Becoming a narco-state?

On Feb. 22, with intelligence from the United States, Mexico used National Guard, Army, and Air Force assets to track and kill Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes. Known as “El Mencho,” the chief of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (JNGC), Oseguera was one of the best known and most wanted drug lords in the world, befitting the $15-million bounty on his head. The violence over several days after El Mencho’s killing disrupted operations at Jalisco’s international airports, while other parts of the country witnessed gunbattles, blockaded roads, and burned buildings and vehicles. Unleashed partly by JNGC resistance and retaliation against government forces, infighting among factions competing to succeed El Mencho and clashes among cartels seeking to cut into JNGC’s business added to the turmoil.

Meanwhile, on the day El Mencho died, the International Criminal Court (ICC) began hearings in The Hague on the charges against former President Rodrigo Duterte for extrajudicial killings (EJK) committed in his drug war. Duterte defenders might view the mayhem in Mexico as a timely reminder of the justification for the drug war and any collateral EJK casualties—the threat of the Philippines turning into a narco-state. But the extensive media coverage of the El Mencho attack actually dramatized the difference between the drug wars in the two countries. Analysts estimate the force controlled by Mexican cartels at between 160,000 and 185,000. Six to eight major cartels operate in Mexico City and in roughly 20 of the country’s 31 states. Facing cartels equipped with military-grade weapons, armored vehicles, and drones, Mexico needed the military to fight its drug war.

In 400 to 800 major engagements a year, its security forces inflict on the cartels casualties of around 300 to 1,000 fighters. Philippine police, mounting thousands more small-scale drug raids, admit average deaths of 1,000 suspects a year, against the 5,000 cited by human rights groups. But losses among Mexican security forces ran at 300 to 400 a year, while Philippine police deaths average 50 per year. Comparisons between the scale and casualty count of enforcement efforts cast doubts on Duterte’s claim, already echoed by his ICC lawyers, that the police killed only in necessary self-defense.

The Philippine police dealt with a relatively small drug user population. In 2015, the year before Duterte’s election, a survey of the Dangerous Drugs Board estimated drug users at about 1.8 million, with a moderate prevalence rate of 2.3 percent, or about the global average. Drug-dependent addicts numbered less than a million. Duterte did not distinguish between users and addicts, while also inflating, without evidence, the number of addicts to 3 to 8 million.

Neither did the police have to confront syndicates with the manpower, weaponry, and influence of Mexican cartels. Geography and political structure made it unlikely that they ever would. Mexico’s decentralized, federal structure left weaker states vulnerable to the cartels. Their access to the estimated $30-billion drug market for cocaine, fentanyl, and other narcotics produced rich profits used to corrupt or coerce local authorities, allowing them in some areas effective territorial influence. Cartels resembled transnational, capitalist corporations, importing materials from Asia, processing them at home for the export market. Some diversified beyond drugs into trafficking, money laundering, and plain extortion.

The Philippine drug economy operated on a smaller scale. Cheaper methamphetamine hydrochloride (“shabu”) was the most common recreational drug. But in low-income, urban communities, shabu also served as a stimulant to sustain longer working hours or as a supplement to dull hunger pains. Social welfare specialists thus argued that drug abuse in the Philippine context was as much a poverty and public health problem as it was a law enforcement problem. Yet these low-income communities became the default targets of police operations, though these yielded few “high-value targets” like El Mencho that the drug war was supposed to “neutralize.”

Duterte was wrong in projecting the Philippines as being in imminent danger of becoming a narco-state—if he and his coperpetrators even really believed this narrative. He was equally wrong in predicting that he would end the drug problem in three to six months, though later admitting that it would outlast his presidency. He was correct in recognizing the appeal of a hardline, antidrug policy for his presidential campaign, and was effective in using it to consolidate near-absolute executive authority with minimal accountability.

Concentrated power did not produce a less corrupt or more capable government. Instead, it left behind a trail of alleged EJK victims leading to The Hague. As more EJK evidence emerges at the ICC, Filipinos must reflect on a troubling question: How did the first Catholic and democratic republic in Asia come to produce the first Asian former head of state and government to be internationally indicted for crimes against humanity?