‘Unheard Voices’: Humanizing the War on Drugs

Screengrab from ABS-News.com microsite.

CHEERS TO ABS-CBN News for running a series of reports on the casualties of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.

First published on Oct. 27, “War On Drugs: The Unheard Voices” is a six-part series by the ABS-CBN Investigative and Research Group that  focused on the stories of 50 drug suspects killed, randomly selected from more than 1,700 cases of victims of police operations since Duterte became president.

Weeks in the making, the series humanizes the drug war, adding powerful individual narratives to the increasingly improving coverage by the press of the bloody campaign. The series also includes an episode that examined the lack of equipment of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and told the story of one of the 13 police casualties.

Using the PNP’s own data on the drug war, relevant laws, police protocols, and documents such as spot reports and death certificates, the series succeeded in making sense of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of suspected drug individuals. It also used interviews with police officials, witnesses and relatives of the victims.

When pieced together, the testimonies and documents showed contrasting perspectives, the claims of innocence on the part of the families and the suspect’s alleged resistance to the police. The series demonstrated that the official version of many of these incidents may not be entirely the factual or truthful version.

The series examined the criticism of the drug war as being an anti-poor campaign, as noted by former senator Rene Saguisag, a long-time human rights lawyer. Nearly all of the victims and families featured in the special report were from poor communities.

The profiles of 24 slain drug suspects, meanwhile, not only gave the readers an insight into the victims’ lives but also presented the much-needed human dimension of the bloody campaign which has been missing in much of the coverage by the media.

CMFR previously cheered ABS-CBN News for mapping the drug war’s death toll, as well as similar efforts such as the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s “kill list“and a folio of articles on the campaign from three different perspectives, and The Philippine Star’s interactive microsite examining the Duterte administration’s war on drugs.