When Rodrigo Duterte was running for president eight years ago, he vowed to order the police and the military to find drug users and traffickers to kill them. He said he would offer them immunity. In the months after, police officers and vigilantes mercilessly gunned down tens of thousands of people in summary executions.
Even now, two years after Duterte left office, there has been little legal reckoning with the wave of killings: Only eight police officers have been given prison sentences, in connection with just four cases, with one verdict that came this month. And though rights groups say that there have been fewer such killings since Duterte left, and far fewer involving agents of the government, a culture of violence and impunity has maintained a troubling hold in the Philippines.
But in recent months, the legacy of Duterte’s so-called war on drugs has slowly begun to get more official attention. Lawmakers are holding several public hearings into the violence unleashed by the former president’s effort to rein in drug use and trafficking. A lawyer said that Duterte’s office tallied more than 20,000 drug war-related deaths in the first 18 months of his term alone. Senior police officers spoke at the congressional hearing, as did victims’ relatives, who relived their horrors and again pleaded for justice.