The number of deaths in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs continues to pile up more than two years after it was launched.
Numbers from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) obtained by the Kyodo News Agency on Tuesday show that the controversial drug war’s death toll .
According to the same report,聽5,050 were killed from July 1, 2016 to Nov. 30 of this year.
The PDEA’s tally 聽at the end of October, Rappler reported, which means that 51 people were killed in just a month.
And that’s just the official count from the government’s authorities. The Human Rights Watch had placed the number of drug聽war-related deaths as early as last year.
Chito Gascon, the chief of the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights (CHR), said earlier this month that the death toll could be .
Despite this, Duterte’s spokesperson Salvador Panelo said that the anti-narcotics crackdown GMA News reported.
Instead of being alarmed by the PDEA’s latest data, Panelo noted how 5,050 is much lower than the number “false news agencies” report.
“The number of deaths occurring in drug-related cases will depend on the circumstances surrounding the arrest, the buy-bust operation. You know, I鈥檝e been reading reports, and I鈥檓 even amazed at until now there have been many buy-bust operations all over the country,” Panelo said聽in a news conference yesterday.
“I didn’t realize there were so many,” he said in Filipino. “I was shocked, so the fight against drugs should be unrelenting.”
Not even Christmas can stop the drug war.
On Monday, Philippine National Police chief Director General Oscar Albayalde said that they won’t be taking a break from anti-drug operations this season — not even on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
PDEA聽Director General Aaron Aquino also earlier said that they plan to intensify their operations, particularly in聽鈥渉igh-end bars, hotels, condominiums, and posh villages,鈥 as an attempt to catch those who use party drugs.
Apart from the deaths, the PDEA’s latest data shows that 164,265 drug personalities in聽115,435 anti-drugs operations from July 2016 to November 2018.
