Anti-Drug vigilante killings in the Philippines: War on Drugs, poverty and urbanity

Abstract

The Philippine drug war has been described as urban-centric, with its epicenter in Metropolitan Manila, and its terrain of death in urban slums and urban areas. This paper explores this urban-centricity, and investigates the urban form of cities with the highest numbers of drug war incidents and killings based on open-source spatial and statistical data. Using open-source software, this study yielded four maps to visualize the extent of the drug war. The findings reflect the urban nature of the “killing fields” and show how killings have taken place where urban poverty is located in high population density areas.

In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte rose to presidency with the promise of the Philippine drug war, a violent crackdown on the illicit methamphetamine or “shabu” industry in the country. The drug war enabled the police to target anyone involved in the illegal drug trade, from small-time street peddlers to drug lords. Anti-drug vigilante groups, allegedly formed by members of state security forces, openly killed people on the streets. At night, shooters on motorcycles evaded identification and capture by riding through interweaving, narrow street networks often found in areas with poor or absent urban planning.

The Philippine drug war was heavily criticized as a war on the poor. Moreover, the drug war is also glaringly urban. Manila and Quezon City, two of the largest cities within the wider Metropolitan Manila, account for more than 40% of all killings.

Manila’s urban space was transformed by the drug war. Researchers (Warburg and Jensen 2018) argue that the practice of bordering, or the “production and proliferation of new borders,” both physical and intangible, such as cordoned death zones or boundaries between friends and neighbors, created a “climate of fear.” Bordering is also characteristic of counter-insurgency, defined as the division of territories and relations, and the creation of places which are both unstable and dangerous. The drug war has, therefore, created an “illegible terrain of violence” in Manila, inspired by similar practices of counter-insurgency in the country’s history. In such landscapes, the urban poor bear the brunt of the drug war. “Killing fields” and “hotspots” are inhabited by poorer and more vulnerable urban dwellers. These are more prone to invisibility, which creates conducive conditions for drug war agents to elude transparency. While existing research into the drug war investigates city-level and barangay-level locations, the need for a spatial understanding of the drug war remains. This paper focuses the urbanness and urban form of places where the drug war manifested.

In this contribution, we ask: in which areas of the Philippines did anti-drug vigilante killings take place? Further, we pose the following sub-questions: what can be observed from the urban form of these places, particularly in terms of the building and street patterns? How is poverty characterized in these configurations?