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When you meet an assassin who has killed six people, you don't expect to encounter a diminutive, nervous young woman carrying a baby. "My first job was two years ago in this province nearby. I felt really scared and nervous because it was my first time." Maria, not her real name, now carries out contract killings as part of the government-sanctioned war on drugs. She is part of a hit team that includes three women, who are valued because they can get close to their victims without arousing the same suspicion a man would.
Since President Duterte was elected, and urged citizens and police to kill drug dealers who resisted arrest, Maria has killed five more people, shooting them all in the head. I asked her who gave the orders for these assassinations: "Our boss, the police officer," she said.
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[...] Maria and her husband come from an impoverished neighbourhood of Manila and had no regular income before agreeing to become contract killers. They earn up to 20,000 Philippines pesos ($430; £327) per hit, which is shared between three or four of them. That is a fortune for low-income Filipinos, but now it looks as if Maria has no way out.
Contract killing is nothing new in the Philippines. But the hit squads have never been as busy as they are now. President Duterte has sent out an unambiguous message. Ahead of his election, he promised to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office. And he has warned drug dealers in particular: "Do not destroy my country, because I will kill you." Last weekend he reiterated that blunt view, as he defended the extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals. "Do the lives of 10 of these criminals really matter? If I am the one facing all this grief, would 100 lives of these idiots mean anything to me?"
What has provoked the rough-tongued president to unleash this merciless campaign is the proliferation of the drug crystal meth or "shabu" as it is known in the Philippines. Cheap, easily made, and intensely addictive, it offers an instant high, an escape from the filth and drudgery of life in the slums, a hit to get labourers in gruelling jobs like truck-driving through their day.
Mr Duterte describes it as a pandemic, afflicting millions of his fellow citizens. It is also very profitable. He has listed 150 senior officials, officers and judges linked to the trade. Five police generals, he says, are kingpins of the business. But it is those at the lowest levels of the trade who are targeted by the death squads. According to the police more than 1,900 people have been killed in drug-related incidents since he took office on 30 June. Of those, they say, 756 were killed by the police, all, they say, while resisting arrest. The remaining deaths are, officially, under investigation.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by quintessence on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:32AM
And I'm absolutely positive all these contract killings are for suspected drug dealers and not political rivals.
an escape from the filth and drudgery of life in the slums, a hit to get labourers in gruelling jobs like truck-driving through their day.
And certainly more productive than improving economic conditions there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @08:06AM
You think political rivals didn't have paper on them in the Old West? The practice of bounty hunting has been abolished almost everywhere because of the potential for abuse, and bounty hunters are considered vigilantes. We like to read about outlaws and the bounty hunters who catch them in fiction, colorful characters all. In the real world, law enforcement has more than enough resources to make arrests and recover fugitives, without resorting to putting out paper.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quintessence on Sunday August 28 2016, @10:26AM
This gets to a larger question of under what conditions should the state be able to kill, if at all; and the ramifications of when this authority is delegated without sufficient oversight.
In a real sense the practice of bounty hunting has just been abstracted to such a degree the populace doesn't really put a face to the practice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:21PM
That's easy - never.
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Sunday August 28 2016, @03:54PM
And while that is a nice, easy, pat answer; even the most superficial unpacking of it leaves more questions than answers (what about police firing on a suspect to prevent immediate loss of life, what about the state's authority to wage war, what about authorizing clinical trials in medical testing, etc.).
The corollary to to that line of thinking is the state doing everything in its power to prevent loss of life, which gets into the three laws conundrums and the potential for an even more oppressive government (arguably the Philippines is promoting this to save lives).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @03:29AM
The answer as to whether summary executions are acceptable should be pretty obvious.
It was implicit that the question was "When should the state be allowed to kill [its own citizens]?", asking about another state's citizens is another issue entirely.
People who die due to unknown and unforseen side effects or circumstances is not the same thing as murder, which as I understood it was what we were discussing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @03:31AM
Correction/clarification, killing of civilians is always unacceptable no matter which state they belong to, what I meant was "another state's military personnel".
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Monday August 29 2016, @03:57AM
And you really haven't answered much of anything.
Inherent to waging war is sending off a portion of the populace to die, if not through conscription then through enlistment with dire penalties for forfeiture, including execution.
Similarly medical tests (if they weren't unforseen or unknown, they wouldn't be tests now would they?) could be simply forbidden outright and avoid any killing whatsoever, since it is the government that sets the parameters.
And to the contrary, what is considered a summary execution is less than obvious from the onset, and becomes more cloudy.
As I was saying easy, pat answers leave more questions than they answer, especially with an absolutist stance that has little reason or justification to support it.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:19PM
Not in self defence?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @03:24AM
What exactly would qualify as "self defense" for the state? We're talking about the government here, not individuals.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:33PM
If you define the "state" as being an instrument of the state -- e.g. a police officer. Would it be acceptable for a police officer to kill someone who had already killed 5 hostages and was about to kill more?
And from there it goes on, what if the person you kill hadn't already proven he'd kill and was just threatening it?
Howabout if he wasn't threatening it, but was instead just reaching for the trigger?
What if another part of the state had told you he was armed and dangerous?
What if you had been told that bag with wires out was a bomb? Despite the bag saying "radioshack" on the side?
What if there was no bag, and just a bulky jacket? Or a light jacket? Or just a t-shirt? What if it was a 3 year old kid with a real gun (only in america!)? What about a toy gun? What about a toy hosepipe?
What about someone planning to kill people, who had killed them already, but wasn't in a position to kill anyone at that immediate time?
At some point between the extremes the state makes a decision, through it's implementers, to take a life. One the one extreme it's justified as self defence, on the other it isn't.
What if the state kills someone by allowing a coal fired power station and thus kills people from the radiation and pollution? What if they don't allow the power station and instead kill people through lack of power to keep houses warm (or cold)? What if they build a road that allows an ambulance to get to hospital and save someone's life? What if that road also leads to an increase in traffic that killed people?
What do you refer to as "state", and what do you refer to as "killing"?