How Nationalism Helps Duterte’s War on Drugs

By now, the war on drugs launched by President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines has already made international headlines. The New York Times recently won a Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for their interactive story on the spate of killings in Metro Manila, showing pictures of dead bodies lying face first on the ground and soaked in their own blood. Some of the corpses were found on the streets drenched in the rain and wrapped tightly in packing tape like a mummy, a scene which could have been lifted straight from a noir novel. In one particularly goosebumps-inducing photo, half-naked cadavers are seen stacked on top of each other, gray skin to gray skin, inside a funeral parlor.

But perhaps the most iconic photograph of the drug war is a shot taken during its early days in July—a picture of a barefoot woman sitting on the ground, holding the lifeless body of her common-law husband. Some have compared it to Michelangelo’s Pieta, a sculpture of the Virgin Mary cradling the newly crucified Jesus in her lap.

It is a sad tale of life imitating art, but the presence of a familiar cardboard beside the scene shatters the veneer of imagination and allows reality to strike heavily like a sledgehammer. The placard bore a message written in black ink: “I am a drug pusher. Don’t be like me.” A drawing of what seems to be a shotgun is sitting in between the lines, colored properly in bold.

The man is Michael Siaron, 29, a cycle rickshaw driver plying routes in Pasay City, south of Manila. The woman is Jennelyn Olaires, 26, a part-time helper in a shop selling mobile phone accessories. They are not biblical characters; they are real people. Now, one of them is dead, and the other is left to live a life in grief and constant fear.

Czar Dancel, the photojournalist behind the lens, recounted the events leading to his capture of one of the most painfully memorable pictures he has ever taken in his career. It was near midnight when he and his colleagues in the night shift heard about a shooting incident in Pasay Rotonda, a busy district near a major train station in the Philippine capital. The group headed to the area in a convoy of around 10 cars.

By then, three weeks into Duterte’s presidency and full-scale drug war, they were already used to the drill: monitor the radio for incidents, rush to the scene, and then shoot photos. What they did not know at that time, however, was that the scene awaiting them was nothing like they had ever seen before.

“We were stunned. All of us paused for a moment,” Dancel said. The photojournalists had to gather themselves before they sprung to action and started shooting, shocked as they were by the scene in front of their eyes.

The whole scene, captured by Dancel in a bird’s eye view photograph: Olaires was inside the police tape securing the area, clutching Siaron in her arms as she cried. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered around as cameras shone a light on the couple, as if they were only from a dramatic climax of a primetime soap opera.

Dancel himself was standing only a few yards away when Olaires met his eyes and spoke. “She said, ‘Help me! Let's take him to the hospital. Sir, please help me! Don't take photos. Have mercy!’ She was pleading to us,” he recalled.

Remembering her cracking voice, Dancel confessed he has been ridden with guilt and plagued by nightmares since then. “I am a nursing graduate; I know basic first aid. But I did nothing. It was hard for my conscience,” he said.

It is only a normal reaction, especially after witnessing the immediate aftermath of a cold-blooded murder. Siaron was routinely waiting for passengers when two gunmen in a

motorcycle shot him dead, making him another unaware victim to the fabled riding-in-tandem modus operandi at work. Olaires, at home at that time, ran to the street without bothering to wear slippers when a neighbor told her what happened to her partner.

“I felt so sorry for them. I am only human, too,” Dancel said.

Public approval

A significant chunk of the country, however, does not appear to be disturbed by the killings and actually approves of the drug war, as violent as it has been. According to a survey conducted by Social Weather Stations in December 2016, 85 percent of Filipinos are satisfied with the anti-drug campaign. Incidentally, 94 percent said it is important to capture the suspects alive, but the satisfaction rating for the drug war in general still suggests that people are willing to overlook the number of deaths.

Since Duterte came into power, thousands of people have been killed in the war on drugs. The local media reported that the death toll has reached more than 7,000 people, but the police refuted that number and said that only 2,602 drug suspects have “died” in their operations. In a March 27 interview with CNN Philippines, police chief Ronald Dela Rosa explained that of the separate 6,011 homicide cases recorded since July 2016, a total of 1,398 killings have been

determined to be drug-related while 828 were unrelated to drugs. The remaining 3,785 are still under investigation.

Even with the police clarification, the fact remains that at least 4,000 people have been killed in nine months due to drug-related offences. As the international media began to report on the drug war, institutions like the United Nations and the European Union, as well as human rights organizations like Amnesty International, began to express concern on the situation.

In their attempts to make sense of what is happening in the country under Duterte, the international media has come up with three explanations. One is that the Filipino people have had enough of the criminality on the streets and they were glad that the government is finally doing something about it. Another is that Filipinos have blind faith on the president, drawn by his charisma and image as a man of the people. And lastly, that the people do not care as much about the killings due to a utilitarian belief that the drug war is ultimately for the benefit of the majority of the population.

Each—or maybe even all three—of the explanations may have a ring of truth to them. But in the end, what could have made a predominantly Roman Catholic nation of a hundred million people, so conservative in its views to remain the only country in the world that does not allow divorce, condone mass killings?

The answer, perhaps, is something that the media already brushed upon but was unable to pinpoint: nationalism.

Nationalism begins with resentment

Duterte has been compared to Donald Trump several times before—the loose mouth, the populism, the misogyny. The media had field days over his controversial quotes and highlighted every curse word he uttered, but what they missed is the strong nationalist rhetoric contained in the Philippine president’s speeches.

Trump talks about making America great again and putting America first, but Duterte’s nationalism takes a subtler form and often gets overshadowed by sound bite material. Consider, for instance, what he said about drug offenders in his interview with Aljazeera: “You destroy my country, I will kill you.” Threatening murder is understandably headline fodder, especially coming from a head of state, but what came before it is arguably of greater interest: invoking national welfare.

Nationalist sentiment is a recurring theme in Duterte’s speeches. In the State of the Nation Address he delivered in July, nearly a month into his presidency, he said: “Human rights cannot be used as a shield or an excuse to destroy the country.” In his state visit to China in October, he declared the Philippines’ military and economic separation from the United States.

Tabish Khair, a professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, says that present form of nationalism thrives from the growing resentment of people not towards foreign citizens per se but towards the effects of what he calls “uncontrolled finance capital.”

“All the money that went into providing education, social services, health facilities, they’ve all been cut. And they’ve all been cut in the name of, ‘oh, we have to save.’ But what are we saving for? We have to save because we have to pay back these national debts. We have to keep these corporations and banks going,” Khair said.

“Social capital is being converted to finance capital, you can say that,” he added. “When social capital is cut and suddenly you have to pay more for your train ticket, your child cannot get into a good school, hospital facilities become bad, of course ordinary citizens feel it. But they

cannot see the reason why it’s happening, because that’s too abstract.”

This blind spot makes it easier for politicians to use that resentment and redirect it to push their own political agenda. “What [citizens] do understand is that their lifestyle is being affected, their facilities are deteriorating, and they need to blame it on someone.”

Suzette Pasustento, a community website publisher who voted for Duterte in the May 2016 elections, indeed shared this resentment to the declining quality of life in the Philippines, pushing her to support the president. She spoke at length about the poor state of Filipino farmers, the difficulty of setting up a business in the country, the worsening traffic situation in Metro Manila, the perennially low minimum wage.

And because she is a former Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), she also vented her frustrations on the practice of sending people to work abroad—what she calls “modern day slavery” after witnessing the exploitation of her fellow expatriate workers, especially those on blue collar jobs, at the hands of their employers.

So when Duterte, during his state visit in Japan last year, told the Filipino community there that he will do everything in his power to employ workers like them at home in the future, Pasustento was moved and that strengthened her faith in the Philippine president.

“There’s something wrong and Duterte’s administration might just change it. For that I support him,” she said.

Duterte secured a landslide victory in the Philippines elections in May 2016 and has maintained a high trust rating in the early stage of his presidency. He won 39 percent of the votes in the five-man presidential race, a whopping 15.6 percentage points more than his closest competitor, former Senator and cabinet member Mar Roxas. He also enjoys a 76 percent trust rating as of March 2017, which suggests that Filipinos in general support his political agenda.

Parallels with the West

Duterte has repeatedly used nationalist logic—though not readily apparent, given the media mileage of his more controversial quips—in justifying the drug war. During the campaign, he said that drug trafficking is a “national security threat” and an “invasion of a new kind.” He also warned that the country is slowly becoming a “narco-state.”

Such pronouncements run parallel to nationalist sentiments in the West about the European migrant crisis. One end of the polarized public opinion fears that the refugee wave coming out of war-torn Syria would allow terrorism to spread to Europe, making the issue a matter of national security especially due to the European Union’s porous borders. A more extreme position is the concern that that Muslims are invading the continent in droves and will soon be enforcing Sharia law in their host countries.

But while there is no such ethnic tension involved in Duterte’s drug war, the logic of creating the Other and pitting it as an adversary of a unified people is essentially the same.

During his tenure as mayor of Davao, he had already been linked to vigilante groups purging criminals in his turf. In October 2015, a month before he announced his presidential candidacy, he actually told drug lords and drug pushers to leave the city in 48 hours or face death.

The nationwide war on drugs basically operates on the same logic, only on a much larger scale. When Duterte speaks of protecting the country from drugs, he is pushing the offenders outside his protective wing, essentially meaning that they are not part of the Philippines he wants

to defend. What they are a part of is his so-called “narco-state,” the equivalent of an enemy foreign nation-state in Duterte’s nationalism.

This could be interpreted as a variation of nationalist ideology. According to Christoffer Kølvraa, an associate professor in the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University, today’s form of nationalism, or what some scholars call neo-nationalism, is a combination of populism and classical nationalism. It is both anti-elite and anti-immigration (or in the case of

Duterte’s Philippines, anti-Other

“Neo-nationalism, as defined for example by Andrew Gingrich, differs from classical nationalism especially in that the primary ‘Others’ are no longer nation-states but instead immigrant populations, internationally oriented elites and supranational institutions,” Kølvraa said in an e-mail.

The Philippine president easily ticks the last two boxes. Many of his supporters see him as their champion against the ruling class composed of traditional politicians, and Duterte himself scoffed at the United Nations, the EU, and even the International Criminal Court in previous occasions.

The first box can be understood in this sense: Duterte, when he spoke of a narco-state, does not really intend to fight an abstract piece of land. He is going after people—drug offenders—the same way that neo-nationalists in the West are going after immigrants and refugees, all in the name of saving the rest of the country from the threat of their presence. His supporters have adopted this reasoning, thus the approval for the brutal crackdown.

“When you deal with drugs you have to be armed,” said Pasustento, who described herself as politically apathetic before deciding to vote for Duterte. “That’s the reality. It’s gonna be bloody because these people are illegal and illegal means they’re gonna protect it with their lives because their lives depend on it.”

Those who see the carnage with their own eyes like Dancel, however, could only hope that things would change on Duterte’s war on drugs.

“I wish it’s not like this that people are instantly killed,” he said. “I wish we could give these people a chance even though they are addicts. Give them a chance, give them hope, show them love. They will feel it and they will change. There's still hope for them.”