The Philippine police have received cash payments for executing drug suspects, planted evidence at crime scenes and carried out most of the killings they have long blamed on vigilantes, two senior officers who are critical of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” said.
In the most detailed insider accounts yet of the drug war’s secret mechanics, the two senior officials challenged the government’s explanations of the killings in interviews with Reuters.
Nearly 9,000 people, many small-time users and dealers, have been killed since Duterte took office on June 30 last year. Police say about a third of the victims were shot by officers in self-defense during legitimate anti-drug operations. Human rights monitors believe many of the remaining two-thirds were killed by paid assassins operating with police backing or by police disguised as vigilantes — a charge the police deny.
Illustration: Constance Chou
The two senior officers, one a retired police intelligence officer and the other an active-duty commander, claimed the killings are orchestrated by the police, including most of those carried out by vigilantes. They spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“It is the Philippine National Police doing it,” the retired intelligence officer said. “This killing machine must be buried six feet under the ground.”
He said he was angry about the impact of the killings on police discipline and wanted “to put Duterte on the defensive.”
Reuters was unable to independently verify if the police are behind vigilante killings.
The president’s office and the Philippine police did not respond to questions.
‘ONLY THE POOR’
The intelligence officer has authored an unpublished 26-page report on the conduct of the drug war in an effort to organize opposition to Duterte’s campaign.
The report, titled The State-Sponsored Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines, provides granular detail on the campaign’s alleged methods, masterminds and perpetrators. The document has been shared with leaders of the Catholic Church in the Philippines and with the government-funded Commission on Human Rights.
Some of the report’s accusations against individuals could not be confirmed by Reuters; the news agency is therefore not publishing the full document.
However, many of its findings support and expand upon previous investigations of the drug war by Reuters and independent human rights monitors.
The report claims that police are paid to kill not just drug suspects, but also — for 10,000 pesos (US$201) a head — rapists, pickpockets, swindlers, gang members, alcoholics and other “troublemakers.”
It also claims that civilian members of the so-called “Davao Death Squad,” which rights activists allege killed hundreds of people in Duterte’s hometown of Davao, were drafted to “augment and assist” the police’s nationwide anti-drug operation.
The report does not provide documentary evidence for its accusations, which the intelligence officer said were based on accounts from 17 serving or former policemen, including the interviewed commander.
The police commander said he agreed to talk because he was upset that authorities are targeting only petty drug suspects.
“Why aren’t they killing the suppliers?” he asked. “Only the poor are dying.”
The second half of the report is largely political in nature, asserting that Duterte has close ties to communist forces in the Philippines.
Many in the military and police are concerned by what they see as Duterte’s leftist sympathies. Since taking office, he has released communist rebels from prison to restart peace talks.
The report also calls the drug war a “social cleansing” campaign similar to that launched in Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) China, with Duterte aiming to have drug addicts “physically eliminated.”
NEW LEADS
The Commission on Human Rights has reviewed the report and the accounts could open new leads in ongoing investigations, commission chairman Chito Gascon said.
Church officials confirmed receiving the report as well.
“We should do all we can to follow any lead that could ultimately shed light on these killings with the view to ultimately holding the perpetrators to account,” Gascon said.
The fresh claims come amid growing criticism of the drug war. The nation’s influential Catholic Church in February called it a “reign of terror,” and it has also sparked street protests and lawsuits.
Philippine National Police Director-General Ronald Dela Rosa halted police operations for most of February after it emerged that an anti-drug unit had kidnapped and murdered a South Korean businessman last year. The killings continued, but at a slower pace, and Dela Rosa on March 6 announced that the police were resuming their drug operations.
In addition, former policeman Arturo Lascanas last month testified in the Philippine Senate about his role in vigilante-style killings in the southern city of Davao, where Duterte was once mayor, the second Senate witness to link Duterte to the Davao Death Squad.
Duterte denies ordering any killings, either as president or mayor.
In a subsequent interview, Lascanas said that for over a decade he was paid for carrying out the liquidation of drug suspects and criminals.
In the early 1990s, he was paid between 3,000 and 5,000 pesos for each of the “jobs” he performed, he said, and by the early 2000s he was earning tens of thousands of pesos for each operation.
Lascanas said he had no documentary proof of the payments. He has since left the country.
In the past nine months, police acknowledge having shot dead more than 2,600 suspects during their operations, saying such shootings occur after suspects open fire on undercover officers trying to catch them dealing drugs.
However, these so-called “buy-busts” are actually well-planned executions, the commander said, adding that targets are chosen from lists of suspects drawn up by police and local officials, who later coordinate to unplug security cameras in the neighborhood where a killing is planned. According to the report, street lamps are also switched off.
“There is no such thing as a legitimate buy-bust,” the commander said. “The dealers know the cops and won’t sell to them.”
Instead, a team of police operatives will execute the target, who is almost always unarmed, before planting guns and drugs at the crime scene to justify the use of deadly force, he said.
“We have to plant evidence for the legality of the operation,” he said. “We are ordered to do these operations, so we have to protect ourselves.”
The commander said officers put the gun in the dead suspect’s hand and pull the trigger with the victim’s finger so forensic testing will show that the suspect fired a gun.
Police crime-scene investigators late last year told their fellow officers to place the guns at a slight distance from the suspects, rather than in their hands, to make things look more realistic, he said.
Most drug suspects in his precinct are shot by rookie cops who are either eager for the experience or nominated by their superiors, the commander said. The superiors refer to this as a “baptism by fire.”
Each team member is quickly paid according his role in the killing and the target’s value, he said.
REWARDS
According to the report, the cash “reward scales” for drug killings range from 20,000 pesos for a “street-level pusher and user,” to 50,000 pesos for a member of a neighborhood council, 1 million pesos for “distributors, retailers and wholesalers,” and 5 million for “drug lords.”
Police officers kill for money, the commander said, but also out of fear: Even the police are afraid of being included on a “watch list” of drug suspects drawn up by police and local officials.
Officials have been killed for not cooperating, he said, adding that he was aware of two cases, but he could not provide more details.
Reuters reported last year that the watch lists were effectively hit lists, with many of those named ending up dead, and in another investigation found that police officers were killing 97 percent of the suspects they confront in violent buy-bust operations, the strongest evidence yet that the police were summarily executing suspects.
Officers also cooperate because they know the police force’s flawed disciplinary system fails to adequately investigate even a fraction of the killings, meaning there is little chance they would get caught, the intelligence officer said.
One sign of the drug war’s success, the government says, is that more than 1 million users and pushers have voluntarily registered with the police, a process known as “surrendering.”
However, the commander said police are given a quota of “surrenderers,” and fill it by using city ordinances to arrest men who are drunk or shirtless — a misdemeanor known as “half-naked” — then forcing them to register as drug suspects.
Reuters learned of the intelligence officer’s 26-page report from him and interviewed two Catholic priests in Manila who said they had encouraged him to compile it. One of the priests said he edited the report; the other said he helped distribute it among a small group of clerics and human rights activists. Both are helping organize opposition to Duterte’s drug campaign.
The church’s initial reluctance to criticize Duterte’s drug war was prompted by a desire to “give him a chance” when he took office, one of the priests said, but the killings — along with the president’s overtures to communists — made many in the church feel their values were under attack.
The intelligence officer said he hoped the report would be used as evidence at the International Criminal Court. The Hague-based tribunal in October last year said it could prosecute suspects if the killings were “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.”
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