Marcos on drug war gains: No killings involved

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. starts his third State of the Nation Address (Sona) at the Batasan plenary hall on Monday, July 22m, 2024. —Screenshot from an RTVM livestream

MANILA, Philippines — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Monday highlighted his administration’s achievements in its fight against illegal drugs, emphasizing that there was no extermination involved.

In his third State of the Nation Address, Marcos said that the government has seized more than P44 billion worth of illegal drugs and arrested more than 97,000 drug personalities in over 71,500 drug operations under his term.

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“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,” Marcos said.

He said that more than 6,000 of those arrested were high-value targets, 440 were government officials, and 42 were uniformed personnel. Seventy-seven were elected officials.

“To further paralyze their operations, dirty money and assets worth more than P500 million have been frozen and preserved,” Marcos stated. “With strong case build-up and efficient prosecution, the drug conviction rate is at a high of 79 percent.”

The President also reported a 32 percent reduction in the number of drug-affected barangays.

The war against drugs was the centerpiece of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.

However, during his term, thousands of drug suspects were killed by police and unknown gunmen, a crackdown that critics described as state-sponsored extrajudicial killings and is now the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

Police said the crackdown left more than 6,000 people dead, but rights groups estimate tens of thousands of mostly poor men have been killed by officers and vigilantes, even without proof they were linked to drugs.

Duterte had openly ordered police to shoot dead suspects during anti-drug operations if officers believed their lives were in danger.

With a report from Agence France-Presse