“I’m telling the Filipino people, not me, it’s going to be bloody, because I will not sit there as president and just like any other regime, say, ‘That’s all I can do.’ If you put me there, don’t fuck with me.”
“Am I the death squad? True. That is true.”
—Rodrigo Duterte.
One of the endearing qualities of being a politician is to be able to speak eloquently. People come to campaign rallies to listen for the candidates who know how to communicate well and extemporaneously. They give a high mark to those who have a clear vision of leading the country for the better. With that requirement, a politician needs words of logic and persuasion, then comes, of course, the passion to deliver the message without the use of obnoxious language.
The 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama, knows the power of words. His keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was well-received and propelled him as a bright politician to be reckoned with. Some of his memorable lines called for unity: “Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.”
Unfortunately, the grandmaster of lies, the peddler of chaos and division, the perfect archetype of a male bully, and the top-dog of grifting, Donald Trump, came and strung along the craziness of his supporters and the Republican Party. He could rail and rant in his speeches with highly offensive and odiously objectionable words and would still get a frenzied applause. I’m afraid that Obama’s warning about the “politics of anything goes” has come to roost. And Trump has become the supermodel of right wing politicians all over the world.
Filipinos are known to be great imitators. In Philippine politics that coveted title belongs to the former president Rodrigo Duterte. In advance of a planned meeting in Laos in 2016, Duterte said about then-President Obama: “Son of a whore, I will curse you in that forum.” Even Pope Francis [may he rest in peace], who was highly-revered in the country and caused traffic jams when he visited, did not escape from Duterte’s swearing: “I wanted to call him: ‘Pope, son of a whore, go home. Do not visit us again.’”
While planning to become a dictator-for-life, Ferdinand Marcos had thought deeply his justification for invoking Martial Law. He had to legitimize his unconstitutional grab of power by convincing not only the country but the Americans as well that he was the only one who could thwart the advance of communism. His argument was long in a form of a book entitled Today’s Revolution: Democracy (1971). “The decision to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus was the result of more than one year’s study and deliberation…I have not undertaken this study on revolution in order to discourse the difficulties of leadership…It should be apparent to the responsible citizen that when a democratic government takes strong measures to preserve itself, it is not for the purpose of concentrating power in the hands of one man.” That was a lie, of course, because his so-called “constitutional authoritarianism” lasted for fourteen years.
Here’s Marcos again in paraphrasing the words of Robert Kennedy during his second presidential inauguration on December 30, 1969: “There are too many of us who see the things as they are in this world and complain. Let us instead see the things as they should be and aspire. Let us dream the dream of what could be and not the dream of what might have been. There are many things we do not want about our world. Let us not mourn them. Let us change them.”
Marcos believed in language beautifully articulated. You could not even hear him cursing in his speeches. But Duterte had reversed that civility in political discourses and became president anyway, just like Trump!
One other controversy that marked Duterte’s presidency was his unabashed use of extrajudicial killing (EJK). “Why do they say,” Duterte said, “it’s illegitimate? Why, is it wrong to say Papatay ako ng tao para sa bayan ko? Tell me, is there a crime?” He had one more justification in his sleeve: “You know, they have to realize that they do not have the monopoly of evil in this. It’s not as if because we’re in government, we can’t do anything other than play the good boy. The enemy is evil—which is the lesser evil now? The ones who cooked the drugs and fed it to our children or us who had them killed?”
Duterte was not the only president to use violence against his own people. Marcos did it and, according to Amnesty International, 3,257 died as a result of EJK. The difference was Marcos never acknowledged his culpability. Because Duterte admitted it openly, he became a fair game for human rights investigation, if only one dared. Lo and behold, another courageous journalist of Rappler took the challenge and documented Duterte’s war on drugs. Her name is Patricia Evangelista and her book is entitled Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in my Country (2023). In reading her book and other news reports, I gathered these facts and observations:
- When Corazon Aquino became president in 1986, she offered the seat of vice-mayor of Davao City to Soling Duterte. Mrs. Duterte declined and suggested her son for the job. That started Rodrigo Duterte’s life as a politician. He summarized his political career to an audience at the Manila Hotel as follows: “I became mayor for twenty-three years in Davao. One term in Congress and another term—four years being the vice-mayor of my daughter.” After completing his six-year term as president in 2022, he was barred by the country’s constitution to run or serve again; otherwise, he would run as vice -president and his daughter Sara as president. Instead, Sara Duterte ran as vice-president in alliance with Bongbong Marcos as president. Both won, thus cementing two political dynasties that will dominate the power structure of the country for a long, long time.
- When Duterte became mayor in 1989, Davao City was described as “a sprawling expanse of urban slums racked by poverty, violence, vendettas and desperate crime.” According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Davao City concentrates every Philippine problem you can think of—a high birthrate, land shortage, absentee owners, prostitution and gambling rackets, corrupt police and military, and of course, the NPA whose avenging Marxist zeal not infrequently cloaks a penchant for unabashed thuggery.” The Communists had a stronghold in Agdao, Davao’s largest slum area, where the NPA partisans called the “sparrows” carried out liquidations of police officers, at least an average of two to three killing per day. As a counter measure, there unfolded a vigilante group known as the Alsa Masa, whose members included some disgruntled NPA members. In her speech in October 1987, the then president Corazon Aquino said: “I am overjoyed to join you here [in Davao City] where the Alsa Masa was born…You have succeeded in crushing the Communists, and we look up to you as the example in our fight against communism.” By the time Duterte took over, the Communist presence in Davao City was dying down. Alsa Masa was disbanded but some members were recruited to form a death squad with the strong backing of Duterte. This Davao Death Squad (DDS) targeted criminals, petty thieves, suspected drug dealers, and enemies of the mayor. “Throw them in the ocean,” Duterte once ordered, “or in the quarry. Make it clean. Make sure there are no traces of the bodies.” According to the Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE), DDS committed at least 1,424 between 1998 and 2015. In his term as president, Duterte turned the country’s police force into a legalized death squad in killing with impunity the drug addicts and small-time drug dealers. “If you are confronted with the violent resistance,” Duterte said, “thereby placing your life on the line, shoot them dead. We all know that. That is my order…Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to kill for as long as it’s those idiots, if they start to fuck with your city.”
- In 2009, Leila de Lima, as chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), the country’s primary human rights institution, looked into the alleged summary executions of the DDS. “We want to make people realize,” de Lima said, “that [killing] is wrong, legally and morally. Even assuming that these are criminal elements, it’s wrong. It’s completely wrong, morally and legally. Many of them are even minors.” In its final report, CHR found that “there was a systematic practice of extrajudicial killings, which can be attributed or attributable to a vigilante group or groups dubbed in the media as the Davao Death Squad.” CHR recommended a probe under the Office of the Ombudsman. The ombudsman, however, did no further investigation. In 2016, Duterte’s war on drugs had intensified resulting in a considerable number of killings. Again, de Lima, as the chairperson of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights, spoke out: “Perhaps we can link what is happening now to what happened in Davao City in the 1990s until the present, and how the Philippines now mirrors the city of Davao under the two-decade rule of Mayor Duterte.” In 2017, de Lima was arrested for drug trafficking and was held in pretrial detention until November 13, 2023. She was released after posting a bond worth 300,000 pesos. On June 24, 2024, de Lima was acquitted on the last of three drug charges instigated politically by the Duterte Administration. Now that Duterte was no longer the president, somehow the Court found the courage to dismiss the case that should have not been brought about in the first place for an obvious lack of evidence. Speaking to reporters after her release, de Lima said: “I am more confident and will be able to sleep more soundly. With the grant of our demurrer to evidence, which is tantamount to acquittal, that means I am now completely free and vindicated. It’s very liberating. Alam niyo naman ito, I respected the rule of law despite the pain and the injustice of it all. I confronted the charges head on and I went through and endured the whole process. So all these criminal cases are gone. That’s why I’m so happy.”
- Rodrigo Duterte is sometimes called Rody, Digong, Du30 or the code name CM for either City Mayor or Charlie Mike. By the same token, the acronym DDS stands for: Duterte Defense Squad, Digong Duterte Supporters, Duterte’s Destiny’s to Service to the country, Digong Duterte Swerte, Davsur Duterte Supporters, Digong Duterte is the Solution, Duterte got Doctors’ Support, or Diehard Duterte Supporters. Duterte’s several nicknames endeared him to his supporters as having the common touch. While the various permutations of DDS muddied the connection of Duterte to the notorious death squad.
- Most Filipinos unquestionably bought Duterte’s war on drugs as his way of cleaning up the addiction that he thought was holding the country to its greatness. They turned a blind eye to the police killing no matter how flimsy the evidence was against the addicts. But one thing was not targeted in Duterte’s list—the drug lords. He left office yet the drug problem remains because the real source, the one who has “the [actual] monopoly of evil” continues to thrive.
- On March 11, 2025, at the behest of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the government of Bongbong Marcos allowed the arrest of Duterte for his crimes against humanity in his war on drugs. Certainly, this was not the result of Evangelista’s exposé. But it would be surprising if the ICC prosecutors didn’t have a copy of her book. I would further say that her book could be used as a reference point in building the evidence against Duterte. But one thing is for sure, the families of those extra-judicially killed would have an intense interest of the trial and its outcome. But they have to wait for a long time, for on average, the ICC trial could take about eight years. If Duterte doesn’t succeed in his legal maneuverings to quash his arrest warrant, his jail at The Hague might be his home for a while. Not an ideal place to be for an eighty-year old and a former president who pretty much has been living in comfort and luxury in his entire life. Is this his comeuppance? In answer to the question, I quote the words of Leila de Lima: “Today, Duterte is being made to answer — not to me, but to the victims, to their families, to a world that refuses to forget. This is not about vengeance. This is about justice finally taking its course.”
24 April 2025