Many non-users included on Duterte’s drug crackdown hit list

MANILA — Every morning before dawn, Rosario Perez checks to make sure her sons are still alive. The three brothers, all in their 20s, sleep at the houses of friends and relatives, moving regularly, hoping that whoever may have been assigned to kill them won’t catch up with them.

They are not witnesses on a mob hit list, or gang members hiding from rivals. They are simply young men living in the Philippines of President Rodrigo Duterte.

“How could I not send them to hide?” Perez, 47, said after peeking in on two of her sons and phoning the third. “We can barely sleep out of fear.”

Nearly a year into Duterte’s violent anti-drug campaign, in which more than 4,000 people accused of using or selling illegal drugs have been killed and thousands of other killings are classified as “under investigation,” fear and mistrust have gripped many neighborhoods of Manila and other cities.

Residents are cobbling together strategies to hide and survive. Many young men are staying out of sight. Others have fled the urban slums, where most of the killings occur, and are camping out on farms or lying low in villages in the countryside.

The Roman Catholic Church has vocally opposed Duterte’s deadly campaign, and an underground network of churches and safe houses is offering sanctuary — quietly, to avoid the attention of the vigilantes responsible for much of the killing.

In the most heavily targeted slums, neighbors are wary of talking to each other, unsure who among them are police informers.

“What we’re seeing here is the rule of law being replaced by a system of fear and violence,” said Jose Manuel Diokno, a human rights lawyer in Manila.

Those who have gone into hiding are often people who think their names are on government watch lists of drug users. The lists are compiled by local officials using information supplied by the police and by informers, and include people who have surrendered to the authorities. They are not public, and it is unclear how some on them are marked for death.

Many on the lists are past or current users of shabu, the local name for the methamphetamine at the heart of Duterte’s anti-drug campaign. Many others are not.

Perez, for instance, says that two of her sons have never used drugs but that the third once did. He surrendered to the police, hoping he would be spared, and she has required all of them to take drug tests and has shared the results with neighborhood officials.

Still, she has been told that all three of their names are on a watch list, and a photo of her home has circulated with it. “With just a name and a photo, they’ll kill you,” she said.

The death threats are often passed along in whispered warnings between neighbors, anonymous text messages or handwritten notes.

In the single-room, concreteblock home she shares with her husband and two granddaughters, Perez catches sight of a news clip on a muted television playing in the background. Another killing: the thin, loose limbs of a young man zipped into a body bag.

Her eyes well up with tears, and her voice trembles. “That’s what I don’t want to happen to my sons,” she said.