4 December 2022

Drug killings under Marcos Jr. surpass those killed in last six months of Duterte

Third World Studies Center

Even as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. adopted a different strategy from the Duterte administration’s brutal war against illegal drugs, the killings continue on the high side, data gathered through the Dahas Project of the University of the Philippines Third World Studies Center showed.

20 january 2022

Duterte’s drug war killings rise in Year 2 of the pandemic

Nixcharl C. Noriega and Larah Vinda Del Mundo

Even as the country grappled with new strains of Covid-19 last year, the Duterte government’s drug war continued to claim more lives at the average rate of three deaths every two days.

Data collected by the Third World Studies Center of the University of the Philippines Diliman showed that in 2021, the second year of the pandemic, 545 people were killed in the bloody campaign. This was 84 more than the total in 2020, or an 18 percent increase.

8 august 2021

Duterte’s drug war claims Chinese casualties

Nixcharl C. Noriega

Foreigners in the country, mostly Chinese, are also getting killed in the bloody war against illegal drugs by the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte.

The latest casualty is Wu Zishen, 51, who was shot dead in a buy-bust operation in Bulacan on August 1. He is the 14^th Chinese drug personality killed in such encounters since Duterte launched his campaign against drugs in 2016.

23 july 2021

Duterte drug war has killed 2 per day, says UP study

Krixia Subingsubing (Philippine Daily Inquirer)

President Duterte will leave behind an “endless, failed” war on drugs in which, up to his last year in office, at least two people are killed in a day despite his administration’s claims that it is “winning” the campaign, according to an independent monitoring group that is tallying the drug-related killings.

And the numbers show that 2021 is shaping up to be one of the bloodiest years since Mr. Duterte began his drug campaign in 2016, when he assumed the presidency, said researchers Joel Ariate and Nixcharl Noriega of the University of the Philippines (UP)-Third World Studies Center.

7 february 2021

The PNP Chiefs’ Scorecard on the War on Drugs; “Bato” Tops in the Number of Kills

Nixcharl C. Noriega and Jamaica Jian G. Gacoscosim

Since the start of the Duterte administration in July 2016, five PNP chiefs have taken their turn in leading Duterte’s war on illegal drugs: Dela Rosa, Oscar David Albayalde, Archie Francisco Gamboa, Camilo Cascolan, and Debold Sinas.  Each PNP chief made his own calculations on how best to conduct Duterte’s war on drugs. What remains clear is that, based on our data, the number of minor players (pushers and users) killed far outnumbers those designated as high-value targets. The ratio stands at 1:5.

18 November 2020

Barangay officials, the drug war’s hidden fatalities

Jamaica Jian G. Gacoscosim and Nixcharl C. Noriega

Last November 5, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency released to the public their most recent figures on the government’s war on drugs covering the period July 1, 2016 to September 30, 2020. PDEA’s Real Numbers peg the drug war deaths for the said period at 5,903. The data includes a tally of government workers arrested in anti-drug operations: 438 government employees, 356 elected officials, and 102 uniformed personnel.

PDEA fails to mention that government workers, barangay officials in particular, were also getting killed in the administration’s anti-drug campaign

18 May 2020

No let up in ‘Tokhang’ even during lockdown

Jamaica Jian G. Gacoscosim and Nixcharl C. Noriega