The Sunday Story: Life in the Shadow of the Philippines' Drug War

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4.5 • 52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

"They can just kill anyone."

Since 2016, thousands have been killed in the Philippines' war on drugs. The bloody campaign began under the Philippines' last president, Rodrigo Duterte, who said he would be "happy to slaughter" three million drug addicts in the country. When current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office in 2022, he promised to end this spree of state-sanctioned killings of alleged drug users and sellers, and focus on rehabilitation instead.

In today's episode of The Sunday Story, NPR's Emily Feng travels to the Philippines to see what has come of Marcos' attempt to burnish the country's international reputation and to put an end to what most people in the Philippines now refer to as EJKs, or "extrajudicial killings." She found that the killings have continued. And she spoke to researchers, doctors, advocates, and victims' families to try to understand why.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story.
0:04.0	More than 8,000 people have been killed in the Philippines since 2016 in the country's so-called
0:10.4	War on Drugs.
0:12.4	The war began under the Philippines last president,
0:15.2	Rodrigo Duterte. While in power, Duterte claimed that at least 3 million people in
0:21.4	the Philippines were addicted to drugs.
0:23.4	There's a 3 million drug added.
0:25.2	And starting in 2016, he vowed to eliminate them.
0:29.4	That year,
0:33.0	the killings reached their peak, with thousands of thousands dead.
0:39.0	Bodies were sometimes left out for people to view as a warning.
0:44.4	The International Criminal Court is now investigating Duterte's campaign.
0:49.4	But Duterte is no longer in office.
0:51.9	In the Philippines, presidents are only allowed to serve a single six-year term, and in
0:57.2	2022, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took over. He vowed to end the killing and restore the country's international
1:05.2	reputation. The campaign against illegal drugs continues, but it has taken on a
1:11.0	new face.
1:15.3	To understand more about what's happening now in the Philippines, I'm joined by NPR's
1:20.4	Emily Fang.
1:21.7	She recently returned from a reporting trip there.
1:24.0	Hi Emily.
1:31.0	Hey Aisha.
	...

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