Tokhang

Philippine war-on-drugs apparatus

Rodrigo Duterte's national anti-drug campaign joined presidential threats, police plans, neighborhood name collection, home visits, surrender lists, raids, killing statistics, and a repeated claim that victims had fought back. The apparatus made lethal discretion portable through ordinary law-enforcement structures, overwhelmingly burdening poor communities while families, witnesses, journalists, rights investigators, and courts struggled to preserve evidence against a system organized to ratify its own account.

How did a president's permission for killing become a repeatable local process whose reports made each death appear like the victim's own fault?