosecutors take control of cases once the police make their arrests. Prosecutors have tremendous discretion as to what happens at that point, but have been reluctant to step back and consider justice alternatives for many drug offenses.

In Baltimore and most jurisdictions around the country, defense attorneys like myself often see less experienced prosecutors handling drug cases without understanding a drug case's relative importance to victim crimes. Having this insight is vital in an overburdened and under resourced system.

Also, prosecutors typically refuse to allow defendants to accept reduced pleas to lesser counts and insist on felony convictions when they have options. Even drug treatment courts, which guarantee probation sentences with treatment components will often require pleas to felonies.

Numbers, statistics and punishment still seem to drive prosecutions rather than focusing on the root of why someone is involved in a drug case The State has showed little interest in addressing Clarence's addiction, only in shoring up their case against him.

The Court System

The final front in the War is the courtroom; where justice rarely prevails. A judge should not set an unaffordable bail amounts for minor drug offenders (In Clarences case bail was set at $25,000). After 4 months of incarceration and help from social workers in my office to find a community treatment program, a second judge decided to release Clarence before trial, a rarity.

In Baltimore, judges too often set unreachable, unconstitutional bails for poor defendants, leaving them in jail, presumed innocent, as they await trial, a pattern seen in cities across the country.

Beyond bail, with sentencing, judges have to understand the impact that drug convictions have as permanent stains on people's lives because expungement rights (to wipe clean a record) are generally not available.

Procedurally, the bench also has to realize that drug cases need to take a back seat to more serious violent and property crimes. More importantly, courts are also where policing can be improved through closer scrutiny over challenges to police stops and searches. In many ways, courts sanction the misconduct of officers by consistently ignoring violations of citizens' fourth amendment rights.

Trial courts need to recognize the realities of the streets and appellate courts have to understand they they are giving cops carte blanche to overstep their bounds. What starts off as an illegal rummaging through someone's pocket can spiral into an injury or death. Fortunately for Clarence, the court didn't have to weigh in on his case since the State dropped the charges when he first appeared for trial. He is better off having benefited from treatment, but what he went through was not justice.

Hope

The War on Drugs is like an onion with its many layers, but some hope is out there for change. Baltimore's new pilot initiative to redirect petty drug offense arrestees in a tiny pocket of the city to treatment and services prior to booking is a great start. Movements for Justice Reinvestment are also sweeping the country focusing on creating new ways to address drug cases rather than punishment.

A big victory for reinvestment in Maryland came with the rollback of several mandatory sentencing laws surrounding drug offenses.

Now that our justice department has told us how discriminatory police practices have been; now that we know that drug laws aren't evenly enforced across races and jurisdictions; and now that we know that punishment isn't as effective as treatment, we have to push forward for more reform on every front until the last battle is fought in the war.

Todd Oppenheim is a public defender in the city of Baltimore. He ran for Baltimore Circuit Judge in 2016. His writing has been published in the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Why we can't seem to end the War on Drugs | TheHill - The Hill (blog)

A new study commissioned by the Mexican Senate found that the Mexican military shouldnt have intervened in the countrys nearly decade-long war against drug traffickers.

Since early in Mexicos war on drugs, the government deployed its biggest possible hammer: the army and the navy.

But a new report from the Mexican Senates internal research office, the Belisario Dominguez Institute, is questioning the rationale behind that decision.

The takeaway is that there was never any evidence showing the military would help violence decline.

Froylan Enciso is a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, a think tank. He said independent research has already made similar conclusions.

"What is new now is that the Belisario Dominguez Institute is systematizing this evidence and putting together, like, a really good intellectual product for Mexican congressman," Enciso said.

The study concludes that lawmakers have tended to rely more on personal conviction than facts.

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Study: Mexican Military Should Not Have Intervened In Country's War On Drugs - Fronteras: The Changing America Desk

Napolcom regional director Homer Cabaral called on police not to be demoralized and instead reassess their role in the campaign against illegal drugs.

THE countrys police force should not be discouraged by their withdrawal from the governments anti-drug operations, the regional chief of the National Police Commission (Napolcom) said yesterday.

Rather, Napolcom regional director Homer Cabaral told the police during yesterdays 26th Philippine National Police Foundation Day observance, that they should step back, analyze their performance and regroup to win back public trust.

Just like in any other organization, there will always be problems and turbulence encountered by the PNP organization as we cruise towards the path of public service. Let not these bad issues and challenges dishearten and demoralize you, he said.

Chief Supt. Noli Talio, Police Regional Office chief, said the PRO-7 performed well in the governments war on drugs before they were sidelined by the murder of a Korean businessman by rogue policemen in Camp Crame.

Talio vowed to help clean the PNP by going after errant policemen in the region.

Chief Supt. Noli Talio, PRO-7 director, (right) says they are committed to weeding out the corrupt police officers within their ranks. CDN Photos/Lito Tecson

We will strengthen our counter-intelligence efforts in monitoring cops involved in illegal activities or irregularities, he said.

Since the PNP was created in 1991, Cabaral said the organization has its share of birth pains ranging from corruption, budget allocations, logistics, lack of personnel, human rights violations and adverse public opinion.

The (Korean businessmans murder) was indicative of the diminishing public trust and confidence in the police and the criminal justice system. These were realities that reduce the PNPs effectiveness to work with the community, he said.

Cabaral said police scalawags continue to tarnish the image of the PNP.

In fact, President Duterte pronounced that 40 percent of the 165,000 PNP officers and personnel are used to corruption or involved in illegal activities, he said.

Cabaral said lifestyle checks and redeployment of police personnel should be done to purge out corrupt cops.

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Napolcom: Police need to regroup, rethink role in war on drugs - Inquirer.net

Describing the Philippine situation as a human rights calamity, Human Rights Watch Deputy Director Phelim Kine says the Philippines needs an 'urgent international intervention' to address human rights violations

Published 8:45 PM, February 20, 2017

Updated 7:14 AM, February 21, 2017

HUMAN RIGHTS. Human Rights Watch Deputy Director Phelim Kine says that the human rights problem in the country require international intervention. Photo by Marvin Tandayu

BOSTON, USA The Philippines needs global intervention to address the human rights violations involving the countrys war against drugs.

This was according to Human Rights Watch Deputy Director Phelim Kine on Saturday, February 18, at the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) conference held at Harvard University.

"What we are advocating is that there is no way, in its current form, that the Philippine government can fix this. It needs to be an urgent international intervention or an international body investigation," Kine explained.

Speaking before Asian youth delegates for the Humanitarian Affairs panel at the conference, Kine said that human rights violations in the Philippines is both unique and distressing because the president is giving his full support.

The president is an active cheerleader. He promised in a rally right before the election that he will fill Manila bay with the bodies of thousands of suspected drug users. He is one of the rare politicians who deliver on their promise. Unfortunately, they are extremely abusive, Kine said.

Since June 2017, 2,555 drug suspects have been killed at police drug operations while 3,930 others have been murdered by unidentified gunmen or vigilantes.

Following the scandal related to the murder of a South Korean businessman inside Camp Crame, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the Philippine National Police (PNP) to stop all anti-drug operations nationwide in late January.

Despite this, drug-related killings continued.

The latest police tally given to the Agence France-Presse showed there were 4,076 "murder cases under investigation" on February 13. This was 146 more since Duterte ordered the PNP to withdraw from the war on drugs, which rights groups said only proved that the extrajudicial killings had slowed but not discontinued.

Describing the Philippine situation as a human rights calamity, Kine also said that what has been happening in the country is surprising and unfortunate considering the countrys history from a Ferdinand Marcos multi-decade authoritarian dictatorship which resulted to a strong civil society and free media.

The tragedy of the Philippines right now is that a sizeable part of the Philippine population have decided or accepted that a segment of the population is disposable, the human rights advocate added.

Where are the watchdogs?

Kine also criticized some leftist human rights groups in the Philippines specifically the Karapatan, an alliance of individuals, groups and organizations working for the promotion and protection of human rights for supposedly staying silent against the extrajudicial killings because President Duterte has identified itself as a leftist.

We have had a complete abrogation of betrayal of the civil society role in this...I think there really needs to be a radical self-examination by these self-proclaimed watchdogs of the public good as to how they fail 7000 plus people because they decided these people are not worth protecting, Kine suggested.

One of the campaign promises of Duterte includes ending the 40-year insurgency of the communist rebels that has killed around 40,000 people. The CPP claims it has 150,000 cadres but the military puts their number at around 4,000.

However, the Philippine president has recently scrapped the talks and the immunities of the NDF consultants days after the communist armed wing New People's Army (NPA) terminated its 5-month-old unilateral ceasefire because of supposed ceasefire abuses by the military.

Kine ended his talk by emphasizing the role of human rights defenders in the country's war on drugs, adding that they serve to "watch over the minority from the depredation of the majority. There are a very few places where the minority can turn that dynamic around." Rappler.com

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HRW on war on drugs: PH needs 'international intervention' - Rappler

MANILA

Thousands of Roman Catholics marched in the Philippines capital Manila on Saturday in the biggest gathering denouncing extra-judicial killings and a government plan to re-impose the death penalty for criminals.

Dubbed a Walk for Life prayer rally and endorsed by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), the gathering came just days after the church launched its strongest attack against President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs.

Organizers claimed as many as 50,000 people took part in the march toward Manilas Rizal Park, while about 10,000 based on police estimates stayed to hear speeches.

More than 7,600 people have been killed since Duterte launched his anti-drugs campaign seven months ago. More than 2,500 died in shootouts during raids and sting operations, according to the police.

Duterte says campaign a success

Amid mounting criticism about a surge in killings, Duterte said Saturday that the campaign was by and large successful.

Speaking at the Philippine Military Academys alumni homecoming in Baguio City, he said the drug problem was more complex than he initially thought, prompting him to seek military support.

I need the help of each one, especially the military, not for social control but protection (for) the citizens from the lawless, the reckless, and the selfish, the firebrand leader said.

Both the government and police have denied that extra-judicial killings have taken place. But human rights groups believe many deaths that police had attributed to vigilantes were carried out by assassins likely colluding with police.

Participants join a procession against plans to reimpose death penalty, promote contraceptives and intensify drug war during "Walk for Life" in Manila, Philippines, Feb. 18, 2017.

Archbishop: Killing is wrong

We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing those who kill. It also increases the number of killers, CBCP president Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas said in a statement.

Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, who also joined the rally, called for strengthening and promoting the culture of nonviolent movements.

In its most strongly worded attack on the crackdown on drug pushers and users, a CBCP pastoral letter read out at services across the country early this month said killing people was not the answer to trafficking of illegal drugs.

Nearly 80 percent of the Philippines 100 million people are Catholic and until recently the church had been hesitant to criticize Dutertes war on drugs.

Senator Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Dutertes war on drugs now facing three drug-related charges, also joined the rally. She said the charges were meant to silence her.

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In Manila, Catholics March Against War on Drugs Tactics - Voice of America

President Rodrigo Duterte delivers his address during the PMA alumni homecoming in Baguio City. SCREENGRAB FROM RTVM

FORT DEL PILAR, BAGUIO CITYPresident Duterte on Saturday called for stronger military support for his war on drugs and terrorism and his program to build a peaceful and prosperous nation.

In a speech before Philippine Military Academy (PMA) alumni, Mr. Duterte said that when he was Davao City mayor he kept on harping on peace and order because if there is peace and order, businesses and everything else will follow.

This could happen to the rest of the country as it did in Davao, he added.

But I need the help of each one, especially the military, not for social control but [for the] protection of the citizens from the lawless, the reckless and the selfish, he said.

He made the call a week before the country marked the 31st anniversary of the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolution that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who used the military to enforce iron rule.

What I desire for the Philippines is a prosperous country that includes everyone a peace loving citizenry and people with different beliefs who chose to get along with one another, he said.

He said government must serve the people not just the interest of the few.

In the past, our government verged on failure because those who were in the position to help deliberately made wrong decisions, which favored only themselves, he said. We will always uphold the sanctity of the common good as the highest good.

Two main threats

He said military support was needed in battling two main threatsthe complex problem of illegal drugs and terrorism from the Abu Sayyaf, which is engaged in ransom-kidnappings and in bringing the extremism of the Islamic State group into the Philippines from the Middle East.

The Presidents appeal to the military comes not long after he sidelined the police from the war on drugs and blasted the corruption in the Philippine National Police.

The President said he had directed government forces to continue to intensify operations using all available assets and resources against militants. He added that it was the only way to secure Mindanao.

Land of Promise

But he said Mindanao, the Land of Promise where his family had migrated from the Visayas, is threatened by climate change caused by man-made diseases like extractive industries, referring to some mining operations that wreck the environment.

The rest of the nation, he added, is threatened by the widening gap between the rich and the poor, crime, corruption, criminality and illegal drugs.

The President is an adopted member of PMA Class of 1967. He was formally adopted as an honorary alumnus of the countrys premier military academy, which he held up as a model for the nation.

While I never pretended to be a saint, I note that righteousness and discipline are the foundations of a nation. That is why I appreciate the PMA. You have the template of discipline and civility, he said.

In response to the Presidents call, the PMA Alumni Association Inc. issued a manifesto supporting his initiatives, advocacies and decisions in the war against corruptionand criminality in general, most particularly against illegal drugs, heinous crimes and terrorism, [and] for his pursuit for lasting peace.

We call on the Filipino citizens to support the President and other leaders in the governing of the country toward attaining lasting peace and economic prosperity, said the statement, which was read by association chair Anselmo Avenido Jr.

The President has been cultivating close ties with the military, visiting many military camps around the country in his first months in office, promising troops medical and combat equipment and increased benefits.

He had also explained to the troops his decision to initiate peace talks with communist insurgents, which he did not touch on in his speech.

He had also condoled with families of slain soldiers, and visited the wounded in hospitals. WITH A REPORT FROM LEILA B. SALAVERRIA

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Duterte calls for stronger AFP support in war on drugs, terror - Inquirer.net

Brother Jun Santiago photographs a crime scene in metro Manila after midnight on February 14, 2017. Photo: Eloisa Lopez.

The only perk of the night shift in Manila is the lack of traffic. By day, the streets and highways are clogged, with vehicles crawling along them slowly, close together, like long lines of disorganized ants. But in the dark hours from midnight to dawn, there is no waiting. Thats how we got to the crime scene so fast, before the bodies were sent to the morgue. Leaving Manila Police District at 3:30 am, the driver of our Isuzu SUV flashed his emergency lights, passed cars, honked for others to get out of the way, and blew the occasional red light. The car was full. I was with four other local journalists and photographers, and Brother Jun Santiago from the National Shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, known locally as the Baclaran Church. Brother Jun was driving.

The overwhelming majority of the 100 million people that make up the population of the Philippines are Catholic. Brother Jun, 46, is from the Roman Catholic order called the Redemptorists, who are known globally for their missionary work. Hes a brother, not a priest, which means he can give sermons but cant lead mass. Brothers spend more time in the field and in the community. Vincent Go, the Filipino photographer sitting in the front seat next to Brother Jun, said theyre like the Marinesthe tip of the spear.

Brother Jun is also a longtime photographer, and as a result, he has one foot in two influential institutions in the Philippines: the church and the media. By day, he attends to religious duties at a parish in Manila. After hours, he goes into the field as one of the dozens of nightcrawlers documenting President Rodrigo Dutertes brutal war on drug dealers and users. Since Duterte took office seven months ago, more than 7,000 people have been killed in official police operations and vigilante killings tied to the crackdown. But as bodies keep appearing in the streets, complaints are growing at home. Through his humanitarian work and photojournalism, Brother Jun occupies a unique position in the fight to document the drug war and help its victims. He is a bridge between two worlds, and his unusual role shows how nontraditional journalism can serve the public interest while working in tandem with the mainstream media.

He has one foot in two influential institutions in the Philippines: the church and the media.

Since the 1990s, when he was a seminary student, Brother Jun has infused his religious work with photography, or as he often calls it, documentation. The two go hand in hand. Photography by itself is a mission, he told me when we first met in Manila in early February.

The Philippines has a reputation for being an extremely dangerous place for journalists; in 2009, 32 journalists were killed in provincial election violence. But the reputation belies one of the most freewheeling and diverse media climates in the region, a seed that was planted during the regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, when an alternative mosquito press rushed forward to challenge the government. As many pointed out to me during my visit, the death toll in the drug war, which has lasted more than half a year, is larger than the death toll under Marcos, who was ousted in 1986 after two decades in power.

Journalists and photographers who have covered the crackdown since it began express frustration that their work has not done more to alter public opinion, which stands strongly behind Duterte. They also have felt the urge to do more to help victims they come across on a given night, but are wary of crossing the line from neutral observer to active participant. Enter Brother Jun. Through his photography, he is amassing case profiles and material that can be used by his church as part of a larger program for victims, which includes financial assistance for poor families, trauma counseling, sanctuary for those in fear, and the possible filing of criminal complaints. On the other side, through his connections to the media, he can respond to tips from journalists who refer needy families to the church. Together, Brother Jun and his contacts in the press organized a controversial photo exhibit of crime scenes now on display at churches in the Philippines; he contributed about six of his own images. Raffy Lerma, a photographer for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, said Brother Juns involvement has been a game-changer. Other journalists echoed this sentiment to me privately. When he came into the picture he gave a different dynamic to it, Lerma says. Trying to describe the effect, he used a saying in Tagalog, the national language. Hulog ng langi: Sent from heaven.

When I arrived in Manila in late January, official anti-drug operations had supposedly been suspendedafter a South Korean businessman had been found dead in a police camp, creating an embarrassing scandal for Duterte. But there have been lulls before, and during the two weeks I was there, shootings slowed but did not cease. Duterte has suggested bringing in the army to take over the job from police. He also recently said he would continue the effort for his entire six-year term. Because of the crime associatedsomewhat dubiouslywith the high use of shabu, a cheap form of methamphetamine popular in the Philippines, the war here has enjoyed broad support from the public, even if some have recoiled from the violence used to wage it. The lack of public outcry has puzzled members of the press corps, while attracting the kind of international media attention that only comes to the Philippines during a natural disaster. At the height of it the cottage-sized Manila Press Corps building, which is attached to the Manila Police District, was packed with foreign journalists, all waiting to go to the next shooting. Back then, Go, who works for the Catholic news outlet UCAN, would show up at MPD and muse, Am I in the Philippines?

Though I sensed a natural weariness with the ongoing arrival of new journalists, members of the local media I spoke with seemed pleased with work from outsiders that, in their minds, was serious and struck a nerve. Many singled out the work of photographer Daniel Berehulak, whose images were widely shared in the Philippines.

The work of the night shift was so darkly fascinating that the shift itself became a subject for reportage, with stories focusing on the gritty side of the coverage. Murderous Manila: On the Night Shift, reads a recent headline in the New York Review of Books, adding the tagline The Execution Beat: Tracking the Philippines Drug War. The BBC has a piece on Manilas Brutal Nightshift, while the LA Times invites us to Meet the Nightcrawlers of Manila: A night on the front lines of the Philippines War on Drugs.

THE NIGHT SHIFT is indeed brutal. Go told me that he stopped counting the bodies after a while, and that it was difficult to edit the photos at night, because he could see the faces of the victims in his sleep. The night shift helped foster frustration. Its been almost seven months and we still dont understand what is going on, Go tells me, alluding to the complex mixture of police killings, disappearances, and murders whose links to the drug war are not always clear. Some of the nightcrawlers had developed an almost religious devotion to covering the shift amid fading local and international interest, doing it on their own time if not on a specific assignment from their newspaper or working with a foreign client as a fixer.

Brother Juns arrival tapped into the sense of helplessness and helped channel it. A tentative alliance was born. Much to the annoyance of Duterte, Catholic leaders have started speaking out against the war. Sending Brother Jun into the trenches was a significant, but scarcely covered, part of that effort. In December, Brother Jun and Go hatched the idea to display the portraits of crime scenes. The photos came from Brother Jun, Gowho contributed about half of themand from photographers covering the night shift. They were blown up and posted at the entrance of Brother Juns church, the Baclaran, 10 days before Christmas. Upwards of 100,000 people saw them, reacting with a mixture of support and backlash.

A man stares at a photo of a crime scene placed outside a church northwest of Manila. Photo: Eloisa Lopez.

Father Carlos Ronquillo, 61, the Superior at Baclaran Church, says the project succeeded. That exhibit is really photojournalism at its best. Yet you need a religious background for it to appeal. Because if you just put it in a public place its not going to work, its not going to be very effective, he says. It spawned a deep thinking in many of the people. I think that you begin to see now that people are asking questions. Soon other churches called up and asked if they could use the images. They are now part of a roving exhibit. Ronquillo said the collaboration between the church and the media was a first. No one from the church sector ever thought of it.

Before joining him at night, I talked with Brother Jun over coffee at the Baclaran Church, which is off a busy thoroughfare in Manila crowded with food stands and taxis and small jeep-like buses. He was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and had a Sony camera slung over his arm. Since I was in college, in the seminary [in Manila], I was involved in documentation, I used to take photographs, he says. He grew up near the Baclaran and felt called to the religious life from a young age. He said he wanted to be a brother instead of a priest because this path allowed him to work closer with communities. We are freer than the priests. I made my choice during my immersion year in a farmworker community. In the Philippines if you are a cleric you are put on a pedestal. Sometimes that special place gives a bigger gap with the ordinary faithful, he says. Our life is more in the community, we live in the community.

His first church assignment as a photojournalist was in 1990 when he went to the aftermath of the 7.8-magnitude Luzon earthquake, which struck on July 16 and killed some 1,000 people. He joined church relief operations as part of the first team to go Central Luzon to cover the extent of the damage. Tasked with documentation, he stayed for two weeks, taking pictures of damaged roads and collapsed buildings. He was stunned by the scope of the destruction.

When Brother Jun takes photos, he is not angling for the images to be picked up by a wire service and published in mainstream news outlets. The photo display of crime scenes at churches was, in fact, one of the few times his work has ever been exhibited before a general audience. The church, which stores his images in an archive, uses them to assess damage for relief and rebuilding or to develop assistance programs.

In later years after the earthquake he carried out similar projects, documenting human rights and environmental abuses. But he always borrowed his camera from the church supply. In 2006, while he was on sabbatical, a deadly landslide hit Southern Leyte, part of an island in the central section of the archipelago. It buried an entire community and racked up a death toll comparable to the Luzon quake. Brother Jun bought his first camera and went to the scene. He saw that part of a mountain had collapsed. It was a school day, so the whole population of the school was buried, he tells me in a conversation over the phone after our first meeting. Elementary, all the kids.

HIS FIRST ENCOUNTER with the drug war involved the families of victims, who came to the church begging for help with funeral costs. They just kept coming. He wanted to do more. He was already a member of the Photojournalism Center of the Philippines, and he knew some photographers. I need to go out at night, he thought. The church management endorsed the idea. So I joined the nightcrawlers.

He started on December 1. The first murder was one of mistaken identity. They were just looking for a name. The name is Michael, he says. In the drug war, the authorities have lists of suspected drug users, petty criminals, or others who have, for whatever reason, run afoul of the system. The names are sometimes based on previous arrests, sometimes gathered by local officials. In an approach called Operation Knock and Plead, authorities went into neighborhoods asking for names, reading off a list. Some surrendered. But encounters with law enforcement didnt always end peacefully. In this case, Brother Jun said, the man was just a streetsweeper. He was shot in the leg, he says. He died. According to him, the police report said the man fought back.

After Michael, another one and another one, Brother Jun adds, referring to the number of bodies that were dropping in drug-related killings on nights he ventured into the field. In one night, 16. He works Monday through Saturday, 9 pm until around 3 or 4 am, then sleeps and resumes his duties at the church. One night, a photographer asked him: Brother Jun, what do you think. Will the Baclaran community allow us to do an exhibition?

I asked him why he thought it was a good idea. For awareness. People are sleeping, he says. When the photos went up, there was a lot of reaction. Some were angry. It was Christmas time. They didnt want to see poor dead people shot in the street laying in a pool of blood. There were calls and comments on the churchs Facebook page. There was media coverage. A pro-Duterte blogger posted a video that was shared thousands of times on Facebook, racking up 1.2 million views, Brother Jun says. They were accused of collaborating with the opposition.

But after three days, four days. [there were] a lot of congratulatory messages, he says. One family told them: We had a son killed. Churches have also held masses for victims. Three sets of the photos were printed, and 13 parishes have requested them. The tentative plan is to rotate them monthly.

A spokesman for Duterte, who himself has called for a showdown with corrupt priests, responded by calling the anti-drug crackdown a reign of peace.'

Their work presaged a shift in the Catholic church in general after months of dithering on how strongly to come out against the drug war. On February 5, sermons delivered at masses in the Philippines called the war a reign of terror. A spokesman for Duterte, who himself has called for a showdown with corrupt priests, responded by calling the anti-drug crackdown a reign of peace.

The officials of the [Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines] are apparently out of touch with the sentiments of the faithful who overwhelmingly support the changes in the Philippines, Ernesto Abella, the spokesman, said in a statement.

I ask Brother Jun which crime scene affected him most. He recalls a case in which a man in his 60s had been killed. It was inside the house, Brother Jun says. The family members were really angry with the media. But one agreed to an interview. He repeated what they told the cameras. Please stop killing. Mr President, please stop this killing. They just killed my father. He was 64 years old. He was blind; he could hardly see. But the police report said he fought back, had a gun. In many shootings involving police, the officers have cited self-defense. The scene moved him to tears. I just covered my face and just kept shooting.

Brother Jun Santiago. Photo: Eloisa Lopez

The war on drugs is also a war of information. In the Philippines, there were 47 million active Facebook users in 2015almost half the population. Dutertes campaign leveraged social media to help him crush his opponents. With the drug war, online trolling and one-sided news sites have shifted focus to silence critics. The parallels with the social media landscape that saw the rise of President Donald Trump are clear. Just as journalists in the US now struggle to be heard amid the din of alternative facts, the media in the Philippines face intense pushback online. The same tool that gave us power has been turned against us, Maria Ressa, the CEO of Rappler, tells me one afternoon at the all-digital websites slick office in Pasig City, a 30-minute drive from Manilas central business district. The pro-Duterte Facebook groups, bots, and fake accounts are outpacing and overwhelming traditional media. They have clear messages that are meant to influence the public, she adds. This is what were facing.

Moving the photo exhibit from Baclaran to other churches meant more people would see the images. By the time I arrived, they had gone to Our Lady of Victory Chapel northwest of Manila. One morning I went to see them, accompanied by a translator. Similar to the setup at Baclaran, they had been blown up, put on canvas, and placed between two upright posts, like miniature billboards. Instead of being around the church, or in a meeting hall nearby, they had been posted on the road leading to the entrance. That meant even non-church goers walking down the street or driving saw them. In the hour we spent there, dozens of people stopped to gaze at the images. Cars slowed down to take a look. Theres one there, you can see the blood, a teenager said to a younger kid. The photos were not sanitized or blurred. Bodies lay on the street, bloodied, normally with police in the background. The neighborhood itself was calm, middle class, residential, with flowerbeds and frangipani trees in the grounds leading up to the stone chapel, where women were cutting flowers in preparation for a wedding.

Escarda Wilfredo Bernabe, who maintains small buses in a town nearby, stopped to look. Coincidentally, he was a former user, though he said he stopped doing drugs years ago. He felt sympathy for the victims. Why would you kill them? he wonders. I am sad because I know they had a chance. He recounted a turbulent life involving political activism, drug use, and being institutionalized. It hurts because I believe in a higher being, but it seems these days, humans act like gods. Joanna Estabillo, a 33-year-old who works in catering, was walking by further up the road. At first, she asked if the killings in the photos were specific to the area. She said the effort to raise awareness was helping the issue. A third person we interviewed illustrated the other, more robust, side of the debate. Nita Cayetano, 70, said she thought the drug war should continue, and that the authorities had not done enough. She also somehow misinterpreted the purpose of the images, viewing them as warnings or cautionary tales. Keep doing drugs and youll end up like this. Even if they put up these photos, the users wont be scared, she says. Her area was still affected. There are still a lot of assholes in my community.

There are still a lot of assholes in my community.

I STILL COULDNT BELIEVE how fastBrother Jun was driving. We had been flying through the streets for about 15 minutes now but had covered a lot of territory since the initial call about the crime scene came in at around 3:30 am. When a car did not respond to beeping or tailing, Go took out a small flashlight and and flickered it into its back windshield, creating an effect not dissimilar to a police cruiser attempting to pull over a driver. It worked every time.

We finally arrived in the neighborhood about 10 minutes later, but it took a while to find the exact street that led into the residential alley where the bodies were. Brother Jun was pulling over and asking questions. With help from neighbors, we finally located a small alley that led into a dozen other small alleys, inside a seemingly endless warren of dark passages. We got out and headed into the darkness. A light rain had fallen, and the ground was slippery. I could barely see a thing and realized why others were wearing headlamps as if they were miners. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight to illuminate the wet concrete. After several turns we arrived in a cramped alleyway with yellow police tape spread across it on either side. An older woman sat with her head in her hands as journalists tried to get answers. Two people had been shot by men in masks, local residents said later. They had entered through the other side of the street, which was frequented by shabu users. It was difficult to get more information. The area was so cramped that crime-scene investigators had to bring in a wooden ladder to try and enter through the window. They had to eventually bang on a neighbors door to get the bodies out of the closely knit houses, nothing more than collections of concrete block and corrugated tin. Brother Jun called out to Go. He had found a way to get a better view. He moved with the haste of a photographer trying to get the right shot. I followed.

We circled around a few alleyways and came to the other end of the scene, where the bodies were now being put on stretchers. Brother Jun knelt down under the crime-scene tape and snapped pictures of the wrapped-up corpse. They brought out one body on the stretcher, then had to go back and retrieve the other. Afterwards I thought about how many nights Brother Jun would continue to go out. Weeks? Months? I recalled something he said to me at the church. I doubt it will stop during Dutertes time, he says. That means six years. The drug problems are his masterpiece.

Excerpt from:

A man of God in the Philippines is helping document a bloody war on drugs - Columbia Journalism Review

In 2015, nearly 1.25 million people in the United Stateswere arrested for the simple possession of drugs. Moreover, Americas War on Drugs has led to unprecedented violence and instability in Mexico and other drug-producing nations. Yet in spite of billions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, drug abuse has not decreased.

The stigma of the addict has remained tried-and-true for decades, even centuries, and it affects every proposed solution to eliminating drug abuse and the drug trade, from treatment models to aggressive drug enforcement measures. With the solidification of the punitive drug control system in the 1970s and 1980s, years of stigmatizing individuals dependencies to substances like cocaine, derivatives of the poppy plant, and alcohol reached its logical conclusion: the addict was cast as a criminal. But if the stigma of the addict were removed altogether, many fear that drug addiction would increase to the overall detriment of society.

With the drug war concept growing increasingly unpopular, treatment policies have been touted as the next frontier in reducing drug abuse and crippling the drug trade. However, the success of treatment policies is more than simply discarding the War on Drugs. Its reckoning with the addict. If the treatment approach is to achieve widespread success, we must minimize our stigma of the addict in conjunction with creating more viable rehabilitative options that can successfully displace punitive drug control measures.

A look at how American society has stigmatized the addict over the last 100 years reveals how much work remains to be done.

Drug addicts have gone to great lengthsmonetarily, physically, emotionally, etc.to cure themselves of myriad addictions. In the 1930s, an experimental treatment known as the serum cure used heat plasters to raise blisters on the addicts skin. Upon withdrawing the serum from the blisters, the administers of the treatment then re-injected the serum directly into the addicts muscles multiple times over the course of the week that followed. Remarkable results were claimed from the serum cure.

Other miracle cures included horse blood injections, the infamous Keeley Cure, which introduced a substance into the body that allegedly contained gold, and placing the excrement of animals into substances like alcohol to induce aversion to them.

Those who did not turn to vogue, experimental treatments often resorted to substituting one substance addiction for another: cocaine for morphine or morphine for alcohol. It all depended upon which substance society deemed the more undesirable at the time.

At one point, the stigmatization of the addict proved so intense that some resorted to sterilization, especially in the age of eugenics. Addicts, as it went, did not have the right to pass on their undesirable addictions to their offspring or to society at large.

While the personal cost of such remedies was high for the addict, it was by no means as costly as enduring the sense of shame that came with being an addict in US society.

While todays addict is more likely to undergo a stay in a treatment facility, a prison, or on the street rather than an unusual, experimental cure, the stigma of the addict remains as sharp as ever, so much so that it prevents treatment resources from being made available to a greater portion of the population. It discourages addicts from seeking the help they need.

According to the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, only 14% of people struggling with drug dependency seek treatment. Treatment implies accepting the status as addict in the path to recovery, a step that for some is too gruesome to endure.

Contrary to popular belief, many of the architects of the US War on Drugs were politicians in favor of treatment approaches to drug abuse. The US anti-drug campaign was not initially intended to be a war per se, but instead an incredible mobilization of US resources to target widespread drug use in the 1960s and 1970s, a period wracked by civil unrest and opposition to authority figures.

But ultimately the desire to minimize crime overtook an increased focus on treatment. Mistakenly, drug control came to be associated with increasing numbers of non-white, lower class drug addictsalready undesirables. Soon the larger umbrella of crime prevention subsumed drug addicts, many who might have been successfully rehabilitated if the conditions proved more favorable. Tackling addiction then grew increasingly intertwined with making US cities and towns safer.

In time, leaders would mobilize supply control measures domestically and abroad, and soon an entire bureaucracy formed around criminalized drug control where the addict was the criminal. Those who advocated genuine treatment options from the 1970s onward fought a losing battle. This made sense given longer traditions of stigmatizing addicts and the intense pressures addicts faced to overcome their dependencies.

The question now is not whether we can fund more treatment programs to reduce drug addiction and move past the War on Drugs, but whether or not we discard the stigma of the addict, which undergirds any solution to drug abuse in our society. With drug control in the United States an inherently racialized, class-based phenomenon, its easier to stigmatize and blame than it is to rehabilitate.

While increasingly sophisticated treatment options and facilities have developed over time, our society is not yet in a position where we embrace our addicts, especially those of lower classes, races, and ethnicities. Although blacks and Latinos use and sell drugs at similar or lower rates to whites, they comprise nearly 60% of those being held for drug offenses at state prisons. Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs, according to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow.

As it stands, drug control fluctuates between two extremes: addiction as crime versus addiction as disease. For most of our recent history, we have subscribed to the former position. Treatment programs on a mass scale should be carefully constructed so that they promote the recuperating addict and his or her recovery post-addiction in a less stigmatizing environment. We must give addicts a second chance to be full citizens in our society capable of making a fresh start.

Perhaps the first step involves supporting campaigns that popularize the notion of seeing addiction as a disease through events and social media, such as National Recovery Month each September. Supporters of this cause offer support to addicts and their families and celebrate recovery. Could such awareness, if it grows powerful enough, then serve to inspire more aggressive political action?

In whatever direction we proceed, we must find a way to reckon with the stigma of the addict, an effort that has to be more powerful than the inclination to see the addict as a criminal.

Featured image credit: Chainlink by Unsplash. Public Domain via Pixabay.

Continued here:

Reckoning with the Addict and the U.S. War on Drugs - OUPblog - OUPblog (blog)