Halloween is still a few weeks away, but a house at gated community in Quezon City — the largest city in Metro Manila — has already decorated its entryway for the occasion.
Kristoffer Aleksie took photos of the said entryway, which features a now-common sight in Philippine news — figures resembling the bodies of alleged drug suspects placed inside garbage bags and wrapped in packaging tape.
The Halloween decor — which could very well be an artistic commentary on the alarming regularity of alleged extra-judicial killings — is definitely effective.
The pièce de résistance of the setup is a cardboard bearing the words, “‘Wag tularan.” The phrase is a shortened form of “Huwag tularan,” which is roughly translated as “Don’t be like this person.” The phrase is also the standard pronouncement in the real-life crime scenes involving the murder of so-called drug suspects.
The extra-judicial killings have intensified amid the country’s war against drugs. The police have not yet probed these cases to determine if these are vigilante killings carried out by those who have supposedly taken the law into their own hands. Authorities have emphasized that they do not condone these killings. Despite this, bodies bearing cardboards have continued being dumped all over the country. People have taken to calling it “cardboard justice,” a phrase that certainly qualifies as an oxymoron.
Another theory presented is that these alleged drug suspects are being targeted by their cohorts in an attempt to “wipe out” their connections so they won’t be pursued by law enforcement. They just supposedly make it seem like vigilante killings. Nobody really knows who’s responsible for these killings and how they choose their targets — and that’s the part that’s way scarier than the already-shocking Halloween decor.
