By: New York Times
Inside President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines, our photojournalist documented 57 homicide victims over 35 days.
YOU HEAR A MURDER SCENE before you see it: The desperate cries of a new widow. The piercing sirens of approaching police cars. The thud, thud, thud of the rain drumming on the pavement of a Manila alleyway — and on the back of Romeo Torres Fontanilla.
Tigas, as Mr. Fontanilla was known, was lying facedown in the street when I pulled up after 1 a.m. He was 37. Gunned down, witnesses said, by two unknown men on a motorbike. The downpour had washed his blood into the gutter.
The rain-soaked alley in the Pasay district of Manila was my 17th crime scene, on my 11th day in the Philippines capital. I had come to document the bloody and chaotic campaign against drugs that President Rodrigo Duterte began when he took office on June 30: since then, about 2,000 people had been slain at the hands of the police alone.
More than 35,600 people have been arrested in antidrug operations the government calls Project Tokhang. The name is derived from a phrase meaning “knock and plead” in Cebuano, Mr. Duterte’s first language.
In affluent neighborhoods of gated communities and estates, there is, indeed, sometimes a polite knock on the door, an officer handing a pamphlet detailing the repercussions of drug use to the housekeeper who answers. In poorer districts, the police grab teenage boys and men off the street, run background checks, make arrests and sometimes shoot to kill.
Government forces have gone door to door to more than 3.57 million residences, according to the police. More than 727,600 drug users and 56,500 pushers have surrendered so far, the police say, overcrowding prisons. At the Quezon City Jail, shown in the middle photo below, inmates take turns sleeping in any available space, including a basketball court.
MY NIGHTS IN MANILA would begin at 9 p.m. at the police district press office, where I joined a group of local reporters waiting for word of the latest killings. We would set off in convoys, like a train on rails, hazard lights flashing as we sped through red traffic lights.
I kept daily diaries and audio recordings of these overnight operations, working with Rica Concepcion, a Filipino reporter with 30 years of experience.
We joined the police on numerous stings. We also went on our own to the places where people were killed or bodies were found. The relatives and neighbors we met in those places often told a very different story from what was recorded in official police accounts.
“NANLABAN” IS WHAT THE POLICE call a case when a suspect resists arrest and ends up dead. It means “he fought it out.” That is what they said about Florjohn Cruz, 34, whose body was being carted away by a funeral home when I arrived at his home in the poor Caloocan neighborhood just before 11 p.m. one night.
His niece said they found a cardboard sign saying “Pusher at Adik Wag Tularan” — “Don’t be a pusher and an addict like him” — as they were cleaning Mr. Cruz’s blood from the floor near the family’s altar, shown in the middle photo below.
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