“War on Drugs” and “Mass Murder” in the Philippines: Discourse Analysis, Power Relations, and an Interview with President Rodrigo Duterte1 Gabriel Gama De O

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro Instituto de Relações Internacionais

The Metaphor of “War on Drugs” and “Mass Murder” in the Philippines: discourse analysis, power relations, and an interview with President Rodrigo Duterte1 Gabriel Gama de O. Brasilino*

Abstract In this article I offer an analysis of statements pronounced by Rodrigo Duterte in a interview conducted by two journalists from the Al Jazeera Global Media Network. I show how through these statements and rhetoric - a political discourse dependent on and effective through the metaphor of "war on drugs" - Duterte attempted to legitimize the extrajudicial killing of more than 3.500 citizens constructed as threats to public security, and enemies to be (“legitimately”) killed. I draw on Foucault's Critical and Genealogical Discourse Analysis (1971; 2003; 2007), to argue that, although the "war on drugs" is a metaphor (MIDDLEMASS, 2014) - and not war in the literal or modern sense - mobilized within a discursive strategy previous to, during and after presidential elections, it [the “war on drugs”] is a (bio)politics of drugs and security that results in confrontations, hunting, punishment, and, in the limit, extermination of declared enemies (FOUCAULT, 2003; 2007; ZACCONE, 2015). In other words, through the metaphorical language of ‘war’, President Duterte admits, tries to legitimize and normalize exceptional (political) violence(s) to deal with the “the problem of drugs,” crimes and (in)security, that is, his discourse produces specific power- and knowledge-effects. Before analyzing the statements, I delineate the historical level of Duterte’s election campaign, and the context of the interview. In the closing remarks, I consider the role of discourse analysis for critical security studies, being reflexive to the previous arguments, and offering paths for future research on the debate on drugs (de)criminalization, (racist) criminal justice systems, and political violence(s) more generally. Key words: Philippines, Discourse, “War on Drugs”, Extrajudicial killings, (In)Security.

1 AL JAZEERA, 2016. From here on I will be using “[A. J.]” for Al Jazeera Journalist and “[R. D.]” for Rodrigo Duterte. “Mass Murder” is an expression used by Duterte in the interview, as will be shown, referring to the extrajudicial killings committed by police, the PDEA, and “vigilantes” in the context of “war on drugs”. The transcription of the interview is under my responsibility. I should thank professors Liana Biar (PPG-Letras PUC-Rio), Jimmy Casas Klausen, and Paula Sandrin (PPG-IRI PUC-Rio) for their comments and suggestions. * E-mail: [email protected]

Resumo A proposta desse artigo é oferecer uma análise das declarações proferidas pelo atual presidente das Filipinas, Rodrigo Duterte, numa entrevista conduzida por dois jornalistas da rede Al Jazeera. Duterte foi eleito a partir de uma campanha focada na retórica das “drogas”, crimes e punitivismo, um discurso político dependente e efetivo através da metáfora da “guerra às drogas”. Duterte tentou legitimar os assassinatos extralegais de mais de 3.500 cidadãos, em sua grande maioria “viciados” e “traficantes de drogas”, construídos como ameaças à ordem e inimigos a serem “legitimamente” assassinados. Seguindo a Análise Crítica do Discurso de Michel Foucault (1971), argumenta-se que, embora a “guerra às drogas” seja uma metáfora mobilizada dentro de uma estratégia discursiva eleitoral e política, isto é, uma figura de estilo, uma técnica ou procedimento da linguagem e não uma guerra, no sentido literal ou moderno do termo, a “guerra às drogas” pode ser interpretada como uma biopolítica de drogas e (in)segurança que produz perseguições, confrontos, punições violentas e, no limite, o extermínio de inimigos declarados. Em outras palavras, por meio do uso dessas declarações, Duterte admite e tenta legitimar, ou normalizar diferentes formas de violência (política) para lidar com o “problema generalizado e dimensional” relacionado ao “vício”, ao “crime” e à (in)segurança pública, ou seja, produzem efeitos de poder e de verdade (DILLON & REID, 2009; DOTY, 1996; FOUCAULT, 1971; 2003). Delineia-se o contexto ou nível histórico dessa “guerra às drogas” durante as eleições presidenciais nas Filipinas (2016) e a entrevista ao Al Jazeera. A partir de uma reflexão sobre a análise de discurso enquanto método interdisciplinar, considero, por fim, possíveis estratégias discursivas no debate sobre Segurança Pública e políticas de (des)criminalização das drogas e dos sujeitos e subjetividades ligado(a)s a drogas como ópio, maconha, cocaína – “viciado”; “traficante de drogas” – e sobre sistemas (racistas) de justiça (direito), violência e relações de poder. Palavras Chave: Filipinas, Discurso, Guerra às Drogas, Execuções Extralegais, (In)Segurança.

Introduction “If it involves human rights, I don’t give a shit! I have to strike fear, because [as I have said] the enemies of the state are out there to destroy the children”. Rodrigo Duterte, 2016.

This text offers an analysis of statements pronounced by Rodrigo Duterte, current president of the Philippines, in an interview conducted by two journalists of the Al Jazeera Media Network. Through these statements; the rhetoric of drugs, addiction, crimes, and punishment; a political discourse deeply dependent on and effective through the metaphor of "war on drugs", Duterte attempted to legitimize the extrajudicial killing of thousands of people in a short period of time. In this sense, although the “war on drugs” is a metaphor, “a figure of style, a technique or procedure of language” (DERRIDA, 1997, p. 276), mobilized within a discursive strategy prior to, during, and after presidential elections – the rhetoric of drugs, crimes, and justice – to maintain and expand a set of power relations and positions (i.e. presidency), it is a biopolitics of drugs and (in)security that results in

confrontation, hunting, punishment, and, in the limit, extermination, of declared enemies (FOUCAULT, 1971; FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997; ZACCONE, 2015). Through the metaphorical language of “war”, President Duterte admits and tries to legitimize and normalize exceptional (political) violence(s) to deal with “the problem of drugs”. In the following sections, I draw on critical discourse analysis, especially Foucault’s, setting the epistemological ground for the argument; I delineate the historical level of Duterte’s election for presidency, in his interpretation a context of “a widespread and dimensional problem”, related to drug addiction and criminality; and the context of the interview. Then I explain why the “war on drugs” is not war in the literal or modern western sense, but a metaphor mobilized in electoral and political discursive strategies, producing specific power- and knowledge-effects (FOUCAULT, 1971; 2003; 2007). Then I think through the content of the interview: Duterte’s political discourse, especially his rhetoric strategies on drugs, addiction, and crimes, deeply dependent on and effective through the metaphor of “war on drugs”. Finally, I draw a reflexive account of the previous analysis, and offer directions for researches on drugs, criminal justice systems, and international political violence(s).

Language, Foucault, and Critical Discourse Analysis Critical discourse analysis (CDA), as other methods of discourse analysis, involves a theory of language, its nature (what it is), its effects (what it does) and how it (re)produces such specific effects (i.e. identification; differentiation; subjectivation; persuasion; legitimization; normalization). CDA, however, is the most interdisciplinary one, encompassing different methods and theoretical analytical categories – linguistic and multimodal – in accordance with epistemological principles from critical realism, and Foucault’s post-structuralist genealogy2. It also involves an engagement with social movements that are critical to the uneven distribution of material and symbolic resources; to the naturalization of discursive tactics – drug prohibition and “war on drugs” for instance – that serve dominant interests and tries to legitimize, normalize militarization of public security. The main

2 On the interdisciplinarity in CDA see for example STROM, M.; ALCOCK, E. (2017); JULIOS- COSTA, M. (2015); BREEN, M. D. (2017).

goal of CDA, thus, is to unveil, to unmask power struggles, to show how those interests represent particular groups, despite of being presented as ‘national(ist)’, ‘universal’, ‘morally correct’ and ‘legitimate’. This interdisciplinarity will help in a great extend here, for “war on drugs”, and (in)security politics more generally, are strongly disputed categories across disciplines in the human sciences. Language, according to structuralist linguistics, “mean not simply words or even a vocabulary and set of grammatical rules but, rather, a meaning-constituting system: that is, any system – strictly verbal or other – through which meaning is constructed and cultural practices organized and by which, accordingly, people represent and understand their world, including who they are and how they relate to others” (SCOTT, 1988, p. 34).

Foucault (1971), however, in his poststructuralism – a term that doesn’t help much, since he is not missing Saussure completely, but I use here to indicate the epistemological approach this analysis will follow – is not interested in the internal structure of language, but in the historical context in which it is used, the rules that constitute any linguistic performance, emphasizing the excesses, abuses, and discontinuities of those rules. Discourse, in this sense, “is not a language or a text but a historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs” (SCOTT, 1988, p. 35). Foucault (1971) argues that there is a fundamental relationship between what is said – words; statements; speeches, etc. – and the “order of things”, the social order where the conditions of possibility for those statements to be made – and contested – are distributed, allocated, dispersed. Meaning, thus, does not follow a priori the words, concepts, categories, and statements, but rather, power/knowledge relations, social interactions mediated by institutions like the family, the school, the hospital, the prison, and the systems of knowledge that constitute them, like medicine; pedagogy; psychiatry; law, etc. In his words, “The Order of Things asked the price of problematizing and analyzing the speaking subject, the working subject, the living subject. Which is why I attempted to analyse the birth of grammar, general grammar, natural history, and economics” (FOUCAULT, 1994, p. 444). In the case of History, for example, Foucault (1971) considers the transformation that happened in its methods, no longer searching for “silent origins” (i.e. documents, memories, archives), but displacing concepts, redistributing them and

making possible new past histories; new series; hierarchies; networks of determinations, and theologies to appear for one and only science that changes in the present. A new problem arose: levels and limits of these new historical fragments, whereas the historical discontinuities became at the same time instrument and object of analysis (FOUCAULT, 1971). And this was a powerful ‘epistemological turn’ not only for the field of history, but philosophy, linguistics, political science, and so on. Archeology, a word Foucault stopped using, meant, thus, the specification of a level, a period, a stratum, and not simply an archive, its history and authority. From this epistemological move, specific events – as moments of crisis that create a rupture in the normality of social relations as well as conditions for the formation of a multiplicity of statements/discourses – could be analysed in their specification, in their historicity. In the present analysis, for example, I will specify the context of the interview produced by Al Jazeera, and the historical level in which the selling, consumption and/or addiction to “drugs” became an extraordinary event for the circulation of new political discourses on public (in)securities, including the “war on drugs”. Prior to paying attention to political discourses, the material we should treat in its neutrality, argues Foucault (1971, p. 36), is a “population of events within the space of the general discourse”3. In this sense, asks Foucault, “Which rules does a statement follow? What other statements could be formulated under the same rules?” (FOUCAULT, 1971, p. 36). For example, in the case of drug addiction, how is it possible that certain groups demand prohibition and punishment by the law, while others ask for State regulation of the market, provision of health care and harm reduction? The point is not to ask “What does the discourse say?”, argues Foucault (1971), but “to comprehend the statement in the narrowness and singularity of its event; to determine the conditions for its existence; to fix its limits in the most narrow way; to establish its correlations with other statements to which it may be linked; to show what other forms of enunciation it excludes” (p. 39). So, how, under which conditions of possibility did the discourse of “war on drugs” become dominant in the Philippines? What are the singularities of its articulation in Duterte’s statements in an interview globally distributed by Al Jazeera?

3 Translations from this book are under my responsibility. 4

The Level of Analysis In June 2016 Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Republic of Philippines, an archipelago in Southeast Asia, after an electoral campaign strongly focused on the rhetoric of drugs, crimes, corruption, and justice. He was then a prosecutor, and has served as mayor of Davao for years, a city in the Southern Island of Mindanao, where he started a “crackdown on crime”, and promised to take it to the national level, “to cleanse the country of drug users and dealers” by extrajudicial means4. In a dispute with 4 other candidates, he received around 16 million votes, nearly 39 percent of the total, with his closest rivals trailing by more than six million votes5. In an electoral campaign, it is important to say, the main goal of any discursive strategy is to persuade the electors in its favor and against other candidates, whereas electors want their demands to be implemented, and candidates to win the elections (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997). Figueiredo et al. (1997) make an analytical distinction that may help: 1) scientific debates and their argumentative rhetoric; 2) political debates and their political argumentative rhetoric; 3) electoral debates and their fictional argumentative rhetoric. In the first one, speakers persuade the audience through logical deduction or demonstration of evidences, convincing them of the theory’s truth. In the second, the idea is to persuade public audience about laws and policies, independently of logical or empirical truth. And in the third, the politico-electoral debates, candidates construct a “possible present world, equal or a bit different from the real current world, and based on it, project a new and good possible future world” (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997, p. 186, my translation). The structure of this argumentation has two strands, they continue: “the world is ill, but it will get better” or “the world is fine and it will get even better”. “The first strand is typical of the opposition’s argumentation and the second of the situation’s” (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997, p. 186, my translation). It is important to say here that Duterte was part of the opposition during the electoral campaign in which he addressed the debate on drugs and crimes in such a fictional way. Fictional “because the possible future good world didn’t accomplish yet, and there is nothing in the logic, from which it is deduced, that guarantees its accomplishment; second, because the possible present world, be it good or bad/ill, is a

4 Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/asia/philippines-duterte.html. Accessed on 20/01/2018. 5 Ibdem. 5

construct inferred from the real current world” (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997, p. 186, my translation). Accordingly, it can be said now that Duterte, in his electoral communicational strategy, resorted to a fictional inference from the (ill) current world, when arguing that drugs, crimes and corruption should be cleansed by extrajudicial means, promising to his audience a possible future world that, unfortunately, became real. In this sense, the transition from the (ill) current world to the (good) possible future world was made through the “logic of interpretative inference of physical or social conditions in a given society, […] typical of political argumentation and, especially, electoral campaigns, where the contextualization or interpretation of history, facts, and social conditions are the raw material for electoral discourse” (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997, p. 186, my translation). In a press conference on September 2016, already president in charge, Duterte made a polemic declaration: “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. Now, there is 3 million, what is it, 3 million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them. At least if Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have, you know, my victims. I’d like to [kill] all criminals to finish the problem of my country and save the next generation from perdition”6.

What is it? if not an interpretation of history, facts and social conditions that are strictly related to Duterte’s political interpretative inference of the Philippines’ drugs and criminal “problem”? Precisely, that is a political motivated interpretation that serves to legitimize, naturalize, or normalize in the political “discourse” (FOUCAULT, 1971), the potential genocidal practices of “slaughtering” “criminals”. Thus, when Duterte likens himself to Hitler, he is not just comparing himself and his victims to those of Nazi Germany and its leader to emphasize his criminalization of drug related activities; he is situating his war-like antidrug political practices in a “zone of indistinction between legality and illegality” (ZACCONE, 2015). The polemic declaration rendered commentaries by the United Nations Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng, who “expressed alarm” at the public comments by President Duterte, “deeply disrespectful of the right to life of all human beings”7. Mr. Dieng reminded that the Holocaust was “one of the darkest periods of the history of humankind and that any glorification of the cruel and

6 Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/30/asia/duterte-hitler-comparison/index.html. Accessed on 20/01/2018. 7 Available at http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=55180#.WnN5pa3Orwe. Accessed on 01/02/2018. 6

criminal acts committed by those responsible was unacceptable and offensive”8. He also called Duterte’s attention for the need to restrain the use of language that could “exacerbate discrimination, hostility and violence and encourage the commission of criminal acts which, if widespread or systematic, could amount to crimes against humanity”, and requested support in the investigation of the “reported rise of killings in the context of the anti-crime and anti-drug campaign targeting drug dealers and users to ascertain the circumstances of each death” 9 . We could think about performatives here, and Derrida’s analysis of them. A performative is a “communication” that does not limit itself essentially in transporting a semantic content already constructed and watched by an object of truth (DERRIDA, 1991, p. 363, my translation). In other words, through “instituted performatives” like the “war on drugs”, or the “human rigths”, Duterte [and Dieng] consolidate an order, a ‘state of fact’, “the service of the ‘strong’ or, on the contrary, little by little, dismantle, put in crisis, menace” (DERRIDA, 2001, p. 52), as in the case of Dieng’s mobilization of the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’, or even Duterte’s own ‘Mass Murder’. The “war on drugs” in the Philippines could be thought, thus, as “a ‘performative’ event of a scope still difficult to interpret” (DERRIDA, 2001, p. 29), since “[b]etween the two hypotheses, all depends on the politics that puts these concepts to work” (DERRIDA, 2001, p. 52). Nonetheless, the effects of this ‘performative’ event can at least be traced in journalist investigation. Drug-related fatalities in the context of Duterte’s “war on drugs” are reported since May 2016 by ABS-CBN, which started an independent monitoring of national and local news reports; Philippine National Police (PNP), Regional Office, and Philippines Drug Enforcement Agency’s (PDEA) press releases. According to their chart and tables, in June 2016, 147 people were killed by the police and extralegal associations (what they call “vigilantes”), although the police killing could be classified as extralegal too. In July, one month after Duterte’s election, the numbers grew spectacularly to 581, and held still: 558 in august and 569 in September, declining to 372 in October and to the lowest rate in the series, 64, in February 2017. The numbers oscillate during 2017, dropping down to 21 in November, 24 in December, and 22 in January 2018. In sum, during the first 78 days of Duterte’s

8 Ibidem. 9 Ibidem. 7

administration, the country has seen the highest rate of extrajudicial killings ever reported: more than 3,000 citizens have been killed10. In October 2016, about 100 days in the presidency, Duterte answered questions on the “controversial war on drugs” in an exclusive interview for Al Jazeera, which started with his familiar and political background, a very common way to start a conversation, to engage the interviewee, to try to grasp his identity, his origins, and sell it to the audience. [A. J.]: “You were raised in a politically inclined family, your father was a governor, your mother was a freedom fighter during the reign of former President Ferdinand Marcos. How did that affected your outlook?” (0’46’’ to 0’59’’). [R. D.]: “Profoundly, I would say, I grew up in an environment of politics and as politicians we tend to, you know, we go by the issues of the day. The big [one] was […] the conditions: economy and […] especially the political issues, and my father was governor […] for 10 years or more, but when he died I was then a prosecutor and when the revolution came my mother was one of the stalwarts of the opposition against Marcos” (1’00’’ to 1’43’’).

[A. J.]: “You also had some difficult times when you were younger as a child”, one of the journalists intervened. “You revealed that you were sexually abused by a priest. Has that shaped your beliefs? Has that helped to shape who you are now?” (1’44’’ to 1’55’’). [R. D.]: Yes, the large extent actually. [It is] what you get along the way that shapes your character, especially, and at that time even your politics, how you look at the world and how you assess them by the standards of view in school and in growing up, the things that you pick up along the way, you said. Sorts of a blend into a coalition, it blends to something big, can be said, forming your own values in life (1’56’’ to 2’35).

I suppose it is very common to start an interview with questions such as these, that is, trying to grasp and fix the interviewee’s identity, origin, and beliefs, to introduce him, in a supposedly common established meaningful ground, to its audience. Interviews are addicted to that king of “metaphysical language” (DERRIDA, 1997), its search for stability, an originary presence (i.e. familiar and/or political background), and a rational sovereign subject, someone who has dealt with his own traumas and political actions. Foucault, as Derrida, in their common Nitzschean approach, also reject this notion of a singular origin with a continuous line of descent that would legitimize inheritors of a true right or identity in contemporary

10 All data are available at: http://news.abs-cbn.com/specials/map-charts-the-death-toll-of-the-war-on- drugs. Accessed on 20/01/2018. 8

power struggles, which are, therefore, multiple and discontinuous, an eternal play of dominations. Rodrigo Duterte, on the other hand, was a president in charge, and it was expected from him in an interview, I suppose, that he acted like such, defending his political program, approved in the electoral process, in a word, that he followed the ‘protocol’. But he also had a commitment with his audience: electors and citizens of his country, for example, and/or the international community, and/or political opponents, and so on. When he makes an utterance, it is part of a rhetorical game addressing whoever his audience is. He might be answering the interviewer, but he is also talking (in)directly to those watching it on television or online broadcast channels. The same is true to journalists, mayors, scholars, etc. It is important to keep that in mind for, when analyzing his statements, I will be concerned not only with Duterte’s identity, historical background and beliefs, or his capacity to interpret meaning and react to questions, but also with his discursive strategies to persuade the audience and try to legitimize his “war on drugs” – including the militarization of public security and the extrajudicial killing of thousands of “drug” users, dealers, and innocent citizens during a period of less than 3 months.

The Political Rhetoric of “Drugs” and The Metaphor of “War” President Nixon is allegedly recognized for coining the metaphor “war on drugs”11, but according to the historian Paul Gootenberg (2008), the expression dates back to the Second World War (1939-1945), when Nazi Germany was attacking coca- vessels coming to supply the Allied Forces, propagating, then, a discourse of “war on drugs” in a literal sense. There was a war was going on, and part of the efforts of that war was concentrated on destroying the enemy’s drug vessels. In that sense, “war on drugs[!]” was an utterance, a performative, a speech act (AUSTIN, 1990, p. 28) or “a decree, a buzzword (mot d'ordre)” (DERRIDA, 1991, p.1). Nixon’s was too metaphorical a war, false in relation to its object (DERRIDA, 1997, p. 276) – “drugs”, since it was, and it still is, a war on people, against specific subjects – poor, immigrants without visas, criminalized and racialized others (FOUCAULT, 2003; 2007; RODRIGUES, 2012).

11 See for example SCHMIDT, Dana, 1971; MIDDLEMASS, Keesha, 2014. 9

On the one hand, “drugs”, a concept “instituted on the basis of moral or political evaluations”, carry in itself both norm and prohibition (DERRIDA, 1991, p.1). On the other, the rhetorically effective category “war” has became central, because it promises a temporary state that will finish in the long run, “a powerful psychological promise that in both cases [the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror”] was crucial for mobilizing resources and popular support” (LINTON, 2015, p. 80, my translation). In other words, although it can be fought and warred, the “war on drugs” could not be won, neither finished, and it has brought important changes to global power relations: the United States has increased its military and juridical authority, intervening in other countries (i.e. Colombia; Mexico; Afghanistan; Iraq) in the name of national (and global) security (LINTON, 2015). We could add here the U.S. annexation and subsequent war against the Philippines (1899-1902), also constructed in official discourse as ‘counterinsurgency’ war, a paradigmatic policy that “construct[ed] identities and simultaneously positioned the subjects that were so constructed” (DOTY, 1996, p. 16). In other words, Philippines has increased its militarized security agencies authority – and encouraged paramilitary ones –to intervene (violently) in the drug economy in the name of “the law-abiding god-fearing young persons of this Republic”, as Duterte puts it during the interview. And “we can note elements of continuity and discontinuity with earlier colonial discourses” (DOTY, 1996, p. 16)1213. In that sense, drug addicts and dealers are constructed as “others”, and as “enemies” to be fought and killed, because, in part, that is the colonized military logic informing Philippine reason of State, its rationality, its ‘truth regime’ regarding security policies. Gootenberg (2008) rejects the idea that drugs were banned with success when science discovered its medical or social dangers. This kind of reasoning doesn’t explain why tobacco remained legal, or why medicinal cocaine also became prohibited – alongside the recreational one –, nor does it explains the rationality of the historical-political, “top-down”, decision-making process of regulating substances

12 As Doty puts it: Despite the United States’ relative lack of experience with formal colonization as well as its ignorance regarding the Philippines and the Filipinos, it had ample experience with “others”: blacks, Mexicans, and “Red Indians.” This experience was drawn upon in coming to “know” the Filipinos and in justifying U.S. practices and policies. Significantly, the discourse instantiated in this imperial encounter exemplified the representational practices that were at work more globally in construction the West and its colonial-other(s) (DOTY, 1996, p. 28). 13 On counterinsurgency, and ‘war-police assemblages’ see also BACHMANN, J., BELL, C. & HOLMQVIST, C. (Eds.). (2015). 10

used by “modern citizens” (GOOTENBERG, 2008, p. 192). In the case of cocaine, prohibition was related to western industrial modernity and too tenuous reasons (including discipline for work and demarcation of new class, race and gender boundaries) that aimed at circumscribing the non-medical use of this and other substances (GOOTENBERG, 2008). He concludes, then, that what started as a “rational” medical regulatory movement, ended up as one of the most punitive regimes of the world (GOOTENBERG, 2008). In this sense, if the goal of Nixon’s “war” on “drugs” was to (re)establish order and security by eradicating production and drug trafficking, we must argue that it failed. It failed because order; security; sovereignty; territory and its boundaries continued to be violated by the mobility of people and drugs across borders, regardless of the actualization in security dispositives – surveillance, control, punishment, and budget for implementing the “war on drugs” as national (and international, or even ‘global’) security politics (LINTON, 2015; RODRIGUES, 2012). ‘Drugs’ and ‘drug addiction’, argues Derrida (1991), “are nothing but normative concepts, institutional evaluations or prescriptions” (p. 1). Whenever we say ‘drugs’ and ‘drug addiction’, whenever Duterte uses these words, it is embedded in that institutionalized, prohibitionist, and moralist meaning. But what we hold against the drug user or addict, continues Derrida (1991), is “something we never, at least never to the same degree, hold against the alcoholic or the smoker [and here we find the moralist rationality behind the prohibition of drugs like opium; cannabis; and cocaine]: that he cuts himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real life of the city and the community; that he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction. We disapprove of his taste for something like hallucinations. No doubt, we should have to make some distinction between so-called hallucinogens and other drugs, but the distinction is wiped out in the rhetoric of fantasy that is at the root of any prohibition of drugs: drugs make us lose any sense of true reality. In the end, it is always, I think, under this charge that the prohibition is declared. We do not object to the drug user's pleasure per se, but we cannot abide the fact that his is a pleasure taken in an experience without truth” (DERRIDA, 1991, p. 4).

On the one hand, Derrida (1991) rejects the metaphysical opposition ‘public/private’, for “the act of drug use itself is structured like a language and so could not be purely private” (p. 11), which in the case of prohibitionist discourses, became central for a rhetoric on the destruction of the social bond (another metaphor uttered more than once by Duterte in the interview). On the other, he rejects the 11

“essence of the aphrodisiac”, the “supplementary role of drugs for an emancipatory experience” in discourses against repression (DERRIDA, 1991, p. 10). Depending on the circumstances, argues Derrida, “a discourse of "prohibition" can be justified just as well or just as badly as a discourse of liberalization. A repressive practice (in all its brutal or sophisticated, punitive or reeducational forms) can be justified just as well or just as badly as a permissive practice (with all its ruses)” (DERRIDA, 1991, p. 6). As one can never fully explicate neither the one nor the other of these practices, finishes Derrida, so one can never absolutely condemn either of them, hoping that “in the very long run […], a thinking and a politics of this thing called “drugs” would involve the displacement of these two ideologies at once opposed in their common metaphysics” (DERRIDA, 1991, p. 9).

According to Foucault (2007), “the sovereign is the person who can say no to any individual’s desire, the problem being how to legitimize this “no” opposed to individual’s desire and found it on the will of these same individuals” (p. 101-102). In what follows, we could argue that the prohibition of “drugs” is found in this power to say ‘No’, deeply inscribed in the social body, trying to fix that which is forbidden and that which is permitted. “After all, we are judged, condemned, forced to perform tasks, and destined to live and die in certain ways by discourses that are true, and which bring with them specific power-effects” (FOUCAULT, 2007, p. 25). In this sense, one corollary of selected drugs prohibition is the increasing role assumed by the performance of the norm, and its continuous, regulatory (or biopolitical) and disciplinary mechanisms (FOUCAULT, 2003; 2007). Drug prohibition is informed by that specific art of governing, governmentality, which is supported by a complex power/knowledge relationship – especially medicine, psychiatry, law, criminology, statistics, political economy, and other political sciences. And the normalization of prohibition follows a warlike rationality that aims at the fortification, conservation or expansion of power relations within society, that is, of political power itself, although multiple kinds of power are being collapsed (FOUCAULT, 2007).

Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of the historical-political discourse, we could argue that, although the “war on drugs” is not war in the western modern sense – “a trial by strength in which weapons are the final judges”; (professional) battles or combats; disruption of everyday life or “civil peace” – it is a sort of “silent war” that

(re)inscribes power relations, as “warlike clash of forces”, in “institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals” (FOUCAULT, 2003, p. 15-16), including public security (political) discourse(s) that aim at countering the invasion of barbarian others (FOUCAULT, 1971; 2003). Nonetheless, as we saw here, we are discussing a kind of warlike politics of drugs that is not so silent, at least not for all the Philippine’s population.

Different from Figueiredo et al. (1997), for Foucault, the political and scientific practices are more interwoven, in the sense that it is not ‘reason’ in general that is implemented, but always a sort of specific rationality, reflexive, and conscious of its specificity (FOUCAULT, 2007). Precisely, this rationality was formulated in two forms of doctrine: Raison d’État and Police Theory. The first tried to define how the principles and methods of government diverged from the way God ruled the world, father the family, or a superior the community, while the latter defined the nature of the objects of State’s rational activities, the nature of its goals, the general shape of the instruments involved (FOUCAULT, 2007). It is important, thus, argues Foucault (2007), more than searching the State nature, situating the State in the process of development of power practices, in the history of “governmentality”.

Following Foucault’s argument that “the right is neither the truth nor the alibi of power. It is an instrument at the same time complex and partial of power” (ZACCONE, 2015, p, 53-54; FOUCAULT, 2003; 2007); and putting light on the center of Benjamin’s formulation, “the nexus between myth, violence, right and destiny”, Zaccone rejects the jusnaturalist and positivist right’s formulations, for they legitimize violence, be it by just ends or trough justified means (ZACCONE, 2015, p. 64; BENJAMIN, 1978) – be it Nixon’s “war on drugs”; W. Bush’s “war on terror”; or Duterte’s (bio)politics of drugs. Orlando Zaccone considers “we cannot not observe that it is in a war-like style politics of drugs and “combat” against criminality that the State legitimizes the extermination of the enemy/criminal” (ZACCONE, 2015, p. 264, my translation).

A chamada “guerra às drogas” passa a ser um recrutador eficaz de clientela para a letalidade do nosso sistema penal. Não é mera coincidência “que a política criminal de drogas hegemônica no planeta se dirija aos pobres globais indiscriminadamente: sejam eles jovens favelados no Rio, camponeses na Colômbia ou imigrantes indesejáveis no hemisfério norte”. Os traficantes de drogas passam a constituir uma “categoria fantasmática”, na expressão reveladora de Vera Malaguti 13

Batista, “uma categoria policial, que migrou para a academia, para o jornalismo, para a psicologia e que não tem cara, não é mais humana”. Assim, a expressão “guerra às drogas” soa como uma metáfora, pois oculta que, como toda guerra, está voltada para atingir pessoas identificadas como inimigas (ZACCONE, 2015, p. 139)14.

Coming from the historical level of mass-incarceration in Brazil during the last two decades and its relation to exterminating enemies/criminals, since he concludes that “the more you incarcerate, the more you kill” (ZACCONE, 2015, p. 265), Zaccone’s definition is relevant here for analyzing what is happening in the Philippines regarding the rhetoric of “drugs” in Duterte’s political discursive strategies to legitimize extrajudicial extermination.

“Mass Murder” in the Philippines, or The (Bio)Politcs of ‘Drugs’, Crimes and Public Securitized Health

The interview follows to the next issue: “the war on drugs”. [A. J.]: “3,500 people have been killed so far”, continues one of the journalists, “it seems like the whole world is talking about that at the moment. The Philippines seems to have so many problems, so, why launch what is a brutal war on drugs?” (2’36” to 2’52”). [R.D.]: “Because the sheer number of people contaminated will pull the country now, it will destroy the next generation of Filipinos. You know, this lives lost, some of them, were lost during legitimate encounters with the police” (2’53” to 3’13”). Firstly, drug use/addiction is not an infectious disease to be contagious. But Duterte’s use of the expression reveals the roots of prohibitionism in medicinal discourses. Second, ‘destruction’ – as an effect of drug use or addiction on the social bond – is used here as another metaphor of “war” that has the political strategic effect

14 The so-called « war on drugs » comes to be an efficient recruiter of clients for the lethality of our penal system. It is not by coincidence « that the hegemonic criminal drug politics on the planet targets the global poor indiscriminately: be they young favelados in Rio, peasants in Colombia, or unwanted immigrants in the North hemisphere ». The drug traffickers come to constitute a « phantasmatic category », in the revealing expression of Vera Malaguti Batista, « a police category, that has migrated to the academy, journalism, psychology, and that is no longer human ». Thus, the expression « war on drugs » sounds like a metaphor, for it hides, as any war, it is directed to hit people identified as enemies (ZACCONE, 2015, p. 139, my translation).

of legitimizing public security dispositives, as well as exceptional, “brutal”, or extrajudicial measures, as “some of the [il]legitimate killings”. In other words, “drugs” and the subjects associated with it need to be linked to an extreme threat (destruction) so their criminalization, incarceration, their death can be legitimized. It could also be said that, since Duterte infers a possible future world (legitimate encounters with the police) from the ill current world (contamination), this is a fictional discursive strategy, with nothing in its logic that would guarantee its accomplishment (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997). On the other hand, Foucault taught us about the pastoral power, and the role played by salvation, that is, the submission of subjects into confession, a procedure of extracting the truth from him/her, and revealing it to them (FOUCAULT, 2007). In Philippines, the police, PDEA, and vigilantes, beyond physical and mortal violence, also enforce a certain pastoral power when, authorized by Duterte’s (extra)juridical-(bio)political discourse, make searches, stop passengers on the streets, break into houses, in a word, force a confession of the crime. Then it is not only the ‘subject’, but also subjectivities. [A. J.]: “But the fact is, at the moment we have 3,500 people killed and you yourself alluded to, just then, that, perhaps, some of them weren’t legitimate targets” (3’14’’ to 3’24”). That is, Duterte didn’t deny the illegitimacy of those killings, but his moral claims were supposedly enough for legitimizing some of the lives lost. What about the lives lost in illegitimate encounters with the police? Or the innocent lives lost in “legitimate” ones? That remained an open question. [R. D.]: “You know, there is no crime at all when you threaten criminals with death. In my country at least there is no law which says I can not threaten criminals, and that was the favorite […] of course the cliché that they used, that became a cliché over time. And then I was president and I said: we have three million, according to PDEA, three million drug addicts, not counting […], because it is still going on. So I said: if we do not interdict this problem, the next generation will be having a serious problem. And I found, again, the same, you destroy my country, I kill you! And it is a legitimate thing. If you destroy our young children, I will kill you! That is a very correct statement. There is nothing wrong in trying to preserve the interest of the next generation. That three million addicts […] are not residents of one compact area or contiguous place. They are spread all over the country. And by the sheer number, because if you are a user, you must push! Unless you are the son of […] a millionaire, or […] because you have to sustain your addiction by getting another financer for you, and then the next financer will have to get a new victim to finance it. That’s how drugs are spread. But it was not until I became president, that the widespread and the magnitude of the problem became really a serious issue (3’25” to 5’25”, emphasis added).

Firstly, it is shocking to see in the interview how naturally he talks about killing. This could be said to be a discursive strategy, chosen precisely to generate power and knowledge effects in part of the population, that is, to send a message, to produce fear, to advise on the possible consequences of breaking the law, and to reinforce a security rhetoric on drugs. Second, he didn’t answer the question, which was on the extrajudicial/illegitimate killings, rather, he talked about drug addiction, which is not a crime – although drug use is criminalized. One can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be considered a criminal because he or she is in that condition, i.e. ill, dependent, addicted. However, Duterte likens drug addition to criminality and argues it is legitimate and correct “to threaten criminals with death”, which is untrue too, since the death penalty was banned from the constitution in 200615. Therefore, even if drug addiction was a crime, the State of the Philippines has no right by the law to kill its own citizens in the name of public security and/or health. In any democracy where the due legal process is respected, people have the right to access the juridical system, to face a fair trial, to be judged and, if convicted, punished in accordance with the penal code. In other words, once he defines drug dealers and users as threats to the society, to the “next generations”, an enemy in the first place, the possible actions are reduced to elimination, exclusion, or segregation. Instead of criminal, drug addiction could be described as a health condition. And why is it not? Because the effect of such a medicinal statement would be the logical (and political) demand of public resources for medical treatment, under the supervision of health authorities, and not security ones, which apparently is in contradiction with Duterte’s electoral promises and political goals. Third, again, we can see how the process of veridiction over criminalized subjectivities reproduces power relations. In other words, all the electoral-political discourses on medicine, law, criminology, economics, history, and security (re)produces a power- and truth-effect. It establishes a truth regime, a set of institutions, practices, rules, and norms to represent the Philippines’ citizens, and/or to exclude the non-full citizens, the ‘others’, the enemies, to secure ‘us’ from ‘them’. Fourth, Duterte uses the metaphor of “destruction” again, inflating the consequences of drug use. “If we do not interdict this problem, the next generation will be having a serious problem”, he says, which is true, but there are many ways of

15 Available at: http://www.philstar.com/opinion/70640/death-penalty-abolition-reinstatement- abolition. Accessed on 20/01/2018. 16

interdicting a social (health) problem. And then he links “destruction” to “young children”, a category automatically related to vulnerability, in a discursive strategy that aims at stimulating fear and legitimating violent anti-drugs measures. Fifth, through this rhetoric game, he is also addressing those who are involved in criminal activities, making as clear as possible that he “will kill you”. How do we make sense of that kind of statement in a democracy? “There is nothing wrong in trying to preserve the interest of the next generation”, he continues, which, again, is true, but how is it possible to know the interest of the next generation? Is it really in their interest to launch such a “brutal war”? Following Figueiredo et al. (1997), this is a fictional discursive strategy and a logical (and political) contradiction, since a significant part of the next generation is not being preserved, quite the contrary, it is being slowly killed, and will be constituted by orphans and/or traumatized and stigmatized children. Another contradiction can be found when Duterte says that “unless you are the son of a millionaire” you can’t be addicted to “drugs”. Firstly, drugs are not so expensive. Maybe yes, after such a repressive prohibition (by artificially increasing the costs of supply, production and distribution, which inflates the price for the demand: consumers and investors), but one does not need to be a “millionaire” to do drugs. Finally, he categorizes the drug addicts as “victims”, no longer the rational sovereign subject of crimes, investing them with evaluative meaning, that is, passive agents or objects of drugs. But if she is a “victim”, why not treat her like that? Why not give her health treatment, juridical assistance, job opportunities, and so forth. And related, “that’s how drugs are spread”, he says, but is that so? What about supply and demand? Where do the most consumed drugs in the Philippines come from? How do they enter the territory? How are they distributed? It is impossible to sell drugs, in a prohibitionist country, without the help of military, police, law and order agents. In sum: there is no drug trafficking without corruption. And that is, perhaps, why Duterte emphasized a crackdown not only on drugs, but corruption and criminality more generally during his electoral campaign. The problem, however, is not the end in itself, but the political means for accomplishing that. [A. J.]: “So what about the children and the innocent people that have been killed?” (5’26” to 5’29”). [R. D.]: “Well, that is bad” (5’30” to 5’31). 17

[A. J.]: “So will these cases be investigated? Do you promise that?” (5’32 to 5’34”). [R. D.]: “Of course. But let me tell you. This is the law of my land. Here is the police, here is a gangster [and he gestures with his indicative fingers upward]. He is armed with a M16; the gangster only a pistol. But when they meet, they exchange fire. With the police with a M16, its one [shot] [and he makes the sound of a machinegun shots] and hits one thousand people there [he points left] and they die. That is not criminal liability. It could not be negligence because you have to save your life. It could not be recklessness because you have to defend yourself [emphasis added]. Just like when the United States and the rest of the country, when you bomb the buildings you intend to kill the militants but you kill in the process the children there. It is only how it is explained and, you know, people judge best when they condemn, so they will always place you in a bad light, but the situation does not comfort that and it explains the reason why until now I have yet to hear an apology for those who have [been killed] in Vietnam, in Afghanistan. Never mind about the militants, kill them! […] but then, in the press is, to families, hospital… all I hear is “collateral damage”. Then why is it, it is collateral damage to the West [with emphasis] and to us it is “murder”” (5’35” to 6’56”)?

Because “collateral damage” is a category associated with military operations; unexpected effects of/in war, and using it to refer to law enforcement in a context of “civil peace” (FOUCAULT, 2003), even within drug prohibition, involves the political risk of naturalizing the state of war (BATISTA, 2011). What is happening in the Philippines is not war, but the securitization of a public health issue (drug addiction) and the militarization of public security, that is, the “expansion of the criminal justice apparatus to intensify unprecedentedly harsh punitive sanctions and coercive practices, with attendant collateral damage, especially in urban centers and against socioeconomically excluded populations” (CORVA, 2009, p. 164-165). In other words, the actualization of biopolitical security dispositives to discipline, punish, control, repress, and in the limit, kill specific populations (FOUCAULT, 2003; 2007). The point here is how life as truth and objective can be reconciled with death/killing. Dillon & Reid argue, for instance, “war being waged in pursuit of liberal democracy and perpetual peace, the life of the species globally is now wagered on its political strategies” (2009, p. 2). Thus, they open the field of biopolitics to think the phenomenon of war in contemporary liberal contexts where it is organized the alliance between war dispositions, science, technology, and business, which threatens the very power of “liberal citizenship”, in addition to its institutions and republican values (p. 2). In other words, the liberal way of rule is not organized only by the requirement to do war, but by the continuation

of the state of emergency and security as well as constant preparedness to war16. It should be added, regarding Duterte’s strategic argumentative comparison with the US military practices of intervention and war, that, one thing is President W. Bush’s “war against terrorism”17 in other countries; another, quite different, is to authorize the extrajudicial killing of your fellow citizens, by the security agencies officers and vigilantes, because you chose a militarized security policy to deal with drug addiction and drug dealing, based on the moralist assumption that (selected) drugs are evil. This is not to say that US military interventions are legitimate, neither that the US security discourse(s) and official rhetoric on drugs didn’t produce similar effects domestically, but only that the comparison does not make sense, or it makes sense in a rhetoric strategy to legitimize extrajudicial killings as “collateral damage”, that is, to make it (the “war on drugs”) sound more palatable to the audience in such a context/historical level. Biopolitics again. As Foucault showed in Security, Territory, Population, the emphasis has changed from the ‘subject’ to the ‘species’ throughout several knowledge practices (savoir-faire), especially biology, medicine, psychiatry, political theories, and the links among them. Reid and Dillon talk about this grid of intelligibility that informs liberal rule and war as strategies for governing people (2009, p. 23), in the sense of a population of subjects that know and are objects to knowledge, or truth regimes (FOUCAULT, 1971; 2003; 2007). The question was on children and innocent people, but Duterte did not properly answer again. He gave an interesting example, however, of what he called “legitimate encounters with the police”, where he places all the responsibility for the “missing bullets” that supposedly hit “one thousand people” – an hyperbolic expression that helps him to inflate his weak (political) argumentation – , among them “innocent children”, on the police, because they are equipped with better guns (M16). [A. J.]: “You went to law school, [“yes”, he confirms] you worked hard to be part of the legal system, you are a layer by profession, [“correct”, and he accommodates himself better on the chair, maybe a sign that he is more comfortable with the subject now] and you were a prosecutor for many years [“yes”]. Do you still believe in the country’s judicial system?” (6’ 56” to 7’10”). Which seems to be a naïve question, since he is “the president”, elected with

16 See also DER DERIAN, 2009 ; STAVRIANAKIS and SELBY, 2013. 17 See for example AGATHANGELOU & LING, 2004; DER DERIAN, 2009; ETTLINGER, 2007. 19

his “war on drugs” campaign focused on the rhetoric of crimes and punishment. It is a tricky question, however, because, in a way, she is suggesting that the judicial system is part of the problem, for there is no due investigation by the Public Ministry on the crimes of drug trafficking and corruption, as in Brazil (ZACCONE, 2015), to which he answers not without hesitation. [R. D.]: “Let, let, no, I, I should believe in the system because I will guarantee [original emphasis], this time, that the law is obeyed. There are judges here in Manila, more than 1,000 cases, no conviction at all of a drug case. That is where punish blows [hesitation], well, the… maybe, savagery, threatening people on both sides. That is how it is played here. That’s why we have this miserable thing with the drug problem now (7’11” to 7’41”).

The answer is both yes and no. He admits corruption in the judicial system, where the economy of punishment fails, that is, disciplinary, regulatory and security mechanisms are negative in relation to the supply of crimes (FOUCAULT, 2007). But on the other hand, he “should believe in the system because he will guarantee that the law is obeyed” [emphasis added], and not because he is a lawyer, a prosecutor, a mayor, and the president of the Republic of Philippines and truly believes the system of justice (law). That is, again, a political argumentation which infers a future possible world from the current (ill) world (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997). [A. J.]: “But do you agree, do you acknowledge that you have encouraged vigilante killings?” (7’42” to 7’45”). [R. D.]: “No, I said I will kill you! If I encourage, fine!” (7’46” to 7’48”). [A. J.]: “Yes, but the point is that people can get away with murder right now and you know that some of the killings are not legitimate. So, do you think that might be cases of people settling old scores out there and disguising them as the war on drugs?” (7’46” to 8’02”). Which is a central question in the “war on drugs”: impunity for ‘white collar’ crimes/criminals. Actually, if the president himself guarantees that you can go out on the streets and kill drug users/dealers – in fact he is the role model for that kind of behavior –, without facing the consequences of a criminal investigation, then, why wouldn’t you do it? [R. D.]: “I do not play with conjectures. I do not make assumptions. I just say what I should be saying as a President under […]. Now, if the criminals that are killed by the thousands, that’s not my problem. My problem is how to take care of the law-abiding god-fearing young persons of this Republic, because they are resources. Strictly speaking, you cannot find any redeeming factor in being, you know, the criminals there. They are there for what? They are there just like the cartel in Mexico. If you read Ian [last name], this is how the cookie crumbles. Exactly! So, […] I will kill you, 20

because I am the mayor, I am the president. Now, if the vigilantes take over, I cannot control it. I cannot be god and control everything. Okay, you just kill these guys or you just wait for the courts do that (8’ 03” to 9’11”, emphasis in the original).

So, whose problem is it? When “the president” himself has already declared that he has killed; that those people deserve to be killed; that it is legitimate by the law; now that he has enforced that kind of drug politics, the problem is definitely his. Second, Duterte uses “to take care” here, in his rhetoric on crimes; punishment; security, in a “logocentric binary opposition” (DERRIDA, 1997) to “killing”, both as possible public security (and health) policies, but an hierarchical opposition that privileges the first term, “take care”, discursively constructed as a right only for the “law-abiding god-fearing young persons of this Republic, because they are resources”. In other words, that is a political discourse that represents those rationalities behind the modern State reason: preservation and expansion of political power, discipline, regulation and security for the sovereign population (FOUCAULT, 2007). In Duterte’s discourse, reliant on the metaphor of war, and informed by the language of logocentric metaphysics, and state reason, “criminals”, especially drug users/dealers, are constructed as the Philippine’s homo sacer, that is, the bodies which hold the ‘violence/law’ nexus, in opposition to the civilized/citizens (e.g. the “law- abiding god-fearing young persons of this Republic”), “being the idealization of the social contract the object which guarantees the passage from one side to the other” (BENJAMIN, 1978; AGAMBEM, 2009 apud ZACCONE, 2015, p. 124, my translation). [A. J.]: “Well, you can encourage good policing and you can encourage justice and trust in the judicial system” (9’ 12” to 9’16”). [R. D.]: “Yes, correct, but when I was campaigning as a president, the drug problem was already reaching by the millions. Well, 3 million is 3 million. Now, during my time we have started to count; we are nearing now the 800 mark, 800 thousand. By the year end, end’s, I would have about or so a million. So, I have 4 millions drug addicts. Do you think that’s an easy number?” (9’17” to 9’46”).

[A. J.]: “No. So, why not put all the energy into rehabilitation; reforming health care?” (9’47” to 9’53”). Duterte gets very uncomfortable, asks for cutting the interview, and for a newspaper of the day before. “He wants to show you the newspaper”, one journalist tells the other, who answers “ok, no problem”. Duterte shows them the front page of

the newspaper with a smile in his face. [A. J.]: “So, you were saying about this facility Sir. What is it about?” (10’12” to 10’14”). [R. D.]: “This is a rehab facility built by somebody. This is what they cried at: “you know Duterte, you should build rehab houses instead of killing the criminals, the drug lords”. You know, this would cost millions. I entered the presidency of the Republic of the Philippines midterm. There is nothing at all left in the budget [he takes his finger to his nose] for this year, which was prepared by my predecessor, which was also prepared the other year to be implemented this year. The implementation does not contain any money [he scratches his chin], because nobody, until I became president of this country, nobody realized how widespread, how dimensional it was” (10’15” to 11’06”).

He did not answer the question, and played the budget card, saying he is restricted by the fiscal policy, and that the administration has no money for constructing rehabilitation centers. However, where does the money for repression come from? Was it prescribed in the budget before? If he was really interested in providing “care” for the population, would he confront the circumstances and call for exceptional health measures? If the problem is so “widespread and dimensional”, why not implement policies with that money? The president is invested in that sort of power. And why should the options be restricted to constructing “buildings”? Why not upgrade the existing ones? Expand the public health system? Or even make partnerships with the private sector? In this sense, there is a lot that could be done. The point is: does Duterte want to? What did his statements say so far? What are its effects to possible future alternatives to “mass murder”? [A. J.]: “Sir, in the past, during your campaign, and weeks into your presidency you have repeatedly said you have no regard for human rights, but human rights is actually part of the constitution, and as head of the State, it is also part of your duty to uphold the constitution. How does that connect? (11’07” to 11’24”).

[R. D.]: “I would rather intimidate and strike fear in the hearts of the criminals just like what happened in Davao, when finally you can walk the streets, walk about in the streets at night and you can eat anywhere at any time and nobody would bother you. It’s happening in Davao. Davao city is in the midst of Mindanao in […] but I can assure you as plenty of people have been there, it’s a destination for conventions and conferences international. […] It’s booming. It is a little bit richer than the others. Why? Because we can live our lives normally, and, of course, business […]. So, that when I said I do not care about what the human rights guys say, I have a duty to preserve the generation. If it involves human rights, I don’t give a shit! I have to strike fear, because I have, I said, the enemies of the state are out there to destroy the children” (11’25” to 12’48”).

Thus, the “connection” he is suggesting is: even if his actions against criminality, especially drug use and dealing, represent a violation of human rights, it 22

does not matter, because his goal is to provide security for (part of) the population – and for the market. This is a question of political priorities. He promised to deliver a “war on drugs” and that is what he is doing, no matter what. But what if the means to combat criminality are criminal? Violation of human rights are crimes against humanity, and are predicted in the constitution, as the journalist reminded him, a situation that sounds the alarm for preventing those crimes, including genocide, hence UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng’s statement. How could the population feel safer on the streets when there is an official politics that stimulates “vigilante” hunting and killing of “criminals”? If that increases fear in part of the population, it does not mean security but insecurity. Second, Duterte makes use of the expression “strike fear” twice in this part of the interview: 1) it is used as a synonym with intimidation, when he is referring to the “criminals”. He wants “to strike fear in the heart of the criminals”, he wants to intimidate them, to increase the feelings of fear; 2) it is used in the opposite direction: he wants to strike fear, to eliminate it, to decrease it. Third, and related – to the extend that his statements are deeply ambiguous – he uses, once again, the word “destroy” associated with “children”, and “criminals” associated with “the enemies of the State”, which, in accordance with his militarized and Statist discourse narrows down future possible political actions regarding drugs, security, and public health to a war-like style of politics of drugs, and “combat” against criminality (FOUCAULT, 2003; ZACCONE, 2015). [A. J.]: “Aren’t you worried about possible ramifications in the future for you, a possible impeachment or being tried in the international court?” (12’49” to 12’56”). [R. D.]: “Good question” [with a smile in his face]. Before you can begin, you must determine that I have committed a crime in my country, that I have committed mass murders in my country and then charge me there. There can be no ramifications when I say that I will kill you if you destroy my land. It is a legitimate […] statement of any general, of any wartime president, of any tribal leader to say those things. Of course, you said there can be consequences, but I am not worried about this thing, I do not make any projections. How many vigilante killings? Well, if you compare the four million to the three thousand minus legitimate encounters between the law enforcement and the criminals, give or take even a half of it, so, what is it to the lives already lost? I have four million addicts to take care of. And I have been criticized, I would say, well, “why don’t just, you know, Duterte, build rehab centers and just place them there. Why do you have to kill them?” Look, I am a midterm president, in the sense that I entered this year the presidency, only this year. The budget of this year was prepared by my predecessor, Sir Aquino, and it binds me because it will last until December. Nowhere in this budget provides enough money to build even two buildings or rehab structures. It is all that is left for my government now, after the election. It is just enough for the M.A.O., Maintenance and Order. No capital 23

outlays” (12’57” to 15’09”).

Nobody mentioned the expression “mass murder” and he suddenly defends himself from it, which means that somehow he is aware that this crime has been committed. He is playing legitimacy again with this issue of “I told you so”; “if I told you in advance you cannot complain now”. He says he does not have the money but the fact is he just not wiling to build rehabilitation centers. Upgrading health is not his primary concern because he is in charge of a sovereign power of life and death, which also constitutes his own subjectivity. [A. J.]: “So you are saying the budget of President Aquino for this year, the last six months, does not include any rehabilitation?” (15’09” to 15’14”). [R. D.]: “Because, the problem was there, but there was nobody minding the stuff. I was the only mayor brave enough to say those things. So, my city, well, got the benefits of a peaceful place, where you can live, where you can eat, work, safely, but the others [cities], we did not know. But they allowed so many administrations to flourish, and it was not until I became president that you realized that there were already, according to, at the time, to generals in charge of the PDEA, 3 million addicts. So nevermind my counting, because I am still counting up to the end of the year” (15’15” to 16’13”).

[A. J.]: “Are you in favor of medicinal marijuana?” (16’14” to 16’16”). [R. D.]: “Yes, but that is a very long process. It has to be something like officially certified by the Food and Drugs [Agency] of the Philippines, and it must have this qualifying, (hmmm) you know (hmmm), activity where it is being used to find out if it’s really a medicinal or if it can do something good for the body” (16’16” to 16’40”).

[A. J.]: “But would you consider it? Legalization of it, for example” (16’41” to 16’44”). [R. D.]: “I, I, I, I, I’m not the authority for that. It is the Food and Drug Administration, which is good. If it is certified by the government, fine, no problem” (16’45” to 16’54”). But it is not going to be, right? He already denies any chance of that discussion to follow, not only in the interview, but also in public debates. Now he has no authority, he has no agency, in opposition to “the president” who is “tough on crime”, and “will kill you”, the sovereign rational subject of politics. In effect: sovereignty is biopolitics. It should be said that, up to this point, they haven’t made explicit which drugs they were talking about. On which drugs are Filipinos addicted to? That remained an open question. Where does it come from? Apparently it comes from China, when the journalist touches this point, later in the interview, talking about Philippine-Chinese 24

relations, but he doesn’t show any interest in talking about alternatives for drug prohibition; health policies for addicted young “persons of this Republic”; about being “tough on crime” and corruption (i.e. military and police agencies that are accessary with “drug lords”). And if we don’t know which drugs we are talking about, its effects in the (social) body, then, how to prevent addiction, public (in)securities and health issues? How to formulate specific, economically viable policies? What about licit drugs? Are people addicted to them? Is he going to kill them too? I don’t think so. Perhaps those are the millionaires’ drugs. Nonetheless, his last point makes sense. It really is a problem for anyone concerned about decriminalizing medicinal marijuana18 – and other medicinal plants – how to set the rules/norms for this process, protecting the rights of those who need this medicine the most; those who cultivate, or use them therapeutically and religiously. In effect, how to protect the rights of those with no rights in Duterte’s declared “war on drugs”?19

Closing Remarks In this text I analysed an interview with Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Republic of the Philippines, his statements, his political argumentation, his rhetoric on “drugs”, crimes, and the criminal justice system, especially his use of the metaphor of “war”, which have the effect of naturalizing exceptional violence, “collateral damage”, or the killings of thousands of innocent people, “mass murder” in his words, once that they are not only performing a grammatical role in his discourse, but they are constructing “discourse” (SCOTT, 1988, p. 35; FOUCAULT, 1971; 2003). I was not interested in other textual elements, as silences; hesitations; (long) pauses; gestures, that is, intersemiotic elements, although I understand they are extremely relevant for creating meaning, although I mentioned some of them. Also, the interview was not recorded by me, and it was not my concern to enter the discussion on (capitalist) mechanisms of production, distribution, and consumption of

18 It is curious, if not paradoxical, to know that Duterte is in favor of medicinal marijuana decriminalization, as he has already made public. For example, see Al Jazeera’s short article on the subject matter, « Medical Marijuana Amid Duterte’s Drug War », available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/06/fighting-medical-marijuana-duterte-drug-war- 170604070616008.html. Accessed on 25/01/2018. For an introduction to the Medical Uses of Cannabis, see also https://www.learngreenflower.com/articles/574/medical-uses-of-cannabis. Accessed on 25/01/2018. 19 The interview continues, on issues that don’t matter for the moment, but for those interested it talks about relations with China, the US, and the UN.

media products. Rather, I was concerned with the role of the metaphor of “war on drugs” in the Philippines’ anti-‘drugs’ law-enforcing politics. In this sense, I went to the discussion on language (FOUCAULT, 1971; DERRIDA; 1991; 1997; SCOTT, 1988); political violence, and drug politics (FOUCAULT, 2003; 2007; BENJAMIN, 1978; ZACCONE, 2015). Although the “war on drugs” is a metaphor mobilized within a discursive strategy prior to, during, and after presidential elections – the rhetoric of drugs, crimes, and justice – which attempts to maintain a set of power relations and positions (i.e. criminals; law; police; the PDEA; vigilantes; presidency, etc.) within the political system of the Philippines, it is also a national security policy based on confrontations and, in the limit, extermination, of declared enemies (drug users/dealers). In other words, through the symbolic language of war, President Duterte admits and legitimizes exceptional violent measures to deal with the problem of violence, crimes and (in)security. He also categorizes people according to their activities, as an effect of prohibition and criminalization of such activities (drug use; production; distribution; sell, etc.). And this categorization could be analysed, for example, in relation to the stigma produced in people’s lives, be they self-identified to such categories (user; addict; dealer; criminal) or institutionally “subjectified”20 (FOUCAULT, 2007, p. 239). In sum, the politics of drug prohibition/repression/war – as public security policy –is related to the process of urbanization, the development of the police and other penal institutions, and could be analysed both as a disciplinary, biopolitical as well as a security dispositives of control and “governmentality” (FOUCAULT, 2003; 2007). It is important to expose the limits and contradictions of these (inter)national/global anti-drugs politics to know if these limits and contradictions would be overcame through possible reforms and changes in the current regimes. According to Foucault (2003), “sovereignty and discipline, legislation, the right of sovereignty and disciplinary mechanics are in fact the two things that constitute – in an absolute sense – the general mechanisms of power in our society”, and, if we are to struggle against disciplinary power, “in our search for a non- disciplinary power, we should not be turning to the old right of sovereignty; we

20 Foucault was concerned here with the problem of the subject, a specific modern Western subject constituted by pastoral and political power (governmentality), « a subject whose merits are analytically identified, who is subjected in continuous networks of obedience, and who is subjectified through the compulsory extraction of truth” (FOUCAULT, 2007, p. 239-240). 26

should be looking for a new right that is both anti-disciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty” (FOUCAULT, 2003, p. 40, emphasis added). Foucault did not want to get away with power at once and for all in his analysis of modernity, but to search for non-disciplinary, non-biopolitical power relations among (political) forces, subjects, institutions and a non-sovereign, non-formal, non-bourgeois public right. Here we find one aspect of Foucault’s displacement of the sovereign modern subject from his epistemological, and ontological ground, as with Derrida’s Ends of Man (DERRIDA, 1991). As mentioned before, Duterte’s militarized language sets a priori any possible public debate on alternatives for drug addiction, in the sense of public health and security. When he says he “will kill you” if you buy drugs, because he is the mayor/president, he constructs himself as the rational, morally superior, sovereign subject that carries on his practices with legitimacy. After, when he says he is not God and he can’t control everything, in an attempt to refuse any responsibility for the actions of “vigilantes” on the streets, he is presenting himself as someone who does not have so much agency and power. That is another metaphysic opposition (DERRIDA, 1997), if not a contradiction, or ambiguity, within his discursive strategy, that checks the legitimacy of his own actions. He cannot control everything, but he can influence it, as he did, or he could repress the “vigilante” killings. There is a tension between juridical and State reason that, when the State reason has crossed the limits of right, it will be able to define the government as illegitimate, it could object its usurpations and, in the limit, even to free the subjects of their duty to obedience (FOUCAULT, 2007). All of this discussion on political violence and public right will be important to know which direction, how much of State and market intervention, and how far could go the public debate on drugs decriminalization, legalization, or regulation, especially medicinal marijuana, and other alternative uses of drugs. Those are discourses heavily reliant upon the (metaphysic) language of law, which is also fundamental for prohibitionist discourses; that’s why Derrida (1991) wanted not only to reverse the binary opposition (prohibition/legalization), but to displace the very epistemological foundation of that language, calling attention to the literary experience, or the search for truth, as also a supplementary experience, a sort of play in the world, which might involve hallucinogenic, toxic, relaxing, stimulating, substances, be they smoked, drank, introduced, expelled. 27

Here the point is: “legalization discourses” are starting to build a consensus around the fact that selective prohibitionist mechanisms and apparatuses have violated rights – ‘human rights’; ‘civil rights’; ‘constitutional rights’ –, which, in the Philippines, could be related to the extrajudicial killing of more than 3, 500 people during the first months of a “midterm” presidency. In addition, “we should question this paradoxes of modernization in the criminal justice systems which establish the solution to urban violence within punishment”, writes Zaccone, who also argues “we can only effectively question the Police State’s violence within the structure of the State of Law if we position ourselves against punitive power in all its plenitude” (ZACCONE, 2015, p. 262). In other words, decriminalization of medicinal marijuana may be an alternative for now, or a “good possible future” in any electoral and/or political discursive/rhetoric strategy that addresses the “theme” of “drugs” (FIGUEIREDO et al., 1997; DERRIDA, 1991), but the horizon that should guide our discursive strategies in the public debate on drugs, crimes, (racist) criminal justice systems, punishment, mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings or “mass murder”, is ‘penal abolitionism’.

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