This is the brutal, murderous Philippin dictator that Trump wants to invite to our White House....
Impulsive stupid Trump!
This is the man Trump wants to meet with
By Phelim Kine
Updated 5:31 PM ET, Wed May 3, 2017
Story highlights
Phelim Kine: Trump's implicit support for Duterte's anti-drug campaign suggests a stunning apathy toward its brutal reality
"Phelim Kine is a deputy director in Human Rights Watch's Asia Division. Kine worked as a journalist for more than a decade in China, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Taiwan prior to joining Human Rights Watch. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. "
(CNN)Angelo Lafuente's family would have good reason to be dismayed by President Trump's "very friendly conversation" with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
It's not likely that the conversation, in which Trump invited the Philippine President to the White House, included discussion of Duterte's murderous tactics in the "war on drugs." Philippine National Police statistics indicate has killed of over 7,000 mostly poor urban Filipinos, including Lafuente.
Lafuente encountered Duterte's drug war on August 18, according to Human Rights Watch, when a police anti-drug raid swept through the neighborhood in Manila's Navotas district, where the 23-year-old small appliances repairman lived and worked.
Four armed men in civilian clothes, accompanied by two uniformed policemen, escorted Lafuente away in a marked white police van. Hours later, police at the Navotas police station presented Lafuente's panic-stricken family members with photos of his bullet-ridden body. The police report attributes his death to "unknown" gunmen and omits any mention that he was last seen alive in police custody.
The circumstances surrounding Lafuente's death are all too common in the Philippines today. Research by Human Rights Watch exposed a damning pattern of unlawful police conduct designed to paint a veneer of legality over summary executions.
Police claim responsibility for 2,717 of the deaths -- all justified, they assert -- but the rest appear to have been carried out by police-backed agents or "death squads." The official numbers of suspected drug users and dealers killed doesn't even include the victims Duterte calls "collateral damage" -- including children killed by stray police bullets.
Trump's implicit support for Duterte's anti-drug campaign suggests a stunning apathy toward its brutal reality. Trump's failure to express concern about the drug war's death toll and his airbrushing of that bloodshed as a legitimate anti-drug operation is more than a grievous insult to injury for family members of victims. Trump is also betraying the few Filipinos courageous enough to speak out against the drug war, notably wrongfully-jailed Senator Leila de Lima, a longtime rights advocate.
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