On the blacktop, the wife cradles her husband’s corpse. A suspected drug pusher, he was shot dead in a police operation. Photographs of the harrowed living embracing the unfeeling, bleeding dead have become familiar. The Philippine Daily Inquirer’s editors used one on the paper’s banner page around the time of President Rodrigo Duterte’s first state of the nation
address.
The image, by Inquirer cameraman Raffy Lerma, has become iconic of officialdom’s war on drugs. It was picked up by foreign news managers for their own outfits. I saw it again last Wednesday in CNN’s front page when I logged on to the internet from the city of York, United Kingdom.
Thursday, news broke that the United Nations (UN) Office on Drugs and Crime has called the attention of the Philippine government to the illegality of extrajudicial executions in light of Duterte’s crusade against illegal drugs.
The UN statement was the latest round of criticism of the summary killings. On change.org, concerned Filipinos had signed a petition requesting the international community to defend thousands of drug suspects killed minus due process. One of the first groups to raise their voice was the global watchdog Human Rights Watch.
Citizen action initiated online illustrates scholar Nico Carpentier’s model of communication at the crux of democratic participation. In this theory, to participate is defined as political action that starts with people’s access to media infrastructure and their mediatized interaction with one another.
The AIP or access, interaction, participation model is, however, also incarnated in attempts to distract the citizenry from the issue of suspects’ trampled right to life. Many supporters of the anti-drug crackdown have used social media to accuse photojournalists of violating ethics. The lensmen allegedly manipulated scenes of the killings to take more haunting pictures. The argument led to an inquiry by the Photojournalists’ Center of the Philippines that eventually exonerated the cameramen concerned.
The latter case of participation and the charge that dramatic photography signifies sentimentality unbecoming of journalists iterate man’s inclination to deny his hand in wrongdoing though confronted with evidence. It is a poor bid for self-justification that echoes Cain’s retort. When his Maker asked him for the whereabouts of Abel, the sibling he slew, Cain snapped back: Am I my brother’s keeper?
Rail about photography ethics. That is easier to do than to acknowledge, meditating on a picture like Lerma’s that brings anyone with an inkling of art literacy back to the Virgin lamenting her executed Son at the foot of the Cross, that one has degenerated into a fratricide enabler. That is easier than granting that the drug dependent or the man with a story of crime has a claim to my care because as far as heaven is concerned, he is my brother.
Returning to Europe after they visited the Philippines a few years ago, my cousin and his eventual wife brought with them a wooden sculpture that a Filipino inmate wrought in the Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm, Puerto Princesa City. My cousin-in-law, who is Portuguese, told me the figure is highly admired by her friends for its beauty. The penal colony seems to be one of the bright spots in the country’s justice system, offering the incarcerated, many with a background in prohibited drugs, the environment to choose a life apart from darkness. The place shares something of Portugal’s own, successful way of dealing with the problem of drugs. That country began by acknowledging that addiction stems from lack of love and care and proceeded to invest generously in dependents’ rehabilitation.