The president declared his war on drugs immediately after his inauguration in June 2016. That very night, the killings began. Within days, more than a hundred people would be dead—shot in dark alleys, on the streets, inside their homes. A few of them were drug users or petty drug dealers, most of them had nothing to do with drugs at all. All of them were poor.
Within six months, the number of the dead would rise to 7,000. By the end of the president’s term in May 2022, there would be around 30,000 victims.
I’m writing this on a Sunday, after spending a couple of hours transcribing interviews of women who lost husbands or sons to the so-called drug war in the Philippines. I’m trying not to be overcome by frustration as I search for news articles on two of the victims whose photos have been shared by their respective family members for me to paint. Nothing’s turning up. No news snippets, not even a mention in the Kill List published by the Inquirer.I don’t know why I still find myself baffled by the lack of news coverage of the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. After all, I’ve been working on this project for more than four years now.
I started painting portraits of the dead and writing their stories after my visit to the Philippines in 2019. During my stay, I went to Payatas on Father Danny Pilario’s invitation. I reached out to Father Danny in 2018 after I heard about the work that he was doing with the families of the drug war victims in Payatas. We became friends over the course of our online conversations, and I wrote about him and the victims’ families that he worked with later that year.
Payatas is an impoverished community with a large landfill—the repository of the waste of Metro Manila’s almost 15 million residents—at its centre. From July 2016 to the time that I visited, there were an estimated 100 victims of extrajudicial killings in the area, but majority of the victims’ families chose to keep quiet out of fear, with many deciding to move away from the area.
When I met the community, there were 25 families in the care of Father Danny’s Project Solidarity with Orphans and Widows (SOW). I brought three of my nieces (all in their 20s) with me, and while I joined a meeting with the adults that was facilitiated by Father Danny, my nieces held an art-and-craft session with the kids. In the adults’ meeting, the main concern was how to keep going with their livelihood project which had only just begun. The women were struggling to learn to sew bags with minimal errors and worried that they would have to carry on putting in hours without earning much. (A year later, they were producing face masks on a large scale and even partnered with Vice President Leni Robredo’s Angat Buhay project.)
The brief time I spent with the Payatas families left me restless. Prior to this, I had already painted some portraits of EJK victims—the few whose faces made it to online news sites. It didn’t seem enough to just do this. I wanted a better way to remember them and honour their memory.
The very first portrait I made was of 22-year-old Rowena, a university student who went to school one day in July 2016 to sort out her graduation requirements and never came back. Her body was found later with a piece of cardboard tied around her neck that said ‘I’m a pusher. Don’t emulate me.’
Rowena was an aspiring singer. I spent a few hours watching all the videos I could find of her performing. I’d end up doing this sort of thing for every person whose portrait I painted—jumping into rabbit holes of social media accounts and immerse myself in the publicly shared moments of strangers before their lives were violentely interrupted. I wanted to know as much as I could about them, and I wanted to know them all.
But there are stories I will never get to know, like that of a 16-year-old boy who was only known as ‘Michael’ with no known address or family, or the dozens who, at the beginning of the war, were simply labelled ‘identity unknown’ on the lists that the police shared with journalists.
And there are stories I’m not yet permitted to tell, like that of a college friend’s older brother, a reformed drug user who was gunned down by cops in his own home. His death was reported as a buy-bust operation. I would like to paint the portraits of the victims in Payatas whose families I have met, but Father Danny advised me to wait until they’re ready because staying in Payatas after your loved one is killed by cops means staying within deadly distance of their murderers.
Only a small fraction of the more than 30,000 victims ever made the headlines, and among them, just a handful are etched in the public consciousness. Before Kian, a 17-year-old whose murder raised outrage in the country in 2017, there were 16-year-old Nercy, 19-year-old Raymart, and thousands of other teenagers who had been gunned down. Before three-year-old Myca whose horrific death was splashed all over the news in 2019, there were Althea and Bladen, both four, five-year-old Danica, seven-year-old Francis, and nine-year-old Lenin. There are thousands of lives that were extinguished by bloodthirsty police and military forces under the rule of a madman that we will never get to know about, and whose families are left to grieve unseen and unheard.
It’s the families left behind that are on top of my mind these days. While I continue to paint the faces of the victims and write their stories, it’s the lives of their parents, wives, partners and children that are becoming the priority of my project. This shift actually started early on in the project, when I met Christine.
Christine’s son Joshua was an up-and-coming e-sports player. He was on his way home to Tarlac from a tournament in Baguio when he and another friend, Julius, were abducted by cops in Rosales, Pangasinan. It would take his mother Christine several days to finally track him down in a morgue. His body was riddled with bullets. The cops claimed that Joshua had ridden a motorbike through a checkpoint. Joshua didn’t own a motorbike, much less knew how to ride one.
After I published Joshua’s story and portrait on the site, I got a call from Christine on Facebook Messenger. She thanked me for telling Joshua’s story and taking the time to paint his portrait. That was 2019. She and I have been in constant touch since. She updates me on Joshua’s case and how things are going in her life. I’ve been a witness to the upheavals in her life—from having to find a new home after the shop where she and her sons had been staying for a few years was shut down and sold, to moving to Manila on her own to find work at the height of the pandemic, to tending to her youngest son after he had a cycling accident.
Most of us have this notion that dead people’s stories are static, that the entirety of their lives can be contained in a single narrative. But every story stays alive somehow, and with every loved one’s retelling, new details come up to the surface. None of the news articles or social media posts about Joshua ever told me that when he was a toddler, Christine would take him with her as she sold balut late at night, tucking him into the cart so he could sleep as she roamed the streets. If it hadn’t been for Tatay Rod, I’d never know that his son Lenin was a Stephen Curry fan and on the day he died, his older sisters had gone out to buy a Curry basketball jersey for him which he never got to see. It was only in one of my chats with Kathy that I learned that her stepson Jhay dabbled in graphic design, and that on the day of his funeral, his friends wore T-shirts that bore the last design that he made.
The dead’s stories continue on, and so do those of their loved ones. As helpless spectators to the carnage committed by the Duterte administration, we root for the bereaved and find ourselves moved by their grief and terror, and express our outrage and contempt for the institutions responsible for the mass murder. And then we move on.
In Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, a novel that fuses supernatural horrors with the real-life terror experienced by Argentinians under a military dictatorship, one character writes, ‘This country disrespects the dead.’ This rings true for the Philippines too, although when it comes to the victims of the fake drug war, it would be more appropriate to say that the country forgets the dead and abandons their loved ones.
We expect the dead to be buried and their loved ones to grieve in quiet dignity, pursuing justice with courage, and demanding nothing from the public apart from ears to hear their pleas for justice.
We forget that there are bills to pay, children to send to school, elderly relatives to support, debts to manage. We forget that on top of the grief and the quest for justice, the left behind must also survive.
We want to hear stories of their pain, but not their mundane worries that echo those of millions of other people in the country living in poverty. We want to hear how sad they are, but not how they struggle each day to put food on the table and keep a roof above their heads.
Let me share with you a few that I know:
Christine has been working since she was 12. She had her first child at 13, and raised her three sons on her own, juggling jobs during the day and selling street food at night. After Joshua’s death, she carried on working as a masseuse and cleaner while also joining protests and speaking to audiences who were willing to listen to her talk about Joshua. She recently discovered that her youngest son’s birth certificate contained errors and she had to pay to have them corrected for his school enrollment. ‘It was my fault,’ she told me. ‘I was all on my own when I gave birth and wasn’t able to register him myself.’
Tatay Rod tends a tiny sari-sari store out of his own house that gets flooded every time there’s heavy rain. He’s had to take out loans against his retirement and widower’s pensions in order to afford the rising cost of living in the country.
Mary Ann lost her husband and son on the same night in September 2016. She sells turmeric and works at the Silingan cafe, on top of trying to finally finish high school and looking after her other kids.
Angel has seven kids and also earns some income from selling small grocery items out of her small home.
Lala is a domestic worker, looking after her employer’s toddler from morning until the child falls asleep. She hardly ever gets to see her own kids, and for this she gets paid a mere 8,000 pesos (£115) a month.
When we say we join the families in their quest for justice, what kind of justice are we referring to? Does justice begin and end with the perpetrators of the drug war getting the punishment they deserve? Cornel West has often said, ‘Justice is what love looks like in public.’ Going by this, justice then goes beyond the prosecution of the guilty and focuses on repairing the damage done to the victims’ families. When we demand justice for the victims, what exactly do we want their families to come away with?
In her book The Reckonings, Lacy M. Johnson pictures justice as ‘anything that makes way for joy, that makes the condition of joy a possibility again.’ We might not be able to speed up the legal process, but we can definitely do something to make it possible for the victims’ families to experience joy again. We can ease a little bit of their burden by ensuring that they’re able to live without having to worry how to make it from one day to the next. The night isn’t ending anytime soon, so let’s help them wait it out, not in despair but with hope. We owe it to them and to ourselves as a society.
Those We Lost, my online memorial, is undergoing a site revamp. But the current version of the site is still active. The new version will include a video and audio gallery, as well as updates on how the project is expanding to live up to our ideal of real justice.
In the meantime, please help me create an emergency fund for the bereaved families by donating here. All the money raised will go to victims’ families in dire need of financial assistance. Right now, we have 13 families on the priority list, but we expect this list to expand soon. As I explore options to formalise the fundraising aspect of the project, I will be working with groups on the ground who are implementing programmes to help the victims’ families.
This newsletter is changing too over the coming months. I’m planning to produce more content centred on finding meaning in chaotic times. There will be more posts on art, writing, books and literature, and creativity. I have no intention at the moment of offering paid subscriptions, but I have set up a Ko-fi.com account that I will link to on every issue in case you’d like to support my work. Whatever goes into this account will help pay for running Those We Lost, such as domain and site hosting, Canva subscription (I use Canva for creating social media assets), painting materials, interview transcriptions and translations, and the interviewees’ mobile data fees. Once I have sorted my editorial calendar, I will start doing my art giveaways and publishing service bundles through that account.