‘They are slaughtering us like animals’
Inside President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign in the Philippines, New York Times photojournalist Daniel Berehulak documented 57 killings in 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 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.
I witnessed bloody scenes just about everywhere imaginable — on the sidewalk, on train tracks, in front of a girls’ school, outside 7-Eleven stores and a McDonald’s restaurant, across bedroom mattresses and living-room sofas.
In another neighbourhood, Riverside, a bloodied Barbie doll lay next to the body of a 17-year-old girl who had been killed alongside her 21year-old boyfriend.
“They are slaughtering us like animals,” said a bystander who was afraid to give his name.
I have worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa’s Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death. What I experienced in the Philippines felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers’ summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes’ taking seriously Duterte’s call to “slaughter them all.”
He said in October, “You can expect 20,000 or 30,000 more.”
Beyond those killed in official drug operations, the Philippine National Police have counted more than 3,500 unsolved homicides since July 1, turning much of the country into a macabre house of mourning.
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, 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.
“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 neighbourhood 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 Cruz’s blood from the floor near the family’s altar.
His wife, Rita, told me, between pained cries, that Cruz had been fixing a radio for his 71-year-old mother when armed men barged in and shot him dead.
The family said Cruz was not a drug dealer, only a user of shabu, as Filipinos call methamphetamine. He had surrendered months earlier, responding to Duterte’s call, for what was supposed to be drug treatment. The police came for him anyway.
As my time in the Philippines wore on, the killings seemed to become more brazen. Police officers appeared to do little to hide their involvement in what were essentially extrajudicial executions. Nanlaban had become a dark joke.
“There is a new way of dying in the Philippines,” said Redentor C. Ulsano, the police superintendent in the Tondo district. He smiled and held his wrists together in front of him, pretending to be handcuffed. The same night Florjohn Cruz was killed, we found ourselves a few streets away an hour and a half later, at another home where a man had been murdered. It was raining that night, too.
We heard the wrenching screams of Nellie Diaz, the new widow, before we saw her, crumpled over the body of her husband, Crisostomo, who was 51.
Crisostomo Diaz grew up in the neighbourhood, and worked intermittently, doing odd jobs. His wife said he was a user, not a dealer, and had turned himself in soon after Duterte’s election. She still thought it unsafe for him to sleep at home, and told him to stay with relatives. But he missed his nine children, and had returned days before.
Crisostomo Diaz’s eldest son, J.R., 19, said a man in a motorcycle helmet kicked in the front door, followed by two others. The man in the helmet pointed a gun at Crisostomo Diaz, J.R. said; the second man pointed a gun at his 15-year-old brother, Jhon Rex. The third man held a piece of paper.
J.R. said the man in the helmet said, “Goodbye, my friend,” before shooting his father in the chest. His body sank, but the man shot him twice more, in the head and cheeks. The children said the three men were laughing as they left.