[Philippine corruption] Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines #6/204

¹This image has been reproduced in much of the documentation from human rights organizations that aim to place a smoking gun in the hands of the president (Amnesty International 2017; Human Rights Watch 2017). However, while we certainly concur that Duterte has been important in establishing the conditions necessary for the large-scale slaughter, what happens in places like Bagong Silang relates to wider sociopolitical histories rather than a singular moment resulting from Duterte’s election. In this way, the ultimate aim of the book is to explore what happens to a place and its people during extraordinary times.

The name Bagong Silang literally translates as “new birth.” It was the brainchild of a dying dictatorship, and especially of Imelda Marcos, who had been charged with the responsibility for urban development in Manila in order to realize the dream of Bagong Lipunan, Marcos’s “New Society.” For years it was referred to as La Kubeta (“The Toilet”). It is easy to imagine how it could be construed as populated by what Balibar (2001) calls human garbage flushed out of the expanding metropolis. However, the name supposedly was coined by a journalist who was given a tour of the enormous site from the air and saw the endless rows of toilet fixtures that marked each 90-square-meter plot. These plots extended for miles. Residents were supposed to build their houses around the toilet fixtures. This marked Bagong Silang off as a resettlement site. When it was built, it was some 20 kilometers outside the city, far away from most economic activity. In this way, it became the quintessential place for surplus people, with above-average unemployment and poverty rates. Rather than being the embodiment of productive informality, those who ended up in Bagong Silang had lost the battle for the right to stay in the city.

Bagong Silang was also born amid conflict and violent politics. Located as it was at the frontier of the metropolitan area, it constituted the frontline between the Maoist insurgency of the New People’s Army (NPA) and the government. According to our older informants, NPA soldiers, known as taong labas(outside people), regularly came into Bagong Silang. Partly as a consequence of this incursion, the military had a large presence in the area. Furthermore, residents of particularly rebellious parts of Manila were evicted and relocated to Bagong Silang. This was the case with what was known as the Diliman commune, a settlement based on an alliance between students from the University of the Philippines and urban informal settlers, as well as well-organized settlers from the old harbor district of Tondo, who formed the iconic organization ZOTO (Zone One Tondo Organization) for poor urban settlers (Karaos 1993). Moreover, it had a reputation for crime and drug dealing as well as gang violence. After the first years of unrest and instability, the area gradually settled into what it is today. Nonetheless, Bagong Silang has maintained its reputation of being a place rife with criminality and violence.

In this way, Bagong Silang had long been a killing zone, but it had also been an exclusion zone, a surplus people zone, and a relocation zone. This is illustrative of the bifurcation of Philippine society, in which some people are worth less than others in ways that give them an uncanny resemblance to colonial, racialized others (Stoler 2016). Therefore, to explain the violence in Bagong Silang and answer our other questions, we need to turn to an examination of Philippine politics beyond dominant perspectives on Duterte and the elite. The drug war and its consequences cannot be reduced to violent and sovereign practices of disposing of unwanted populations. Neither can an understanding of what happens in Bagong Silang be solely based on elite politics and a focus on big men, patronage, elite culture, and populism, factors that have dominated the analysis of Philippine politics for decades. Instead, we propose to explore communal intimate politics. This requires a serious examination of intricate webs of relationships, forms of violence, and exchange relations both animated by and animating the war on drugs.

This book aims to make two overarching contributions, one that is empirical, or historically specific, and a second that is conceptual, or theoretical. First, in empirical terms, the book offers a reading of the historical specificities of the drug war as it occurred in one place in Manila. We aim to explore the consequences of the war in places like Bagong Silang rather than exploring the drug war in its own right. We contend that an understanding of the war on drugs and its consequences can only be achieved by examining what preceded it and the conditions that made it possible in specific places.