ACLED Data Shed New Light on Drug War Death Toll in the Philippines

18 November 2021: Civilian fatalities from anti-drug operations in the Philippines are at least 25% higher than official figures suggest, new data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) reveal. ACLED has now expanded coverage of the Philippines through a supplementation project drawing on information from two major Filipino language sources — Abante and the Philippine Star¹ — adding nearly 1,000 events and more than 1,100 fatalities to the dataset for the period of 2016 to the present. The supplementation project has specifically bolstered ACLED’s coverage of anti-drug operations, contributing to wider efforts to approximate the drug war’s true toll on civilians in the Philippines. Access the data and read the full report — The Drug War Rages on in the Philippines: New Data on the Civilian Toll, State Responsibility, and Shifting Geographies of Violence.

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Key Findings:

ACLED currently estimates that at least 7,742 civilians have been killed in the drug war since 2016.² 

• This is 25% higher than the government’s September 2021 count of 6,201, even by ACLED’s conservative estimate³

While anti-drug ‘vigilantes’ were responsible for a large proportion of violence targeting civilians in the early days of the drug war, the majority of civilian targeting in recent years has been carried out directly by state forces.

• At the start of the war in 2016, anti-drug ‘vigilantes’ accounted for over 48% of civilian targeting associated with the drug war
• Now, in 2021, state forces account for 80% of civilian targeting associated with the drug war

The geography of the violence has shifted, particularly from the National Capital Region (i.e. Metro Manila) to Central Luzon. 

• While drug war violence in the National Capital Region accounted for nearly 45% of the national total at its peak in late 2016, it now accounts for less than 8% as of the latter half of 2021
  • This shift became initially most apparent in 2018 when Central Luzon experienced more drug war violence than the National Capital Region for the first time: 28% of national drug war violence vs. 17%, respectively
• More recently, new frontiers have emerged within Central Luzon, with violence shifting from Bulacan province to Nueva Ecija province
  • Nueva Ecija is now home to the most drug war-related violence in the country (nearly 14%), the most drug war-related fatalities in total (nearly 13%), and the most drug war-related civilian fatalities specifically (over 14%) — surpassing both Bulacan and Metro Manila to become the new epicenter of the war

A US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization established in 2014, ACLED is the highest quality and most widely used real-time data and analysis source on political violence and protest around the world. 

If you would like to use ACLED data and analysis, please review our Terms of Use & Attribution Policy. For more information about ACLED methodology, please check our Philippines Drug War Methodology Brief and our full Resource Library.

For media inquiries, please contact: Sam Jones, ACLED Head of Communications