HE who claims that the bloody war against illegal drugs as a thing of the past, must be dreaming, says a group of scholars behind a study on the government’s campaign against illegal drugs.
According to Joel Ariate who forms part of the group behind a recent research project based at the University of the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s claim over his administration’s approach in its campaign against illegal drugs is a “plain and simple propaganda.”
Reacting to one of the highlights of the July 22 SONA, Ariate who is from the UP Third World Studies Center likewise took a swipe at the President’s supposed “bloodless” drug campaign.
“With the rhetoric of having a bloodless drug war, the tendency of the people is to forget that all these killings are still happening,’’ said Ariate, citing data showing 700-drug-related killings since Marcos Jr. became President.
“And without public intervention, without institutions looking in at the practices of this government, then we would be thinking that the drug war is quite over… but it’s not,” added.
In his SONA speech, Marcos said: “Our bloodless war on dangerous drugs adheres, and will continue to adhere, to the established ‘8 Es’ of an effective anti-illegal drugs strategy. Extermination was never one of them.”
Interestingly, UP’s Dahas Project also documented 342 drug-related deaths in 2022 and 359 killings from July 2023 to June 30 this year.
UP research associates Larah Vinda del Mundo and Vincent Halog in the UP study noted unidentified masked assailants on motorbikes – as claimed by witnesses, accounted for 135 killings or equivalent to 37.6 percent of the total number of drug-related deaths under the Marcos administration.
The rest, the study showed, were perpetrated by law enforcement groups tasked to undertake the illegal drugs operation.
“Despite several characterizations by Malacañang of a ‘bloodless drug war’—or, as claimed by some, ‘less bloody’—state agents remain the primary perpetrators of drug-related killings in the two years of the administration of Marcos Jr.,” the researchers said in the report released on July 20. (ANGEL F. JOSE)
