Full multimedia experience: audio, stills, text and or video: Go to zReportage.com to see more – Ever since Rodrigo Duterte was voted in as Philippines President in June 2016, he has been making good on his threats of ‘Killing all criminals’ during a campaign that promised to bring law and order to the Philippines through the barrel of a gun. Overwhelmingly, death comes by night in the poorest quarters of the Philippine capital, Manila which has become one of the murder capitals of the world. Bloodied corpses are sprawled in the street in a never ending array of grotesque tableaux. Sometimes a warning scribbled on a scrap of cardboard is left by the body: ‘I’m a pusher. Don’t be like me.’ In the nine months since Duterte took office, the total body count of suspected drug dealers or users tops 8,000 with an estimated 4,000 of those deaths vigilante or extrajudicial killings. Duterte has made the drug war his signature issue, and he vowed to clean up the problem in six months. He recently announced that he had ‘miscalculated’ and that the problem was larger than he realized. He vowed to continue the drug war ‘until the last pusher is out in the streets, until the last drug lord is killed.’ The spate of killings has drawn condemnation from human rights groups that contend many of the deaths amount to illegal executions.
ZUMAland.com 