Colonel Romeo Caramat oversaw the bloodiest day in the “war on drugs” in the Philippines — 32 people killed in 24 hours in the province north of Manila where he was police chief in 2017.
Now the Philippine National Police head of drug enforcement, Caramat said that ultra-violent approach to curbing illicit drugs had not been effective.
“Shock and awe definitely did not work,” Caramat told Reuters in an interview, speaking out for the first time on the issue. “Drug supply is still rampant.”
Photo: Reuters
Caramat said that the volume of crime had decreased as a result of the drug war, but users could still buy illegal drugs “any time, anywhere” in the Philippines.
He said he now favored a new strategy. Rather than quickly arresting or killing low-level pushers and couriers, he wants to put them under surveillance in the hope they lead police to “big drug bosses.”
Three-and-a-half years after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte launched his war on drugs with a call to kill addicts and traffickers, his signature policy has failed in many key objectives, police officers, health professionals and government officials say.
Duterte’s spokesman, Salvador Panelo, did not respond to requests for comment on Caramat’s statements, but on Jan. 6, responding to a request from Reuters for comment on the anti-drug campaign, Panelo said: “We are winning the war on drugs.”
However, Duterte has repeatedly said in speeches and interviews that the anti-drugs campaign has fallen short, blaming endemic corruption for undermining enforcement and the absence of a death penalty for failing to deter crime.
Critics say that problems with the drug war run deeper, pointing to a failure to target high-level drug traffickers, cut the supply of drugs and invest in rehabilitation.
“Heavy suppression efforts marked by extra-judicial killings and street arrests were not going to slow down demand,” Bangkok-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Southeast Asia and Pacific representative Jeremy Douglas said. “There has to be a focus on prevention and public health, coupled with intelligent policing that takes on transnational crime.”
Caramat’s criticism of the tactics that marked his tenure as Bulacan province’s police chief is remarkable given the nationwide fame he enjoyed for the killings, and the rapid promotions that followed.
After news emerged of the one-day death count in Bulacan in August 2017, local media reported Duterte saying: “Let’s kill another 32 every day. Maybe we can reduce what ails this country.”
Caramat estimates “hundreds” died in Bulacan when he was police chief.
The Philippine government says 5,532 people have been killed in anti-drug police operations nationwide since the middle of 2016.
Human rights groups suspect the nationwide death toll is much higher. Amnesty International in June last year said in a report that “evidence points to many thousands more killed by unknown armed persons with likely links to the police.”
Caramat said that those killed on his watch violently resisted arrest, but agreed with critics that the anti-drugs strategy has mostly targeted low-level operatives.
“For almost three years, we are arresting the street pusher or the courier. After we have arrested the drug courier, we stopped,” he said in the interview conducted in December last year.
After a brief pause when the drug war was declared, transnational crime groups have flooded the nation with crystal meth — the most popular illegal drug in the Philippines, known locally as shabu, law enforcement officers, government officials and experts say.
Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo, a political rival of Duterte who was appointed “drugs tsar” last year, but fired 18 days later for “failing to introduce new measures” among other alleged shortcomings, said in a report handed to the president last month that the inability to constrict the supply of illicit drugs had been a “massive failure.”
The report added that “attention and resources were disproportionately focused on street-level enforcement.”
After being fired, Robredo said that the government was “afraid of what I might discover.”
Panelo criticized Robredo’s “baseless extrapolations” on drug supply at the time, saying that drug lords had been “neutralized” and that the crime rate had fallen.
Crystal meth seizures climbed in the past year and were on track to more than double last year, data supplied to the UNODC by the Philippines showed.
However, the average retail price for crystal meth, at US$136 per gram, is below the US$164 it cost when the war on drugs began in 2016, data showed.
The cheaper prices suggests that far more of the drug is reaching the streets than is being stopped, Douglas said.
A US$50 million drug bust in November last year highlighted the oversupply, Caramat said.
More than 370kg of crystal meth was allegedly found stacked in a wardrobe in a flat rented by a suspected Chinese drug trafficker, but “it turned out that was just the leftovers,” Caramat said.
On the trafficker’s phone were pictures of tonnes of crystal meth stored elsewhere in the Philippines, he said.
Efforts to cut demand for drugs, including treatment and counseling for the estimated 1.3 million addicts, have also been hampered by lack of funding and poor organization, analysts and officials say.
Government data show that in-patient treatment at rehabilitation centers nationwide dropped from 5,648 in 2016 to 5,477 in 2018.
With minimal funding allocated to rehabilitation, most addicts have been unable to access even community-based, out-patient programs, officials and health workers say.
“We were caught with our pants down when the war on drugs started,” said Benjamin Reyes, chairman of the drug reduction committee of the Philippine Dangerous Drugs Board, a government agency.
Rehabilitation is now a priority for the government and funding is set to rise this year, Reyes added.
Government data show that 500 people were killed in the drug war last year, which compared with 3,000 killed in the first year of the campaign, but rights activists are skeptical that a major shift in the anti-drug strategy is in the works.
As recently as November last year, Duterte spoke of killing “drug personalities” and throwing their bodies into Manila Bay.
Philippine Police Chief Lieutenant General Archie Gamboa, Caramat’s superior, in December last year was quoted in the Philippine Star as saying that police had been too tolerant combating drug offenders and urged officers to “neutralize” them if they felt under threat.
Gamboa did not respond to a request for comment.
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