‘Say hello to my little friend’: is there a Hollywood ending to Duterte’s drug war?

The bloody national campaign may be popular with the public, but there are some people getting addicts off the streets without firing a shot

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Published: 11:30am, 25 Mar 2018Updated: 3:55am, 28 Mar 2018

If American director Brian De Palma’s Scarface taught viewers anything more than a few great lines of dialogue to spice up pub chatter, it was that the illegal drugs business is a violent one and even successful careers can unexpectedly end in gruesome death – often carried out by colleagues.

If much of the world’s media is to be believed, there’s a modern version of the flawed masterpiece being played out right now in the Philippines that rivals the excessive violence of the 1983 film. But as with many reboots, the roles have been flipped.

Al Pacino’s ferocious anti-hero Tony Montana, who stops at nothing to rise from Cuban immigrant to powerful drug lord, is now foul-mouthed Rodrigo Duterte, a president seemingly stopping at nothing – mowing down human-rights charters and racking up a body count in the thousands – to free his country from the scourge of “shabu”, the popular name for methamphetamine.

At the advice of Filipino politicians, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has begun investigating whether Duterte’s crackdown involves crimes against humanity. A common complaint about The Hague is why it seems to focus on leaders who have fallen foul of the West and not the likes of former US president George W Bush and ex-British prime minister Tony Blair, whose invasion of Iraq based on spurious information led to the deaths of about a million people. Duterte agrees and has told the ICC the Philippines is leaving.

The flaw in the sensational drug war coverage is that rarely is it suggested that the gangs might be doing some of the killing.

Father Luciano Felloni at a meeting of the Community Assisted Rehabilitation and Recovery of Outpatient Training System (Carrots), a programme that mixes psychology, counselling and spiritual guidance to get people off drugs. Photo: Carrots

“You cannot attribute all the killings to the police – it’s very infantile. Drug syndicates everywhere operate in a violent way,” said Luciano Felloni, a priest in Metro Manila. “You were given a kilo of shabu and then you did not remit that money and so the syndicates will kill you … that makes perfect sense.”