'Have We Opened the Gates of Hell With Our Images?'
Since the middle of last year, a group of Filipino reporters, photographers, and cameramen have been at the frontline of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. They are a different type of war correspondent, and the drug war, a different type of war.
The correspondents work what they call the “night shift,” the unholy hours between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., when the dead bodies are found. They wait at Manila’s main police station and rush from there to the site of the most recent kill. They keep count of the corpses, talk to witnesses and families, interview the police, attend wakes and funerals. A lot of what the world learned about the carnage, especially in the early months, is due largely to the night shift reporters.
Most of the over 7,000 victims of Duterte’s drug war are poor, targeted by officials who assumed they are street-level drug dealers, known as pushers, or merely addicted to shabu, the local name for crystal meth. Many were shot in police operations, caught in the crossfire, or mistaken for someone else. Many more were slain by vigilantes or death squads—masked gunmen riding on motorcycles who shoot their victims in the head or chest, usually at close range. Some of these killers have been linked to the police or are policemen themselves.
The victims’ bodies are found on sidewalks or bridges, their heads wrapped in packing tape, their hands bound with rope. Some are left lying on the streets, bathed in blood, or splayed on the shaky wooden floors of shacks in shantytowns along the river, the shoreline of Manila Bay, or further inland, in the densely packed warrens inhabited by the city’s poorest and neediest.
Over the course of three weeks in December and January, I interviewed several night shift reporters, in press vans or the press room at the Manila Police District office. In our conversations, they wondered whether they were doing enough. Duterte has compared drug addicts to animals worthy of slaughter, so the reporters try to humanize them in their work, they told me. But readers don’t seem to care. Those on the night shift have been attacked viciously on social media, accused by the president’s supporters of being paid hacks and of making up stories and faking photographs. Most Filipinos, they said, have chosen to avert their gaze from the slaughter.
“I think I’ve aged, my soul has gotten old,” photojournalist Dondi Tawatao said. “But I feel I am stronger now because I’ve seen the worst. ... What else could happen that I haven’t yet seen?”
What follows is the testimony of the night shift reporters.
I. July 2016
On July 1, Duterte’s first day in office, his newly appointed police chief ordered all police units to conduct “massive and simultaneous” anti-drug operations throughout the country. Nearly 600 suspected drug users and dealers were killed in Duterte’s first month as president.
Dondi Tawatao, a photographer for Getty Images, began working the night shift in June, before Duterte was sworn
