Raphael is on the run. He is a softly spoken, middle-aged man of wiry build – and he is wired. The friend who put me in contact with him said that Raphael had been in this hyper-adrenalised state for months, ever since he had learned he was on the police “watch list”. A local councillor had casually asked him to pop down to the police station one day and, when he complied, he realised he had inadvertently “surrendered”. Now, like more than one million other Filipinos, Raphael is on the “kill list” database. Being on it doesn’t necessarily mean he will be taken out, but the chance is always there.

“But if I’ve been killed by the time this comes out, feel free to use my real name,” he told me with gallows humour. This was a man spending his life glancing over one shoulder and listening out for motorbikes.

Assassins wear a smoked-visor helmet over a black balaclava. They wear black T-shirts, black jeans, the barrel of an unholstered Colt 45 “Duterte pistol” [in 2017, the Philippine president distributed 3,000 guns to his armed forces] jammed into the pillion’s belt. This is the uniform of the Philippine army of freelance executioners tasked with interpreting the dog whistles of their godfather-president. It’s lucrative enough work – the going rate is rumoured to be at least £140 for a hit on an addict or local pusher, the money divvied up among the kill team. Each night’s handiwork is faithfully reported in the media within a day or two, a paragraph here or there and then nothing. No investigation. No risk of getting caught.

Raphael was being monitored and didn’t want me coming to his city, which he refused to even let me name. We decided to meet on neutral territory, in a crowded place. We ate well and had a couple of Red Horse beers to take the tension down a notch, though at no point did Raphael look relaxed. In better days he might have had a rakish charm. But these were not good days. He came with very strict conditions of total anonymity – Raphael is not his real name – which was a shame because, in real life, he is a compelling character with a colourful story.

He’d had it rough. Raphael grew up with his grandmother in Tondo, a sprawling Manila slum, before accidentally killing his violent, drunken uncle with a karate kick and then wisely moving far away. His aunt, possibly grateful for this intervention, had not pressed charges, although money did change hands. But the odds on Raphael having a long life himself had recently got a lot shorter. He had been informed by a couple of friendly police officers that his name was not only on the watch list, but also on the police high-value target (HVT) register, identifying him as a purveyor of methamphetamines and licensing the henchmen of the Fillipino president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs to shoot to kill. He was now even more likely to be dispatched in one of the notoriously fatal buy-bust operations, with alleged dealers entrapped by police or liquidated by “vigilantes”, who are actually off-duty officers.

"I lie awake at night. I don’t know when they will come, but I know they will." - Raphael

Raphael had also come to discover that once his name was on a list it would stay there for as long as Duterte was president or for as long as Raphael survived.

Though in the “barangay” slums [a small administrative district] drugs watch lists predate Duterte’s administration, he has used them to instil fear and to impose a paranoiac’s version of social order. Despite a reported spike of more than 50 per cent in the national murder rate [according to figures from July to November 2016 vs the same period in 2015], Filipinos are said to feel safer with Duterte’s nationwide “peace and order project” in full swing.

[Of the same time periods] the government has claimed there has been a 42 per cent drop in crimes such as carjacking and theft. The police have said the number of crimes overall has dropped by 30 per cent. The reality is that nearly eight out of ten adult Filipinos fear that they or someone they know will be taken out by the men in black on motorbikes.

These sinister riders bear Duterte branding, his grisly modus mortis. Some of the killings have been caught on CCTV and have occasionally been posted online. The grey, low-resolution clips run like silent snuff films, cold and brutal.

“How am I supposed to live like this?” Raphael asked.

He is no exception. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines have lived like this since the day Duterte was inaugurated in June 2016, having found themselves on one list or another.

Every single barangay, in every single town, in every single city, has drawn up watch lists and HVT lists and Duterte himself has a personal kill list, a voluminous sheaf of papers he brandishes during threat-laden after-dinner speeches. With two exceptions, the only other Filipinos I had knowingly encountered who had been on one of these lists were already dead by the time I set eyes on them.

President Rodrigo Duterte speaks at an event with the Filipino community in Hong Kong, 12 April 2018 © Getty Images

“I lie awake at night,” said Raphael. “I don’t know when they will come. But I know they will. Every time I hear a motorbike, every time my dog barks, I think it’s them.” He paused. The stress had placed unsustainable pressure on his relationship. He and his partner of 20 years no longer talked. His eldest son was a shabu (methamphetamine) user, he told me, and was also on the watch list, making the strain unbearable.

“I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life,” he said, “but it’s my son I’m worried for. I’m old. He’s just 19. He is frightened. I’m used to living with danger, but he’s not.”

Raphael claimed that a local community leader bore a personal grudge against him and this was their revenge, it had nothing to do with drugs.

I had heard stories of how the drugs war was being used as a pretext for settling personal vendettas. In late 2017, the Philippine National Police (PNP) adopted a sinister new tactic: deploying public drop-boxes outside police stations into which anonymous informants could post the names of their neighbours in the hope they would be placed on drugs watch lists.

Raphael was insistent that although he’d once been involved in the drugs world, he had long ago left it behind. He hated shabu and hadn’t smoked the stuff in 20 years. In the late Nineties, he had used it for two months, each time unable to sleep or eat for days on end. Finally, he said, he’d overdosed, nearly died and hadn’t touched it since.

“I also didn’t like to be around users unless they were really close friends,” he said. “Even then they would turn into something I didn’t recognise. They get paranoid when the high starts to wear off. And then they get violent.”

The destructive, character-warping effects of crystal meth on users’ personalities are matched in intensity only by the psychological and social damage it inflicts on those around them. As I sat questioning and cross-examining Raphael, it was clear to me that he was not a shabu junkie. Overwhelmed by feelings of his powerlessness, he had taken to self-medicating with Red Horse beer, he said, to counter what he called a well of “deep, black depression and rage”.

Raphael said the number of people he knew who used shabu had increased dramatically over the previous decade. Many, like his own son, were teenagers and changed the mood in the barangay. “The kids are all stealing.” And with the petty crime came violence.

Death sentences could be handed to enemies by adding names to list

In the early days, crystal meth was mostly coming in from China, dropped off at sea, off the Philippine coast, in plastic containers which Filipino drug lords and dealers would salvage and bring ashore. That was “the stuff that kept you awake for days”. But, as the years went by, small labs began to spring up everywhere. The shabu was increasingly being locally produced, which meant the quality and potency decreased.

Scores of labs have been raided by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) in recent years, with regular big busts since Duterte became president. By the end of the first year of the drugs war, police said they had dismantled nine labs and confiscated nearly 2,500kg of shabu with a street value of £174 million. The labs all contained the tell-tale equipment – drums and pressure tanks, tubes and packing facilities – familiar to anyone who’s watched Breaking Bad.

The labs were and still are disguised as legitimate factories, hidden in warehouses, abandoned mines, remote poultry farms and inner-city apartments. Their discovery has almost always been accompanied by the arrest of Chinese nationals. In one case, police seized a floating shabu lab aboard a converted fishing boat in Subic Bay. Another was uncovered in a village piggery.

“Our barangay was considered a hotspot,” Raphael said. “The number-one dealer is in my neighbourhood. He was selling drugs to my son, who started stealing from [us].”

Raphael was crippled by regret. Back in 2012, he told me, he had been arrested and charged with dealing drugs, but when his case came to court (after spending two-and-a-half years in prison on remand) he was acquitted. He conceded that he had, in fact, been an irregular, small-time dealer, but claimed to have stopped years ago for the sake of his family.

Ah, so he was a dealer, I surprised myself by thinking, as if Raphael’s inclusion on two kill lists was somehow justified because of this. Of course, this is exactly what has happened in the minds of many Filipinos as killings have been normalised and Duterte’s views have gone mainstream.

Raphael painted a bleak picture of his own drug-infested barangay, a place where neighbours spied on neighbours and where small disputes found lurid means of resolution. Drugs war drop-boxes began to appear at police stations for informants to post the names of suspects. If you had an influence, or could convince someone else who did, death sentences could be handed to your enemies simply by adding names to lists.

During the five hours I spent with him, Duterte’s name came up frequently.

“Shit,” he suddenly exclaimed, as though struck by the insanity of the situation he was in. “Duterte is crazy, man. Crazier than I am. He’s a psychopath.”

PDEA agents arrest an alleged dealer during a drug raid in Maharlika Village, 28 February 2018 © Getty Images

Whose name is on which list is common knowledge. List compilers are leaky, as are the police. The listed become socially toxic and are publicly ostracised. Months of stigma and exclusion generally precede violent death. Several listed individuals Raphael knew had already been shot dead.

The first to die in Raphael’s barangay was a dealer he had known, who was killed on the very day of Duterte’s inauguration. The man had served 20 years for murder and on his release in 2014 had set up as a shabu “distributor”, as Raphael called him, and tried to recruit him as a dealer. Raphael said the man had been supplied by the police, who took most of the profit. The barangay sounded like a typical poor urban district. It could have been anywhere in the Philippines – a place where everyone knew everyone else, but where community spirit had been shattered by suspicion and consumed by fear since Duterte was elected president. Many, including children, had witnessed the regular street assassinations.

Raphael related two chilling encounters with masked men on motorbikes in detail, both right outside his house. Once, two men, who did not bother to remove their helmets or balaclavas, stopped in front of his house and asked for him by his full name. He saw his tenant talking to the men and pointing up. There was no avoiding it, so, heart in mouth, he had gone down.

The riders claimed to be working for a courier company, he said, although neither wore a uniform. To his horror, one reached into a sling bag strapped across his chest and went to pull out what Raphael was sure would be a pistol. The man hadn’t pulled a gun, though. It had been an envelope, with a label identifying its sender as his aunt, who lives abroad. He hadn’t been in contact with her for months. (And, no, it wasn’t the same aunt whom he had inadvertently widowed years earlier.)

As Raphael showed proof of identity and scribbled his signature, he’d wondered whether he’d just signed his own death warrant, confirming for his would-be assassins that he was indeed their local HVT. Nervously, he made a joke of it and said to the riders, “I really thought I was going to die. I thought you were riding in tandem.”

These brazen killings have severely eroded perceptions of justice in the Philippines

“When I explained,” Raphael said, “they just laughed. Then they roared off.”

The terror of the experience was written all over his face, even in the telling of the story. It had really spooked him.

As it turned out, the envelope contained a prepaid Visa card – a common means by which many Filipinos receive remittances from family members working overseas. “But when I tried to use it there was no money on it,” he said. When he called his aunt to thank her for her “gift”, she had no idea what he was talking about.

Raphael was required to sign in once a week at his local police station and attend lengthy state- and church-run drug-rehab programmes three afternoons a week. These “rehab” programmes involved addicts hooked on crystal meth attending lectures. There was no medication on offer, Raphael said, and no other form of psycho-social intervention. Narcotics Anonymous sessions took place every weeknight (“except they weren’t anonymous”) and in the community hall every Sunday afternoon. Missing even one of these sessions would be a problem. On completion of these compulsory programmes, it was promised that the names on the lists would be submitted to the city mayor and police chief for “delisting”. It never happened. New requirements were always drawn up. No one was delisted. That was when Raphael realised he was on the lists for life.

I have remained in regular contact with Raphael. The good news is that, at the time of writing, I still have to use his pseudonym.

He has remained unable to get himself delisted, however. Finally, having toughed it out for a year, he recently messaged me to ask whether I could put him in contact with someone who could help him disappear. He wanted to go into hiding with his 19-year-old son, in the hope that one day their nightmare would be over. A nascent network, operating by word of mouth, had begun to provide sanctuary and protection for people who have found themselves on Duterte’s death lists. But the safe houses, it turned out, were all full.

"There’s no difference between today and how the SS operated." - Diokno

One Sunday evening, in a noisy café on the University Of The Philippines campus in Manila’s Quezon City, I met Jose Manuel “Chel” Diokno, the country’s best-known human rights lawyer and one of Duterte’s most daringly outspoken critics.

Diokno has publicly disparaged the president’s war on drugs, condemned the surge in extrajudicial killings and lamented the erosion of the rule of law. He is incensed by Duterte’s murderous threats to human rights activists and lawyers. Diokno is also the dean of De La Salle University College Of Law and has discovered a thing or two about Duterte’s lists.

“When he was mayor of Davao, Duterte didn’t keep his lists a secret. And if you look at how his government is conducting its drugs war now, it’s based on these watch lists. There is no difference between what is happening here today and how the Japanese operated, with their Secret Police or how the SS operated in Nazi Germany,” he said, fixing me with a steady, solemn glare over the rims of his glasses. “The more I see, the more disgusted I am.”

Diokno chairs the Free Legal Assistance Group (Flag), which for years has handled cases dating back to martial law under Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, as well as those linked to Duterte’s kill squads. Diokno’s late father, Jose “Ka Pepe” Diokno, also a distinguished human rights lawyer as well as a senator, was widely regarded as a legendary opponent of Marcos.

Police at the scene where an alleged drug dealer was shot dead, 23 March 2018 © Getty Images

When military rule was declared in 1972, Diokno senior was arrested without charge and held incommunicado in solitary confinement. The young Chel, who was in those days not even a teenager, spent two years not knowing if his father was alive. Ka Pepe founded Flag when he was released and, four decades on, his son is following in his footsteps.

Chel sipped his strong black coffee. He was well-versed in Duterte’s patterns of behaviour. Now, he confirmed exactly what I’d heard from Raphael.

“There are several kinds of lists... Names on the typical watch list are supplied by local barangay officials... Then there are the HVT or ‘wanted’ lists. Those names come from the PDEA and PNP agents monitoring drug activities. I don’t know it for a fact,” he said, “but it’s not beyond this government to compile a list of human rights activists and lawyers too. What I do know is that once your name is on a list it’s pretty much impossible to get off it.”

Diokno told me about two lawyers he knew, one in Mindanao and one in Luzon, who had sought to have their clients’ names removed. The first had a transgender client who had gone to the lawyer with a drugs-test certificate to prove to the police that she was clean. They went to the PNP, he said, asking them to please remove her, but were told, “Sorry, the list is now at police HQ in Manila and we don’t have the power.”

In Luzon, it had been exactly the same story with another client. “Unless you know someone high up in the PNP or in Malacañang Palace [the president’s official residence and primary workplace] it is impossible to get delisted.”

Those who have managed to get themselves delisted are about as rare as survivors of tandem hits or police buy-bust operations.

Many of those killed in police buy-bust operations are known to have had falsified evidence planted on their bodies

In late September 2016, Duterte did something very out of character: he publicly apologised to a congressman and former provincial governor whom he had maligned as a named kingpin of what he’d called a “drugs matrix”, which supposedly ran operations in and out of the country’s biggest prison.

Unsurprisingly, Duterte’s critic-in-chief, the senator Leila De Lima, who was named as “boss” of this drugs ring, received no such apology. But the president said he was “very sorry” to have implicated representative Amado Espino Jr and two other senior provincial officials in this supposed “matrix”. He described this mistake as a “lapse” and conceded that “somehow we were negligent in counter-checking”.

It was Raphael who reminded me of this incident. He added, “If Duterte can mistakenly put a congressman’s name on a list and then admit it and say sorry, how much more uncertain is it for ordinary people?” Then Raphael asked, “Even if they do say sorry, what’s the point when you are dead?”

Those documenting the spiralling death toll believe that, among the thousands killed by either police or hitmen, there is likely to have been scores of cases of mistaken identity. Many of those killed in police buy-bust operations are known to have had falsified evidence – sachets of shabu or homemade revolvers, oftentimes both – planted on their bodies.

A source in counter-narcotics told me, “They’re not even trying to cover it up. Guns with identical serial numbers turn up in different incidents. Shells don’t match the calibre. Revolvers are found in the right hands of left-handed people.”

“Drug lords, don’t be complacent with me. I will have you killed.” - President Rodrigo Duterte

According to US online campaign stopthedrugwar.org, 49 people were killed in the United States in police drug-bust operations during 2016, with about one police officer killed for every ten dead civilians.

In the Philippines, meanwhile, according to government statistics, just 36 police personnel were killed during more than 50,000 drugs operations in Duterte’s first ten months in power.

Compared with the US, counter-narcotics operations in the Philippines are not particularly dangerous for police, but all-too-often fatal for the suspect.

In addition to the watch lists and HVT lists, Duterte has his own personal “narco list”, which he can be seen waving around during live televised addresses.

This list began with 158 government officials whom Duterte named and shamed, accusing them of involvement in illegal drugs activity right across the country. They included several serving or former congressmen and seven judges, as well as mayors, governors, scores of senior police workers – including generals – and military officers.

Speaking at the central command of the Philippines Army camp in Cebu City a month into his premiership, in July 2016, the president said, “These drug lords, these mayors, these governors – don’t be complacent with me. I will have you killed.”

He had presented no evidence against those whom he accused. It quickly transpired two on the list had already died.

In legal circles, the president’s evidence-free allegations were a cause of growing concern. Father Ranhilio Aquino, dean of the San Beda Graduate School Of Law, where Duterte earned his law degree, said, “There is no basis for removing them from office.”

Then the Philippines’ Supreme Court chief justice, Maria Lourdes Sereno, entered the fray, pointing out that, given the number of judges who had been assassinated over the years, the president had rendered those he had named “vulnerable and veritable targets... in the war on drugs”.

The next day, the president lashed out: “I’m giving you a warning,” Duterte said. “Don’t create a crisis... Don’t order me. I’m telling you. I hope you are listening... Or would you rather I declare martial law?”

This was the first time the president had publicly threatened martial law. It wouldn’t be the last. Sereno hit back, saying the thousands of brazen and unresolved killings of suspects on these lists had severely eroded perceptions of justice in the Philippines. In September 2017, congress began the process to impeach chief justice Sereno.

As the months went by and the drugs war plumbed new depths of brutality, Duterte’s narco list lengthened dramatically.

He began to unfurl large drugs war diagrams that looked like genealogies, complete with photographs, annotations and flowchart arrows connecting the accused. The number of alleged narco judges grew to 40. Numbers in all the other categories also rose relentlessly. Duterte repeatedly asserted that “the problem is now all-encompassing, it is destroying our nation”.

By early 2017, the PDEA announced that the president’s narco list contained the names of more than 6,000 “suspects”, although the New York Times would soon report that there were anywhere between 600,000 and more than one million names on the list (hardly surprising given that Duterte has claimed there are more than three million addicts in the country). One of the names on the presidential list was the mayor of Albuera, a town in Leyte province in the Eastern Visayas region, Rolando Espinosa. His son, Kerwin Espinosa, was also named.

“I have ordered people to look for him and shoot on sight like a dog,” Duterte said.

Relatives of Leover Miranda, who was killed by police in an anti-drugs operation, 20 August 2017 © Getty Images

And that, a few weeks later, is exactly what happened. The mayor voluntarily surrendered within 24 hours of the president’s initial ultimatum. He publicly urged his son to do the same. There had been no warrant out for him, but police had raided his family home, shot dead six of the mayor’s bodyguards and apparently discovered a stash of eleven kilograms of shabu. Espinosa was released, then rearrested and, while in jail, was shot four times, thrice in the head, inside his cell, by police who claimed he had a gun and had shot at them. They also claimed they had found sachets of shabu in Espinosa’s cell and in those of an alleged accomplice, who was also shot dead in a neighbouring cell.

In March 2017, a gutsy judge in Leyte issued arrest warrants for murder against superintendent Marvin Marcos and 18 other policemen for Espinosa’s killing. They surrendered to their own police unit.

In July 2017, the PNP’s director general, Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, ordered them to return to work.

While in jail, Espinosa had signed an affidavit, without a lawyer present, implicating 226 police officers, as well as senator De Lima, in a drugs ring allegedly run by his son, Kerwin, who had meanwhile fled the country. Three weeks after Espinosa senior’s “unfortunate” death, Kerwin was tracked down in Abu Dhabi, where he was arrested, then deported. Within days of his return, Kerwin was paraded, wearing manacles and a bulletproof vest, before a senate hearing where he confessed to being a drug lord. He also accused De Lima of bankrolling her senatorial election campaign with the proceeds of drugs trafficking, testifying that she had received three separate tranches of shabu cash. De Lima claimed she had never met him and dismissed his testimony as a “nice script”, advising Kerwin that his “cooperation” would not save his skin. “May God forgive you for all your lies about me – and I forgive you,” she said to him in the senate.

I was in Davao when the hearing took place and so was Rodrigo Duterte. At a news conference, I raised with the president the dramatic escalation of the killings. He countered by raising the case of Espinosa, warning that other mayors involved in illegal drugs would suffer the same fate. “There are still mayors, still there,” he said, “playing the narco-politics game and I’m warning them again. You might not want to hear it. You will not only lose your funds, you will lose your life.” He then berated me for my impertinence in asking the question in the first place.

A week before Espinosa’s death, another mayor, Samsudin Dimaukom, was gunned down in the autonomous Muslim province of Maguindanao, west of Davao City.

At the end of July 2017, a third mayor, Reynaldo Parojinog of Ozamiz City in Mindanao and also on Duterte’s list, was shot dead, along with his wife and 13 other people, in a series of simultaneous predawn raids at several of the family’s properties. CCTV cameras had been disabled. Not a single officer involved in the “shoot-outs” was injured.

Conspiracy theories swirled around these killings. In the cases of mayors Dimaukom and Espinosa, there were rumours that both men knew secrets Duterte did not want out.

By the first anniversary of Duterte’s “narco list”, one thing stood out: apart from some murdered mayors, there had only been a tiny handful of arrests and the only alleged narco-politician to face charges was the former human rights commissioner, justice secretary and Duterte-inquisitor De Lima, who is now a recognised Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.

Prior to her arrest, De Lima had traded accusations with Duterte about the other’s involvement in the drug trade, with Duterte calling the former justice secretary “the mother of all drug lords” and De Lima repeatedly alleging that Duterte was the drug lords’ “number-one protector”.

The president’s list served a key purpose, however, by allowing a cloud of suspicion to hang over those he so publicly accused, all of whom were then forced to live in perpetual anxiety, imagining they could be hit by an assassin’s bullet at any time.

A cardboard sign was left on his body: ‘I’m a drug pusher. Do not emulate me’

Beyond doubt, the most iconic image from the drugs war is a picture taken by Raffy Lerma, a night-shift photographer for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It depicts a weeping woman, Jennilyn Olayres, barefoot in the street, her arms and legs wrapped around the half-upright but limp body of her partner, 30-year-old Michael Siaron.

Siaron had been a pedicab driver in Pasay, Metro Manila, who, at 1am on 23 July 2016, was shot dead by killers riding in tandem. In the photograph, a crowd is gathered behind Olayres, held back by yellow police tape. In the foreground, you can make out the scrawled word “pusher” on torn cardboard, which was left on Siaron’s body. The rest of the sign read, “I’m a drug pusher. Do not emulate me.” A chalk circle on the tarmac rings the spot where police found a bullet casing. There are what looks like blood stains on the road. To many, the image evoked Michelangelo’s “Pietà”, the sculpture of Christ’s limp body lying in his mother’s lap after he was taken down from the cross.

Lerma’s tragic but beautiful photograph went viral, published on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and in newspapers around the world. It seemed to capture the shock wave reverberating around the Philippines over the sudden rash of killings. It gave a face to victims who the president had said were scum, not even human. One newspaper commentator wrote of how the picture of Olayres and Siaron had “immortalised their powerlessness”.

Duterte was not happy. In his first state of the nation address, he railed against the melodrama of the photograph and mocked Siaron’s bereaved partner: “There you are, sprawled on the ground, and you are portrayed in a broadsheet as Mother Mary cradling the dead cadaver of Jesus Christ.”

Olayres went into hiding. It took time to track her down, but, less than a month after Michael Siaron’s death, I found her. The Philippine Daily Inquirer had photographed the “home” she had shared with Siaron, a dilapidated patchboard, tin-roofed shack, about eight foot by ten, built on rickety stilts above a disgusting canal of stagnant water, surrounded by a carpet of floating rubbish. They really were the poorest of the poor.

I met Olayres at Pasay City Cemetery, where Siaron had been buried.

It was threatening rain when she arrived by sidecar. She was wearing a white T-shirt with a Mickey Mouse print on the back and a black baseball cap embroidered with a disco dancer. Her long black hair was tied up in a ponytail and threaded through the back of the cap. Olayres was still fragile, and teary from the start. She had come with Siaron’s father and little sister and brought some yellow lilies to place on the grave.

We meandered together between the cluttered tombs to what locals call the “Duterte Compound”, a high-rise matrix of graves on the back wall where the remains of many of the victims of his drugs war are interred. Halfway along the wall of concrete box-graves and three layers up, a plaque with as-yet unfaded gold-leaf lettering read:

RIPMICHAEL C SIARON 26 October 1985 - 23 July 2016 Family Remembrance

Olayres lit a tall votive candle, reached up and placed it in a pool of melted wax, then stood in silent prayer, crying quietly. After a few minutes, she gathered herself and wandered over to a nearby tomb. At the invitation of the graveyard watchman, she sat down on top of one and it was right there, among the dead, that we talked. She told me how her life had disintegrated, how she felt completely crippled by what had happened and that she had been scared by Duterte’s mocking of her. She explained why Siaron had occasionally smoked shabu: to keep him going as he worked ever longer hours to try to make ends meet. Olayres denied he had been a pusher or a dealer and said that he had even voted for Duterte. I asked her about the photograph and she started to cry again.

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do but to cradle him, to find out if he might still be breathing,” she sobbed. “I just wish these killings would stop. If only his death had ended all this. He’s gone. He cannot speak for himself any more.” But this was only the beginning. My graveyard interview with Olayres was brought to a sudden stop by an ear-splitting crack of thunder. Fat, heavy raindrops began to hit us and splatter like water bombs on the tops of tombs. Within another minute, it was tropical-torrential. The anvil-headed storm clouds had welled to bursting and the deluge could no longer be contained. The rain cascaded down onto the paupers’ graves in the Duterte Compound, extinguishing the candles.

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