Executing people for drug-related offenses, judicially or otherwise, is characteristic of the region. “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful,” he was quoted as saying to another crowd that day. He was speaking at a ceremony installing dela Rosa, his loyal henchman, as the nation’s top cop. “Do your duty, and if in the process you kill 1,000 persons because you were doing your duty, I will protect you,” he told police officers on July 1, the day after his inauguration. A month later, when he was President-elect, Duterte offered medals and cash rewards for citizens that shot dealers dead. “All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you,” he said before his election, in April. The carnage is exactly what Duterte promised. By one account, there is official pride in the death toll.

22 that 712 people had been killed in police operations in the seven weeks since the crackdown began, and that another 1,067 had died at the hands of vigilantes.

The director general of the Philippine National Police (PNP), Ronald dela Rosa, told a Senate hearing on Aug. And so it was.Ī single bullet to the back of his head that night made Castro one of the first of nearly 2,000 Filipinos killed so far in Duterte’s brutal war on drugs. “He always had a hard time saying no to his friends,” his wife Merlyn tells TIME.Īt the same time, a flirtation with meth didn’t sit well with his life as a family man and his work as a chauffeur at a nearby hotel, and Castro decided to stop cadging recreational hits before he became dependent.Īccording to his cousin, Castro told them that his next drug run would be his last. Too poor to become a proper user - shabu starts at $31 a gram - he used to buy the drug on behalf of his friends in exchange for a bump or two. He never even bought grams of shabu - one of the local names for methamphetamine - for himself. “We will not stop until the last drug lord … and the last pusher have surrendered or are put either behind bars or below the ground, if they so wish,” said Duterte.Ĭastro, 46 and a father of four, was neither a drug lord nor a pusher. Just hours earlier, the Philippines’ new President, 71-year-old Rodrigo Duterte, had given his inaugural State of the Nation address, in which he repeated the vow that saw him elected by a landslide in early May.

on July 25, Restituto Castro received an anonymous text message asking him to leave his house in the Caloocan district of northern Manila and come to the corner of the McArthur Highway.

Bato dela rosa girlfriend