Golf Clap
Lots of people are being killed. There’s no real way of knowing if they are drug dealers.
Filipinos thought the Marcoses were swell folks and tried to beat the shit out of the Beatles. Forgive me if I seek outside confirmation.
Did they really used to kill 1700 alleged drug dealers and arrest 300 allegedly corrupt police officers? Did 600,000 people used to surrender to the police when the administration changed?
Well that’s the downside of “extrajudicial” killings, you don’t have to prove anything. But it seems targeted well enough that 600,000 alleged drug dealers have surrendered to the police.
As far as I’m concerned you’ve answered your own question here. If it’s authoritarian and extrajudicial I’m against it. I don’t give a shit how well it works. Fighting evil with more evil doesn’t sit well with me.
But then I’m also against the death penalty because I don’t care if the false execution rate is 1 in 100,000. One is one too many.
I don’t know if the Filipinos thought the Marcos were swell folks after they declared martial law. After all they got chased out of the country. But I will agree that the Filipinos are awfully forgiving of a family that looted their country and oppressed their citizens.
I don’t know about the Beatles incident but I wouldn’t dismiss the democratic will of an entire nation because some of them mistreated a bunch of musicians that were perceived to have slighted the democratically elected head of state and had recently compared themselves to Jesus.
They’ve replaced illegal drug sales with government death squads. As a solution, this is equivalent to getting rid of a toothache by cutting off your head.
I’d seen a citation to 1200 extrajudicial killings there in 2010, but having looked at other sources, I think that’s probably the figure for 2001-10. So, sure, it’s a bigger spike than I realized, but it’s still the case that the Philippines has been a very violent polity for a long time.
That is a drug dealer for every 168 people. :dubious:
I’m sure plenty of people turned themselves in to avoid being killed, regardless of their history with drugs. Assuming that actually 600,000 turned themselves in (which as you pointed out is a questionable number) there’s no way of really knowing how many were actually drug dealers and how many were scared potential victims.
Apart from the dead ones of course
Or its like killing breast cancer with a mastectomy and chemotherapy.
Why is it questionable? The number was reported by several news outlets without a hint of skepticism.
Which amounts to less than a fifth of one percent, of one percent of the population. Sure its still a big number but this guy came into power promising to do exactly this and that promise was a large part of why he won.
You know who else won an election ;)?
Strongmen are often popular with certain segments of a frightened or paranoid population - Putin certainly is. But by and large history doesn’t tend to judge them kindly, the less so the father you get from them in time. Just because you democratically elect an authoritarian demagogue, doesn’t make them less of an authoritarian demagogue. Especially in a state where the rule of law is fragile at best, all but absent at worst. In other threads there are even posters advocating for aiding in the overthrow of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another democratiocally elected authoritarian asshole ( though less of a wild card than this joker ).
What if my ex wife falsely accused me of being in that one fifth of one percent and I were killed? What if someone on the SDMB accused you? :dubious:
The current number being reported is actually 700,000. With a population of 98 million that means there would be 1 drug dealer for every 140 citizens and presumably more left to turn themselves in. Do you think that is an accurate representation of the drug problem in the Philippines or do you think perhaps something else is going on?
If only those unjustly accused of a crime, one that suddenly entailed immediate capital punishment, had a way to protect themselves from a government that had become tyrannical.
Back to the title of the thread, no, Mexico should not create death squads.
First, the predictable result would be Mexicans fleeing their country to the US in the hands of human smugglers. Tons of children from Central America had done a similar thing over the last several years, fleeing drug violence in places like Honduras and Guatemala, and it has been a serious problem. Nobody should encourage that sort of nonsense.
Second, no matter how popular such murders are, it is immoral to set death squads on the loose. It’s just straight up evil.