Phantasmagorias of Violence in Thai and Filipino Drug Wars: Projecting Police Drug Suppression through Media Spectacles in Southeast Asia

Abstract:From daily news displays of arrests and seizures to extrajudicial killings and drug wars, drug suppression in Thailand and the Philippines transformed private horrors into public spectacles. These spectacles relied on the narratives and imagery of popular media to project their public impact, and shared numerous operational similarities documented by Thai and Filipino scholars and journalists. Nevertheless, the extrajudicial killings of thousands of ‘criminals’ in the ongoing Philippine drug war, initially known as Oplan Double Barrel, differed from the 2003 Thai drug suppression campaign in a number of ways, including their presumed enlistment of executioners. Beyond political utility and despite logistical differences, these displays employed a remarkably similar operational mechanism of covert execution and public revelation through media narratives, statistics and imagery. This article transposes anthropological approaches to image regimes, illusory spectacle and media analysis to reveal the political utility of police operations in Southeast Asian drug wars. It argues that drug suppression in Thailand and the Philippines was reliant on visible displays that publicly converted covert police violence into political value through the projective objects of media imagery, narrative and spectacle.