Pubdate: Mon, 05 Jun 2017
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2017 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Aurora Almendral

ON THE RUN FROM DUTERTE'S CRACKDOWN

MANILA - Every morning before dawn, Rosario Perez checks to make sure
her sons are still alive. The three brothers, all in their 20s, sleep
at the houses of friends and relatives, moving regularly, hoping that
whoever may have been assigned to kill them won't catch up with them.

They are not witnesses on a mob hit list, or gang members hiding from
rivals. They are simply young men living in the Philippines of
President Rodrigo Duterte.

"How could I not send them to hide?" said Ms. Perez, 47, after peeking
in on two of her sons and phoning the third. "We can barely sleep out
of fear."

Nearly a year into Mr. Duterte's violent antidrug campaign, in which
more than 4,000 people accused of using or selling illegal drugs have
been killed and thousands of other killings are classified as "under
investigation," fear and mistrust have gripped many neighborhoods of
Manila and other cities.

Residents are cobbling together strategies to hide and survive. Many
young men are staying indoors, out of sight. Others have fled the
urban slums, where most of the killings occur, and are camping out on
farms or lying low in villages in the countryside.

The Roman Catholic Church has vocally opposed Mr. Duterte's deadly
campaign, and an underground network of churches and safe houses is
offering sanctuary - quietly, to avoid the attention of the vigilantes
responsible for much of the killing.

In the most heavily targeted slums, neighbors are wary of talking to
each other, unsure who among them are police informers. Most try not
to get involved if they hear someone is in trouble, not wanting to be
blamed if the person ends up dead. One man said that just talking to
the wrong person could be fatal.

"What we're seeing here is the rule of law being replaced by a system
of fear and violence," said Jose Manuel Diokno, a human rights lawyer
in Manila.

According to a recent survey by Social Weather Stations, a local
polling firm, 73 percent of Filipinos are either "very worried" or
"somewhat worried" that they or someone they know will be killed in
the antidrug campaign.

Those who have gone into hiding are often people who think their names
are on government watch lists of drug users. The lists are compiled by
local officials using information supplied by the police and by
informers, and include people who have surrendered to the authorities.
They are not public, and it is unclear how some on them are marked for
death.

Many on the lists are past or current users of shabu, the local name
for the methamphetamine at the heart of Mr. Duterte's antidrug
campaign. Many others are not.

Ms. Perez, for instance, says that two of her sons have never used
drugs but that the third once did. He surrendered to the police,
hoping that he would be spared, and she has required all of them to
take drug tests and has shared the results with neighborhood officials.

Still, she has been told that all three of their names are on a watch
list, and a photo of her home has circulated with it. "With just a
name and a photo, they'll kill you," she said.

The death threats are often passed along in whispered warnings between
neighbors, anonymous text messages or handwritten notes.

Most people hiding from the police or vigilantes are reluctant to talk
because they are afraid of disclosing their location and being killed.
But several dozen people spoke to The New York Times about their lives
on the run, or those of their neighbors or loved ones, on the
condition of anonymity.

One young man who was picked up by the police, beaten and then
released after a month and a half in detention said he had moved to
his grandmother's house in a different district of Manila to hide.

When he returned to visit his neighborhood, one of his friends told
him that vigilante gangs were looking for him. It was a warning he
took seriously. One of his friends had already been killed.

"I was afraid," he said, adding that he has had trouble sleeping at
night. "I thought they were going to kill me."

His mother worried that if he stayed in Manila, he would be shot, so
she made him move again, to a rural village of bamboo huts, dirt roads
and banana trees in the northern Philippines. He texts with his
friends, but tells them that he is in a different part of the country,
just to be safe.

His mother said she had voted for Mr. Duterte, but now wishes she
could take her vote back.

The clergy providing sanctuary, part of a coalition called Rise Up,
operate in secret, fearing the church's protection will not be enough
to keep vigilantes from coming after them.

"The most vulnerable are always an easy target, even if they are under
our sanctuary," said Jun Santiago, a lay brother of the Congregation
of the Most Holy Redeemer and a member of Rise Up. "We don't know who
the killers are."

One recent evening, at a convent at the edge of Manila, a teenager who
was the only surviving witness to a massacre that left seven people
dead slept on a narrow bed on the rooftop under clotheslines and a
tattered plastic tarp.

A priest, the Rev. Gilbert Ballena, said the boy had been hiding in
the convent for four months, using an assumed name, keeping busy by
painting small canvases of the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary and by
grinding turmeric, which Rise Up sells for extra cash.

The teenager texts with his girlfriend, but he is afraid to go see her
or his family. For his safety, and for a change of scenery, he
recently moved to a different church, where he changed his name again.

At another church in Manila, most people seeking sanctuary spend a few
nights on spare mattresses before they are moved to safe houses or
helped to leave Manila, staff members said.

This church has sheltered more than 30 people so far, they said:
people under immediate threat, witnesses to a family member's death
and others who have filed complaints against the police.

Mr. Santiago said he had received threats for his work with survivors.
"That will not be the reason to silence us," he said. "It is our
mission to help the needy."

Another person who believes he is on a death list is a skinny young
man with crude tattoos on both arms. He said he had used drugs and had
surrendered to the police in November.

Since then, he said, he has lived in fear that he will be killed.
Whenever the police or men in balaclavas walk his neighborhood, he
climbs a tree and hides in the branches until they leave.

He would not say whether he still used drugs. Whether you quit or not,
he said, "they'll still kill you."

In the single-room, concrete-block home she shares with her husband
and two granddaughters, Ms. Perez catches sight of a news clip on a
muted television playing in the background. Another killing: the thin,
loose limbs of a young man zipped into a body bag, a woman collapsed
against a vehicle, crying hysterically.

Her eyes well up with tears, and her voice trembles. "That's what I
don't want to happen to my sons," she said.

Correction: June 6, 2017

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Monday with an article 
about Filipinos who are fleeing their government's violent crackdown on 
drugs misidentified, in some copies, the woman shown silhouetted. She is 
a mother who asked not to be identified, one of whose sons is hiding in 
the northern Philippines; she is not Rosario Perez, another mother 
mentioned in the article.
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MAP posted-by: Matt