FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
**3,000 or 30,000? How Many Exactly Were Killed in Duterte's ‘Drug War’? **
*After a decade of conflicting death tolls, a push to harmonize the statistics and list the dead by name *
MANILA (Sept. 28) — How many people died in the Philippines' so-called “war on drugs” under former president Rodrigo Duterte? A decade after the violent campaign began, there is still no agreed answer.
The Truth Commission, tasked to investigate the “drug war” killings, said Monday that it wants to start with people instead of a total number. It is asking the families of the dead, and the community groups, journalists, lawyers and researchers who have tracked the killings, to help build a shared registry of victims and to decide how it should be run. The registry would cover people killed during the anti-drug campaign that ran through Rodrigo Duterte's presidency, from 2016 to 2022.
The existing numbers have never lined up. At a Senate hearing on Sept. 5, 2017, Ronald dela Rosa, then the national police chief, put the deaths in police anti-drug operations at 2,216. Around the same time, government data showed 3,811 deaths from July 2016 through Aug. 29, 2017. The two figures were counted under different categories and reporting systems, so neither can stand in for the other. The UN, citing government figures, put the toll at more than 8,000. Activists later estimated at least 27,000 people had been killed by 2019.
Some numbers were never meant to be a death toll at all. In 2018, the German media outfit Deutsche Welle reported that a download of the police's public crime data for 2017 returned 21,999 killings. But that system covered all kinds of crime, not just the drug campaign, and police told the outlet it was not their official source for crime analysis.
The actual numbers are also difficult to ascertain because government documentation is flawed. In the course of the commission’s work so far, and according to previous findings by rights groups and journalists, the documentation that exists are riddled with death certificates that contain questionable details and incomplete or faulty police reports, to cite two problems.
For nearly a decade, families, neighborhood groups, human rights organizations, journalists, artists, researchers, lawyers and church groups have recorded the killings and kept the stories and papers of the people affected. The commission said its own work is possible because that foundation already exists, built over years of hard work and trust, and often at personal risk. It is now asking those groups to help shape the registry and decide how their records can be safely connected through it.
Each entry of the registry will hold just enough information to identify a person and tell that person apart from others, along with pointers to records kept by the groups that gathered them. Those groups keep their files unless they agree otherwise. The commission said the aim is to link scattered work without collecting it all into one database that it controls.
"The documentary record of this violence was built by many hands long before the Truth Commission existed," said Dr. Bono Olgado, a documentalist who serves as the commission's director for Documentation, Archives and Memorialization. "We are not asking groups to surrender that work. We are asking whether we can build a shared layer that connects it while respecting and protecting the people and communities who have stewarded these records."
The commission said the registry could help establish what happened, hold people responsible, compensate families and prevent a repeat. It also aims to make the wider effort to record the killings more visible.
The effort comes as Duterte, arrested in 2025, is due to stand trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague beginning Nov. 30 on three counts of crimes against humanity tied to the crackdown.
Separately, the commission said it has formally asked government agencies for their records, including the national police and the Commission on Human Rights. The requests cover police reports, autopsy findings, court filings and photographs, among other material.
Groups and families interested in joining the registry can write to bolgado@truthcommission.ph or visit the commission’s Victim Registry at https://truthcommission.ph/victims-registry.
*For media reference: Carlos Conde Commissioner and Spokesman *