Duterte 'Using Drugs War to Kill Opponents': Rights Groups | TIME
The assassination of two provincial mayors in two days has raised fresh fears that law and order in the Philippines—already in a fragile state as the result of a bloody war on drugs—is deteriorating further.
On Tuesday, motorcycle-riding gunmen ambushed Mayor Ferdinand Bote in his car after he left a meeting in Cabanatuan City, about 100 miles north of Manila. The morning before, a suspected sniper shot Mayor Antonio Halili in the chest as he sung the national anthem in front of Tanauan City Hall in Batangas, about 40 miles south of the capital.
Their deaths have brought to at least 10 the number of mayors who have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016.
Halili, who had gained local notoriety for parading drug suspects on “walks of shame”, was stripped of his powers to supervise anti-drug operations when authorities included him on a list of government officials supposedly linked to narcotics (the administration is fond of making such accusations, often without proof). His death came just four days after Duterte publicly joked that vice mayors should kidnap or otherwise depose their bosses.
“The earlier you do away with your mayor, the earlier you become the mayor also,” he told an audience in Bohol province, where at least two mayors have been killed since he took office.
“Duterte’s culture of violence is upon us. No one is safe now,” opposition senator Antonio Trillanes, said in a statement Tuesday. Trillanes, who last year told TIME he was an assassination target, added that whether or not Halili’s killing turned out to be connected to the war on drugs, the president had turned the Philippines “into the murder capital of Asia.”
Read more: Another Philippine Mayor Accused of Drug Ties Has Been Killed in a Police Raid
The Philippines has a long history of political killings. The 1983 assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.—a politician and vocal opponent of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos—was one of the driving forces behind the so-called People Power Revolution that ousted the autocrat. In 2009, under then-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, gunmen killed at least 57 people traveling with supporters of a politician challenging a
