[Powerful people, Mr. Kine said, are often
able to evade justice entirely. “When you factor in elements of corruption, and
perceptions that people can buy themselves protection from the police or buy
themselves out of trouble,” he said, “this adds up to a lot of frustration
among Filipinos who sense that government and the judicial system is part of
the problem, not the solution.”]
By Amanda Taub
 |
|
A Filipino woman hugged
her husband after an unidentified gunman killed
him in Manila on July 23.
The placard at their feet read, “I’m a pusher.”
Credit Noel Celis/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
|
When campaigning for the Philippine presidency
last spring, Rodrigo Duterte promised to kill so many criminals that “fish will
grow fat” in Manila Bay from feasting on their corpses.
Since taking office on June 30, Mr. Duterte
appears to be making every effort to meet that grisly goal. Over 1,800 people
have been killed by the police and vigilantes since then, and the wave of
killings shows no sign of subsiding.
Many of the victims appear to have been
innocent by any definition, and none had been proved guilty in a court of law.
But the crackdown has struck a chord with the public, and Mr. Duterte’s
popularity has been soaring.
What drives this explosion of extrajudicial
violence — which, far from unique, bears striking parallels to previous waves
of killings in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Thailand and elsewhere?
It would be tempting to reduce this to a
simple story of good versus evil, with the villain — whether that means
enforcers like Mr. Duterte or the criminal elements they claim to be expunging
— solely responsible.
But social scientists who study extrajudicial
killings say the real story is more complicated, and more tragic. It is often
the affected communities themselves that unwittingly help create the
circumstances for this violence.
It tends to begin, the research suggests,
with a weak state and a population desperate for security. Short-term
incentives push everyone to bad decisions that culminate in violence that, once
it has reached a level as bloody as that in the Philippines, can be nearly
impossible to stop.
The
Spark
It might seem that the Philippines’ trouble
began when it elected Mr. Duterte, a brash provincial politician who has for
decades embraced extrajudicial killings as a legitimate method of crime
control.
But the true roots of the problem can be
traced to the administration of Mr. Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino III.
That is because, experts say, the true cause of this kind of extrajudicial
violence is the public’s loss of confidence in state institutions and its
turning instead to more immediate forms of punishment and control.
Mr. Aquino, elected in 2010 on promises to
support the rule of law and human rights, failed to fix the Philippines’
corrupt and ineffective justice system. His administration also faced a series
of security-related scandals, including a hostage crisis in Manila in 2010.
And, perhaps most critical, Mr. Aquino was
perceived as lazy and soft, unwilling to take the necessary steps to solve the
country’s problems.
Frustration with the government’s inability
to provide basic security led to rising public demand for new leaders who would
take more decisive action to provide security.
“The fact is that the judicial system, the
court system, is broken in the Philippines,” said Phelim Kine, a deputy
director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch.
Powerful people, Mr. Kine said, are often
able to evade justice entirely. “When you factor in elements of corruption, and
perceptions that people can buy themselves protection from the police or buy
themselves out of trouble,” he said, “this adds up to a lot of frustration
among Filipinos who sense that government and the judicial system is part of the
problem, not the solution.”
The
Demand
When people begin to see the justice system
as thoroughly corrupt and broken, they feel unprotected from crime. That sense
of threat makes them willing to support vigilante violence, which feels like
the best option for restoring order and protecting their personal safety.
Gema Santamaria, a professor at the Mexico
Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico City who studies lynchings and
other forms of vigilante killings, and José Miguel Cruz, the research director
at Florida International University’s Latin American and Caribbean Center, used
survey data from across Latin America to test what leads people to support
extrajudicial violence.
The data told a very similar story across all
of the countries in their sample. People who didn’t have faith in their
country’s institutions were more likely to say vigilante violence was
justified. By contrast, in states with stronger institutions, people were more
likely to reject extrajudicial violence.
People turn to vigilante violence as a
replacement for the formal justice system, Ms. Santamaria said. That can take
multiple forms — lynch mobs in Mexico, for instance, or paramilitary
“self-defense” forces in Colombia — but the core impulse is the same.
“When you have a system that doesn’t deliver,
you are creating, over a period of time, a certain culture of punishment,” she
said. “Regardless of what the police are going to do, you want justice, and it
will be rough justice.”
Surprisingly, that includes increased support
for the use of harsh extralegal tactics by the police themselves. “This seems
counterintuitive,” Ms. Santamaria said. “If you don’t trust the police to
prosecute criminals, why would you trust them with bending the law?”
But to people desperate for security, she
said, the unmediated punishment of police violence seems far more effective
than waiting for a corrupt system to take action.
And so, over time, frustration with state
institutions, coupled with fear of crime and insecurity, leads to demand for
authoritarian violence — even if that means empowering the same corrupt, flawed
institutions that failed to provide security in the first place.
The
Supply
Leaders like Mr. Duterte have a political
incentive to exploit this sentiment, marketing their willingness to go around
the system to prove that they are willing to do whatever it takes to solve the
country’s problems.
“When you have a weak government that faces a
security crisis and also a crisis of trust of the people, the issue of
promising more punishment is a shortcut to gain citizens’ confidence, to gain
support,” Ms. Santamaria said.
Why not instead promise to fix the real
underlying problems?
First, because institutional reform isn’t as
politically appealing as identifying villains — in the case of the Philippines,
criminal gangs — and promising to take them down. Second, because the very
state weakness that created the problems often means that leaders are incapable
of fixing the underlying issues.
A number of developing countries struggle to
deliver security, said James Robinson, a professor of public policy at the
University of Chicago and an expert on state failure.
State weakness creates the “demand” for
better security by any means, he said, “but there’s also a supply side.”
“And the supply side,” he continued, “is that
the state encourages this kind of informalization of violence, this kind of
informalization of security.”
A result is that politicians who embrace
extralegal violence gain public support, and those who oppose it are often
painted as weak and ineffective.
“Rule of law does not sell well,” Ms.
Santamaria said.
The
Escalation
This dynamic can drive leaders like Mr.
Duterte to encourage vigilante violence, even if the bloodshed only worsens insecurity
and its targets are largely innocent. The point is demonstrating a willingness
to go to any length to get results.By portraying the victims as criminals, Mr.
Duterte can claim success, and local communities might believe things are
improving. But the extrajudicial killings, though intended to provide security,
instead end up provoking a self-reinforcing cycle of ever-worsening insecurity
and retaliation.
Once the government makes it clear that no
one will face legal repercussions for extrajudicial killings, Mr. Kine of Human
Rights Watch said, “then anybody with a gun and a grudge has free license to go
and victimize people without worrying about the consequences.”
That fuels public demand for more extralegal
violence to quell the problem. Eventually, the situation spirals out of
control.
Mr. Kine pointed to the Philippine city of
Tagum on the island of Mindanao. There, the city government encouraged off-duty
police officers and collaborators to murder petty criminals, including street
children, in the name of being tough on crime.
Once its ability to operate with impunity was
established, Mr. Kine said, that death squad began engaging in contract
killings for money. People who opposed the death squad, including some police
officers, were deemed enemies and often targeted. The city became more
dangerous and lawless, with devastating results for ordinary citizens.
The real problem, Ms. Santamaria said, is not
just the violence. Rather, it is the way it alters the rules of society itself:
what is acceptable, and what is necessary to survive.
People whose relatives have been unjustly
killed see violence as a legitimate way to right that wrong, Ms. Santamaria
said. Once violence becomes an acceptable means for settling disputes and
exerting power, it is difficult for people to trust any other system, she
added.
States, locked in that escalating cycle,
struggle to re-establish order. A culture of vengeful punishment takes hold,
crowding out the rule of law. State officials have little standing to demand
that people follow the rule of law when the state itself has been encouraging
lawless violence.
In Guatemala, decades of extrajudicial
violence have left thousands dead, opened space for ruthless street gangs and
sent tens of thousands of child refugees north in search of safety.
In Colombia, vigilante “self-defense” groups
grew, in the 1970s and ’80s, into large paramilitary organizations. They joined
with state-supported counterinsurgency groups and became major players in the
country’s drug trade and a party to its civil war, in which they were known for
particularly gruesome attacks on civilians they perceived as enemies.
This is perhaps the most worrying lesson of
the social scientists’ research: that it does not take evil to destroy a
community’s peace and safety. Rather, ordinary human desire for security,
coupled with weak institutions and desperate short-term thinking, can lead a
country into an escalating disaster.
Follow Amanda Taub on Twitter @amandataub.
