Duterte's “War on Drugs” Rhetoric

Abstract

On 9 May 2016, Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines. The former mayor of the Southern Philippine city of Davao won the election on a platform of fighting illegal drugs, criminality, and corruption, and became infamous for tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings committed as part of his so-called “War on Drugs.” Of these killings, most deaths were attributed to civilian vigilantes, often operating in coordination with the police and in a context where Duterte's incendiary anti-drugs rhetoric had become tantamount to a “license to kill.”1 The resulting human rights violations caused shock and outrage among civil society in and outside of the Philippines. Despite tacit popular concern about the killings and other militarized policies, polling institutes continued to measure high levels of approval for the president until the end of his term.2 Although Duterte was not the first Philippine president to rely on a tough-guy approach to crime, his particular style of using this platform constitutes an unprecedented form of penal populism to win popular support against the backdrop of a performed crisis. Its success can be traced to many particularities in the context of the Philippines and at the same time can be placed in global trends of authoritarian populism.Duterte's election victory and his presidency have been analyzed from a variety of perspectives, including the lens of populism. This article builds on these preceding analyses and focuses on the power-consolidating impact of the “War on Drugs” rhetoric, including its mobilizing power not only against drug criminals themselves but also against the political opposition. Employing the theory of penal populism complemented with the idea of cosmic war, this research aims to explain how the “War on Drugs” rhetoric justifies and incites increased levels of violence against drug users and pushers and at the same time human rights activists and political opponents.The concept of penal populism as described by John Pratt3 helps us understand how punitiveness functions as focal point of Duterte's populist rhetoric and tool for consolidating his power. Although the specific manifestations of penal populism are contingent on the local circumstances of each country, certain common elements can be observed.First, penal populism centers on the rejection of an elite-controlled criminal justice system that is perceived as excessively lenient favoring the criminal over the victim of the crime and over law-abiding citizens in general. The assertion that criminals and prisoners have human rights is thought to be the pinnacle of a criminal justice system that disregards the interests and needs of “ordinary people.” Such penal elitism is considered as one specific manifestation of the ruling elite being generally distant and preoccupied with their own gain and therefore incapable of looking after the “people.”4 What follows is an overall rejection of deference to the traditional ruling class, civil servants, and expert opinion and the call for more citizen involvement in public institutions. In light of this, penal populism offers what it claims to be common-sensical solutions placing the interests of the victims at the center of penal policy.Second, penal populism feeds on the perception of a law-and-order crisis and the associated fear of crime and the criminal. Focusing on personalistic, anecdotal victim accounts in crime reporting, penal populism stresses the possible victimization of citizens and thereby exaggerates the immediacy of the threat.Third, penal populism taps into the fears of constituents by focusing on groups of criminals perceived as particularly monstrous. It juxtaposes idealized images of innocent victims with the animalistic Otherness of the criminal and the idea that crime is irreparably ingrained in offenders. Sex offenders in particular are often in the focal point of this narrative. Stressing the purity and defenselessness of the victims, the penal populist line of reasoning only allows for the conclusion that any intruder in this idealized image must be the antithesis of their victim: abnormal and inherently evil predators fully dictated by their sexual instincts and therefore unfit for rehabilitation. Utilizing such images of loathsome intrusions into the sanctity of family and society, removing the intruder becomes synonymous with restoring social order.Combining these three thematic strands—the elite unduly favoring criminals, the immediate threat for ordinary citizens to be victimized, and the inherently evil criminal preying on innocent victims—a more punitive stance towards criminals is seemingly justified. In the case at hand, however, Duterte's rhetoric—expressed in language that is deeply disruptive to the established norms of (political) conduct—not only argues for an intensification of existing crime control tactics like longer prison sentences or harsher prison conditions, but rather does away with the tenets of civilian law enforcement and calls for the killing of drug criminals as a first resort. In addition, addressing criminality is not framed as one of many areas of governance but rather as essential precondition to more fundamental changes to the entirety of the nation. Duterte's rhetoric suggests a more radical form of penal populism that rejects not only principles of law enforcement, but also the broader socioeconomic and political order in exchange for a vaguely formulated project of fundamentally transforming the country towards an improvement of living conditions for the general population. Thus, to understand the specific case of Duterte's penal populism, Pratt's theoretical approach is complemented with Juergensmeyer's conceptualization of “cosmic war” as the rhetoric of a broader, historical struggle used to justify or incite violence committed in pursuit of a superordinate goal. Although Juergensmeyer limits his analysis to terrorism, the rhetorical elements identified can also be found in justifications of state-sponsored violence.Juergensmeyer describes cosmic war as an “enormously important and historical struggle,” a fundamental dichotomy giving rise to an epic encounter between the cosmic forces of good and evil.5 Social history is consequentially organized in a linear story of persecution, conflict, and redemption between a clearly demarcated “Us” and “Them.” The power of cosmic war as a violence-inspiring concept lies in its momentum towards a goal that may lie far beyond someone's lifespan and can give meaning to sufferings experienced in the past. The goal of the cosmic war, the “victory,” is paramount in that it justifies all means to achieve it. In this context, the “cosmic war” narrative utilizes the religious language of sacrifice and martyrdom as essential attributes of the “cosmic hero.” Cosmic enemies, in contrast, are often described in subhuman, amorphous terms kept vague to allow the inclusion of anyone supporting or defending the primary target as secondary targets.6 The satanized portrayal of the enemy is characterized by their alleged rejection of the community's morality and the power to completely destroy the community. The combination of these qualities makes the victory of the enemy inconceivable, and, as a consequence, all other considerations become subordinate to defeating this enemy. Juergensmeyer's concept of “cosmic war” therefore highlights the way such narratives incite violence, namely by defining any hindrance to the historical struggle as cosmic foe whose victory would be unthinkable therefore necessarily leading to the conclusion that the hindrance needs to be eradicated.The “War on Drugs” was not only one of the defining policies of the Duterte presidency, but also central to his public speeches. It was often one of the first topics mentioned, continuously reaffirmed as a priority, and frequently reverted back to even when speaking about different topics in the course of the speech. Duterte's public speeches thus provide useful data to understand his specific way of justifying and inciting violence in the “War on Drugs.” The following analysis draws on seven speeches given by Duterte in the course of his presidency: his inaugural speech on 30 June 2016 and the six State of the Nation Addresses (SONA) delivered since then. Whereas the inaugural speech was held in the presidential palace, the SONAs were held in July of each year in front of a joint session of the Philippine Senate and House of Representatives. All seven speeches were broadcast on national television. The inaugural speech and SONA 2018 lasted for less than an hour, SONAs 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2020 took between one and a half and two hours, and SONA 2021 became the longest postrevolution address at almost three hours. This difference in length depends on whether or not Duterte went off his English script to give long intermediate pieces in Tagalog or Visayan. Duterte's SONAs are particularly interesting for this analysis because they have a wide reach in the population and constitute significant moments in each presidency to reveal policies and the overall framework for their implementation. Full transcripts of the speeches were obtained from news outlets and non-English parts were translated by an interpreter. By means of a content analysis of the translated speeches, thematic and linguistic elements of Duterte's “War on Drugs” rhetoric were identified. Codes corresponding to the main elements of the concepts of penal populism and cosmic war were developed and applied to the speeches using an evolving approach allowing the identification of additional coding categories throughout the analysis and thus finding nuances in Duterte's specific articulation of penal populism and of the idea of a cosmic war. As a result of this approach, codes not only included essential elements of the theoretical framework such as the language of crisis, the demonization of the drug criminal, and references to Duterte's personal heroism, but also overarching themes like national development or emancipation from foreign rule as integral parts of the “War on Drugs” rhetoric.The rejection of an elite-controlled criminal justice system, one of the three elements of penal populism, is reflected in Duterte's portrayal of the liberal democratic political elite as corrupt and overly lenient out-of-touch politicians7 who are captured by the drug criminal Other and “oblivious to the anguish and pleas of the weak and impoverished.”8 The highly publicized raids of luxurious cells inside the national prison in 2014 became a symbol of this alleged entanglement of the liberal democratic elite with high-level drug criminals and were invoked by Duterte as such.9 Accusations of the Manila-based political elite as manipulative and corrupt fed preexisting distrust of the ruling class and popular frustrations with the unfulfilled promises of social justice and economic equality of the liberal democratic regimes that followed the 1986 Revolution.10 Pointing in particular to Duterte's predecessor Benigno Aquino's perceived inadequacy to tackle everyday issues and deliver tangible change carries weight in the dismantling of the liberal democracy-human rights narrative because he was the son of revolution symbol and first post-Marcos president Cory Aquino.11 In line with this rejection of the political elite and utilizing feminization as a strategy to discredit opposition, Duterte repeatedly called critics “gay” or “weak” and reacted violently to criticism voiced by women such as opposition senator Leila de Lima or former chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.12 One major theme of this feminization is the alleged unwillingness of human rights-promoting politicians and activists to get their hands dirty for the good of the Filipino people: “when illegal drug operations turn nasty and bloody, advocates of human rights lash at—and pillory—our law enforcers and this administration to no end.”13 In his speeches, Duterte often placed such allegations against his opponents in direct contrast with his own approach to law-and-order: “neither do I intend to preside over the destruction of the Filipino youth by being timid and tentative in my decisions and actions.”14It is against the background of this alleged timidness of the liberal elite that Duterte constructs the crisis of criminality that constitutes the second element of penal populism. By means of exaggerated statistics and hyperbolized language of a looming narco-state, Duterte paints drug dependency and drug trafficking as an overwhelming crisis threatening the nation15: “it's so enormous that you are intimidated even just to make a move.”16 The usage of modalities makes this message even stronger: “I can only shudder at the harm that those drugs could have caused had they reached the streets.”17 In his speeches, Duterte associates drug criminality with the destruction of individuals, the breakdown of family relations, the ruining of the youth, the weakening of the social fabric, and even the 2017 siege of Marawi City by an ISIS-affiliated group.18 Part of this narrative is language projecting fear, crisis, danger, and uncertainty including the labeling of illegal drugs as a “social scourge,”19 “human cesspools of succeeding generations,”20 a “menace,”21 and a “virulent social disease.”22The thus constructed urgency of the threat allegedly originating from illegal drugs is corroborated by the third element of penal populism, the portrayal of incorrigible criminals violating the innocence of their victims. By tapping into latent anxieties and utilizing individual stories of brutality, Duterte successfully fed into popular imagination to create the new enemy of the state: the drug criminal.23 Given his track record as an anti-crime mayor in Davao City, the drug criminal was Duterte's logical choice of the Other against which public support could be garnered.24 Thus, an essential part of the “War on Drugs” rhetoric is the antagonism between the law-abiding, virtuous citizen and the drug criminal as the dangerous Other who is beyond redemption and does not deserve due process.25 In his speeches, Duterte associates drug users with other forms of criminality such as brutal murders or rapes and describes them as “root cause of so much evil and so much suffering.”26 In line with the elements of penal populism, the drug criminal is thus framed as a monster “hiding in the shadow”27 encroaching on the family and especially children and youth.28These penal populist elements in Duterte's rhetoric thus serve to justify otherwise unacceptable methods in a generally more punitive approach to drug criminality and by extension the continued support for President Duterte as a symbol of this approach and response to penal elitism. Duterte clearly delineates himself from the “high” politics of the elite29 through both his style and self-portrayal as “man of the people.” An important element of this portrayal is the narrative of Duterte's election victory as a victory of the masses vis-à-vis the elites overstating the contributions of “ordinary” people to Duterte's presidential campaign. In his speeches, Duterte makes his claim of representing the “people” explicit: “the patience of the Filipino people is reaching its limit [and] I will be the one to articulate the anger of the Filipino people.”30 Further distancing himself from the allegedly power-hungry elites, the beginning of Duterte's presidential campaign as well as subsequent speeches let him appear as a reluctant leader overcome by love for his country and therefore willing to sacrifice himself for it.31 Statements such as “Just like you, I get hurt when people are nearly almost brutalized”32 and “I realized that I have to do something about it as a Filipino”33 are projecting “unyielding and uncompromising love for the nation and its people.”34 Reflecting elements of personalism and immediacy between the people and the leader characteristic of the populist appeal,35 Duterte is portrayed as disciplinary father who knows what is best for his dependents and is willing to do what is “necessary” to achieve this. Duterte makes his personal role as protector explicit in statements such as “I take care of a Republic”36 and—in the face of the performed crisis of illegal drugs—appears as man of decisive action able to tackle even long-lasting problems.37 Examples of this politics of “I will”38 can be found abundantly in the speeches at hand and particularly in off-script parts.Closely related to this display of “ballsiness” and a further means of demarcation from the elite is Duterte's breaking with established standards of propriety of the political elite. According to Ostiguy, this “low” style of politics is manifested in sociocultural aspects such as manners, demeanors or vocabulary. For Duterte, it consists of unorthodoxies already displayed as mayor of Davao where, fueled by urban legends about how he made a foreign tourist eat a cigarette after violating the smoking ban, he gained national notoriety earning him nicknames such as “The Punisher” or “Duterte Harry.”39 Using vulgar language, political incorrectness, and partially delivering speeches in his regional dialect instead of Tagalog,40 Duterte continued to disrupt the language of national politics as president.41Although the penal populist elements of Duterte's rhetoric justify a more punitive stance towards drug criminals and the denunciation of the liberal democratic rehabilitative ideal, it is the elevation of the anti-drug campaign to a struggle of historic dimensions that constitutes a radicalization of penal populism and sets the tone for the extreme levels of violence that have been observed in the Philippines. Rather than merely implying that any individual can potentially fall victim to criminality, as is done in the examples of penal populism presented by Pratt, Duterte's rhetoric paints drug criminality as an emergency threatening the very foundations of Philippine society and therefore a threat to the nation itself.42 This is reflected in Duterte's description of the drug issue as a “virulent social disease that creeps and cuts into the moral fiber of Philippine society”43 and drug criminals as having “nothing in their mind except to destroy a nation.”44 The drug criminal thus becomes a cosmic foe in Juergensmeyer's terms, namely an enemy whose victory would be unthinkable because it would mean the destruction of the nation. The violence-inciting potential of this portrayal is reinforced by the dehumanization of drug criminals through brutish descriptions as “beasts and vultures preying on the helpless, the innocent, [and] the unsuspecting”45 and Duterte explicitly calling their humanity into question when asked about evidence of crimes against humanity committed in the “War on Drugs”: “In the first place, I'd like to be frank with you: are they humans?”46 By painting a stark dichotomy between the innocent, law-abiding people47 and the amorphous, dangerous Other, Duterte draws symbolism from the Filipino people as one unit collectively suffering from the issue of drug criminality. This dynamic is reflected in describing the drug issue as “crisis that has engulfed . . . the nation,”48 “will drown us as a Republic,”49 and the consequent need to “protect our people from these crimes.”50 As can be seen in the preceding quotes, Duterte implies collectivity through the personal pronouns “us” and “our,” which are contrasted with “the drug criminals,” “they” or in some cases—when delivering a warning—“you.”Elevating drug criminality to a threat of cosmic dimensions and creating a dichotomy between those who are saving the republic and those who are intent on destroying it shifts the urgency of winning the “War on Drugs” and consequentially justifies all means necessary in pursuit of this victory. Using the framing of a “war against [those] labelled a menace to the rest of the society,”51 Duterte repeatedly called for the use of violent means to deal with illegal drugs and has justified these as necessary evils to protect “ordinary” Filipinos from criminality and to end the “drug scourge” he alleges is threatening the survival of the nation.52 These “necessary evils” not only cover the killing of alleged drug traffickers or users, but also of those who are innocent of these crimes such as bystanders hit by stray bullets who Duterte called “collateral damage.”53 Rather than regular war, which affords combatants a level of due process, the classification of the drug criminal as dehumanized cosmic foe excludes them from these protections: “I said to the military if you see them, blow them up, even if they surrender, they have a white . . . flag. It is just for war, not for criminals.”54This cosmic struggle against the “drug scourge” is placed into a wider nationalist framework of the Philippine people's emancipation from their “perennial subjugation” by colonial powers and the local oligarchy.55 At the center of this nationalist emancipation narrative is the idea that foreign domination, the rule of corrupt elites, and the effects of illegal drugs and criminality, framed as a lack of discipline, are holding back national development. Having been mayor of Davao City for over twenty years, Duterte often cites the so-called “Davao model” of development—a new social contract in which citizens willingly give up additional rights for the purpose of crime reduction and economic development56—as evidence of the development that would be possible without the effects of criminality.57 Whereas drug addicts are portrayed as “dangers to social welfare and obstructions to economic development,” law-abiding citizens are considered “human resources for economic development, and the basis of the well-being of future generations.”58 Placement of the “War on Drugs” in the context of a broader struggle for national development is also characterized by instrumentalist language justifying sacrifices made on behalf of that larger–than-life struggle: “there can never be real, tangible, and felt development without making our people feel secure”59 or “developmental gains will not be felt . . . if we cannot maintain law and order.”60Connecting this development-focused perspective on criminal justice with the emancipation from domination of foreign actors and the rule of corrupt local elites has a particular appeal in the Philippine context due to the idea that the “unfinished revolution” keeps the Philippines in an underdog position. The narrative of the “unfinished revolution” centers on the U.S.-given, rather than won, independence, but also relates this to the continuing lack of accountability for historical grievances committed by colonial powers and the present-day domination of foreign elites—particularly the United States—over the lives of “ordinary” Filipinos.61 In his speeches, Duterte challenges such foreign dominance, citing abusive business practices and diplomatic arrogance and promising that “the days when the Philippines decides and acts in the shadows of great power”62 are over.In this frame of cosmic war, Duterte then appears not only as “man of the people” but as superhuman figure who “calls on the ‘people’ to lay the burden of sacrifice at his feet, and to trust him as a redemptive leader who can deliver his ‘people’ out of the wilderness.”63 Through his speeches, Duterte portrays himself as selfless vigilante and martyr: “I am willing to go to prison for the rest of my life.”64 Magcamit and Arugay argue that by cursing even the pope, Duterte took on the persona of a “demigod who was sent to redeem and save the Filipino people from the ‘false prophets’ of ruling state elites and religious establishments.”65 All these aspects of his persona create the image of Duterte as cosmic hero who takes on the “drug scourge” and thereby delivers national development to the Philippines.Contrasted to this heroism are Duterte's critics and opponents as secondary targets of the cosmic war. In the context of this greater struggle of the Philippine people that characterizes Duterte's radical brand of penal populism, critics of the punitiveness of Duterte's “War on Drugs” are not only considered weak and overly lenient as the penal populist logic paints them, but are categorized according to the dichotomized logic of cosmic war. Accused of being protectors of drug criminals and therefore complicit in the suffering drug criminals allegedly cause, these critics are deemed obstacles in the historical struggle for national development.66 Human rights defenders and activists in particular thus become secondary targets against which the cosmic war against illegal drugs incites violence.Combining the theoretical frameworks of penal populism and cosmic war, the analysis of Duterte's “War on Drugs” rhetoric reveals a more radical form of penal populism than the examples given by Pratt. Whereas the three elements of penal populism—a rejection of penal elitism, the hyperbolized crisis of criminality, and the demonization of the drug criminal—are clearly reflected in Duterte's rhetoric, its portrayal of the “War on Drugs” as precondition for the survival of the nation, emancipation from foreign and domestic elites, and ultimately national development gives Duterte's punitiveness a more radical, cosmic war-like character. As a consequence, the rhetoric not only led to a generally more punitive stance by the population, but also engendered widespread acquiescence towards the extrajudicial killings perpetrated in the “War on Drugs” and incited violence committed by civilian vigilantes in pursuit of this historical struggle. The case study also showcases how this specific manifestation of penal populism not only targets the elite and the criminal Other, but rather functions to classify a broad category of both domestic and foreign actors accused of being complicit in the alleged crisis of drug criminality as enemy. Invoking narratives of past and present-day subjugation and constructing a logic according to which “ordinary” Filipinos have been denied national development due to the failure of liberal democracy, the concept of human rights, and the inadequacies of previous administrations enabled Duterte to simultaneously target drug criminals and those potentially limiting his power including the oligarchic liberal democratic elite, critical civil society, and actors of the international community. For opposition actors, the designation as secondary targets in the “War on Drugs” translated into increased security risks and frequent online harassment. In a context where levels of political violence are already high, Duterte's “War on Drugs” contributed to limiting opposition politicians’ and activists’ space for action and silenced critical voices thus making Duterte's radical brand of penal populism an effective tool for consolidating his power.Duterte's presidency ended on June 30, 2022, but the effects of his presidency are expected to outlive his rule. The demonstrated success of “Dutertismo” paves the way for future candidates following Duterte's style of populism. On a more general, societal level, the “War on Drugs” has polarized Philippine society into an “Us vs. Them” dichotomy, has created additional structures for the repression of critical voices, and shifted the standard of what is considered acceptable in both politics and crime control. Of course, these changes were not automatically reversed when Duterte stepped down but will continue to define the Philippine political landscape.