[Philippine corruption] Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics Understanding the War on Drugs in Bagong Silang, Philippines #13/204

Furthermore, the focus on hierarchy and coercion in exchange relations allows us to explore the entangled relations with authority (for instance, the police). While when analyzing the drug war, most of the focus has been on the killings, the war has also allowed for an expansion of a corrupt economy of survival. This even has a name: Tokhang (Knock and Plead) for Ransom. Following Sheila Coronel, in her 2017 analysis of the drug war as a murderous enterprise, we may say that survival has also become an enterprise. Moreover, all accounts suggest that during the war on drugs, the price of a life has gone up (Jensen and Hapal 2018, 58). This price is not only exerted through direct payments between drug personalities and police but also involves preying on intimate relations with kin and neighbors to bail out the suspect.

Hence, rather than focusing only on the drug war as a sovereign act of necropolitics (Mbembe and Libby 2003; Reyes 2016), we must also focus on exchange relations that are both compelling and compelled. Economic anthropologist Janet Roitman (2004, 194) suggests that we must look at the relationship produced by state regulation—of, in our case, criminal justice, prisons, the drug war, and anticorruption drives—rather than state regulation as such. It is the relationships that are produced rather than regulation per se that are central for how people engage with the system. If that is the case, it is crucial to understand what relationships are produced by prison conditions—for instance, the need to get out of prison and the implication of families in survival. These relationships and the negotiations they lead to were incredibly complex even before the war. But there was predictability to them—not always leading to good results but at least with a promise of resolution. It was the parameters of these social exchange relations that the war reconfigured, not the need to engage in exchange relations with authority. If anything, exchange relations became even more important as they became destabilized and fragmented.

It might be useful to introduce the life trajectory of Maricel, one of our key informants in Bagong Silang for over a decade, to situate communal intimacy within these theoretical movements and empirically within the violent politics right up to the war on drugs. When we first met Maricel, she was a tanod, or community guard, nominated by Garcia, the purok, or area leader, in the area in which we lived during fieldwork in 2009 and 2010. Maricel promised to take us around the area “to keep us safe,” as she dramatically put it. While she was a peace officer, she had a tolerant view of much crime—including abortion and drug dealing—and focused more on the social relations that both abortionists and drug dealers engaged in for the community. She was also a known supporter and organizer of Oca Malapitan, who was then a member of Congress and who she desperately hoped would run for mayor in 2010 against the then mayor, Recom Echiverri. That would have secured Maricel income and opportunities. He failed to run, however, and Maricel had to contend with the less remunerative role as a community guard and local political operator. She was friendly and high-spirited with her neighbors and known to be really good at pakikisama, that is, good at engaging with neighbors. The term pakikisamahas often been invoked as central in understanding communal relations in the Philippines more broadly.¹⁴We shall return to this in detail later in the chapter. For now, suffice it to say that discussions have been somewhat essentializing when trying to agree on what Filipinos are really like. What does remain clear is that pakikisama, as an emic concept, is embedded in contestations about its true meaning.¹⁵Hence, that Maricel was good at pakikisamaalso indicates that others were not, as was the case with another friend, Inday, who was seen as arrogant and aloof even when she engaged in communal activities. Inday was adamant that rather than spending your time in the path walk, you must take care of your family. The friction between Maricel and Inday informed communal activities for much of the extended period of time for we stayed in this section of Bagong Silang.

Maricel was a wonderful interlocutor. During several hour-long interviews, we discussed emic concepts such as pakikisamaand utang na loob(inner debt or debt of gratitude), as well as diskarte(the ability to stay afloat during times of crisis through cunning and street wisdom) and hiya(shame). What characterizes all these concepts is that they all, in different ways, map out a relational, affective economy structured by horizontal and vertical ties as well as notions of subjectivity.