LETTER FROM THE PHILIPPINES
NOVEMBER 21, 2016 ISSUE
WHEN A POPULIST DEMAGOGUE TAKES POWER
Since Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the
Philippines, in May, more than three thousand people
have been killed in a vicious drug war.
By Adrian Chen
President Rodrigo Duterte said that, if he was elected, it will
be bloody. His drug war has killed thousands.Illustration
by Diego Patio
In May, Rodrigo Duterte, the provincial mayor who had
just been elected President of the Philippines after
promising to rid the country of crime and drugs by killing
thousands of criminals, vowed to stop swearing. He told
reporters, Dont fuck with me. He called political
figures gay. When a reporter asked about his health, he
replied, How is your wifes vagina? Is it smelly? Or not
smelly? Give me a report. In an overwhelmingly
Catholic country, he swore at the Pope. At first, he
defended his language as a gesture of radical populism. I
am testing the lite in this country, he said. Because we
are fundamentally a feudal country. But, the day after
the election, he appeared with a popular televangelist
and said, I need to control my mouth. He compared his
forthcoming transformation to that of a caterpillar
changing into a butterfly. If you are the President of the
country, you need to be prim and proper, he said. His
inaugural speech, in June, was obscenity-free.
The resolution didnt last. Dutertes war on drugs has
resulted in the deaths of more than three thousand
people, drawing condemnation from human-rights
groups and Western governments. In early September,
before the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations, in Laos, a journalist asked Duterte what he
would say if President Barack Obama raised the issue of
human rights. You know, the Philippines is not a vassal
state, he replied. We have long ceased to be a colony of
the United States. Alternating between English and
Tagalog, and pounding on the lectern, Duterte, it was
widely reported, said of Obama, Son of a whore, Ill
curse you at that forum.
Duterte does not, as he has put it, give a shit about
human rights, which he sees as a Western obsession that
keeps the Philippines from taking the action necessary to
clean up the country. He is also hypersensitive to
criticism. Dutertes weakness is, really, hes a tough
guy, Greco Belgica, a Filipino politician and an ally of
Dutertes, said. You do not talk down to a tough guy.
Hell snap.
The day after insulting Obama, Duterte released a
statement expressing regret that his comment came
across as a personal attack on the U.S. President. In his
outburst, Duterte had used the Tagalog phrase putang
ina, which means, literally, your mother is a whore. But
it is also used to communicate frustration, as in son of a
bitch. Its just an expression, Salvador Panelo,
Dutertes chief legal counsel, explained to the press. I
dont think it was directed to President Obama. A
columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer provided
foreign journalists with a satirical guide to
Dutertespeak: Putang ina really means I firmly
believe you are mistaken.
Duterte thinks out loud, in long, rambling monologues,
laced with inscrutable jokes and wild exaggeration. His
manner is central to his populist image, but it inevitably
leads to misunderstanding, even among Filipino
journalists. Ernie Abella, Dutertes spokesman, recently
pleaded with the Presidential press corps to use its
creative imagination when interpreting Dutertes
comments.
On September 7th, the second day of the ASEAN summit,
Duterte and Obama met briefly for the first time. Obama
later described their encounter: It was not a long
interaction, and what I indicated to him is that my team
should be meeting with his and determine how we can
move forward on a whole range of issues. Duterte
presented a starker version: I told him in a holding
room, President Obama, Im President Duterte. I never
made that statement. Check it out. According to
Duterte, Obama was dismissive, and replied, My men
will talk to you.
The next day, Duterte showed ASEAN delegates, including
Obama, photographs of Muslims who had been killed by
U.S. soldiers in the Philippines in the early twentieth
century. This is human rights, Duterte recalled telling
the delegates. Do not tell me this is water under the
bridge. A human-rights violation, whether committed by
Moses or Abraham, is still a violation of human rights.
What began as a reaction to a personal slight has led to a
dramatic shift in foreign relations. Duterte has
increasingly, if fitfully, signalled his intention to distance
himself from the United States, the Philippines closest
ally, in favor of China, which previous governments have
viewed warily. In September, he called for the withdrawal
of a contingent of U.S. military advisers and for the end
of annual joint combat exercises between the two
nations. (Last week, he approved limited exercises.)
During a state visit to Beijing in October, he announced a
separation from the United States. America has lost
now, he told a group of Chinese businessmen. Ive
realigned myself in your ideological flow. And maybe I
will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that
there are three of us against the world: China,
Philippines, and Russia.
As Erwin Romulo, a former editor of Esquire Philippines,
told me, There are no slow news days anymore in the
Philippines.
Your X-rays are kind of depressing, so heres Susan
and me in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Duterte has an eighty-six-per-cent approval rating in the
Philippines, but his break with America has proved
controversial. Opinion surveys regularly find the
Philippines to be among the most pro-American
countries. The language of instruction in schools is
English, and basketball is a national obsession. Around
four million Filipinos live and work in the U.S., and the
country is one of the Philippines most important trading
partners. American interests have typically made up a
large proportion of foreign investment in the Philippines.
In the Manila Standard, the widely respected former
President Fidel Ramos compared Duterte to the captain
of a sinking ship. Even many on the Philippine left, who
decry U.S. influence, worry that Duterte may be trading
one imperial master for another.
Dutertes pivot to China is a rebuke to the Obama
Administrations foreign-policy shift away from the
Middle East and toward Asia. But a senior State
Department official said that he thought the talk of a
complete realignment with China was largely bluster.
The issue is not so much what he saysthe issue is what
he does, the official said. He pointed out that the U.S.
and the Philippines are so deeply entwined that it would
take longer than one Presidential term to unravel their
ties. That said, if hes absolutely determined, he could
do a lot of damage to the U.S.-Philippine relationship.
Since the overthrow of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in
1986, the Philippines has been a democracy, if an often
dysfunctional one. Dutertes actions challenge the liberal
Western values that are enshrined in the Philippine
constitution. Although he styles himself a revolutionary,
Duterte seems uncertain about what kind of order will
replace the one he aims to overthrow, or whether he will
be around to see it. He often intimates that he may not
live to finish his term, whether because of overwork and
agehe is seventy-oneor something more sinister.
Will I survive the six years? he asked recently. Id of people have been killed and millions have been
make a prediction: maybe not.
country, and its islands served as an important staging
ground in the Pacific Theatre. In 1946, the country was
granted formal independence. Soon after, the U.S.
secured a treaty that allowed it to maintain a permanent
military presence, and thousands of troops were
stationed at two huge bases throughout the Cold War.
Nationalists and leftists protested against the bases,
which they saw as symbols of Americas colonial legacy.
In 1991, amid rising anger at a new base treaty, the
Senate declined to renew the lease. But, in 2014,
President Benigno Aquino III, Dutertes pro-American
predecessor, signed an agreement allowing U.S. troops to
return on a temporary basis.
Duterte is the first President to come from the island of
Mindanao, which has a particularly fraught history with
the U.S. military. Mindanao, the biggest of the southern
islands, is home to the countrys large Muslim minority;
for more than three hundred years, while the Spanish
conquered the north and converted its people to
Catholicism, the Muslim tribes in the southern islands
resisted. When the U.S. instituted a civilian colonial
authority over the Philippines, Mindanao was put under
military rule and subjected to a campaign of pacification
which resulted in many thousands of deaths. To people
in Manila, Mindanao is known for guerrilla fighters and
rampaging kidnap-for-ransom gangs. It is also home to
the New Peoples Armythe armed wing of the
Communist Partyand an assortment of Muslim rebel
groups, including Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist organization
that recently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria. In the past fifty years, tens of thousands
displaced in Mindanaos overlapping conflicts.

The Philippines has had an up-and-down love affair
with the Americans, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano told
me when we met in Manila, in September. Cayetano had
been Dutertes running mate, but Presidents and Vice-
Presidents are elected separately in the Philippines, and
he lost. We met in an office belonging to his wife, the
mayor of Taguig City, thirty minutes southeast of Manila,
among the glittering high-rises of the financial district
known as Bonifacio Global City.
In 1898, after winning the Spanish-American War, the
United States took possession of the Philippines.
President William McKinley assured Filipinos that
Americas aim was benevolent assimilation, but the
U.S. Army proceeded to crush a burgeoning
independence movement. Under Theodore Roosevelt,
the U.S. established a legislature in Manila with the aim
of schooling Filipinos in the ways of representative
democracy. But, with American acquiescence, the
legislature was monopolized by a small group of lite
landowners, bolstering the power of an oligarchy that
continues to dominate political life. Cayetano explained
that Duterte spoke harshly of the United States because
of its checkered past in the region. We embraced and
loved the Americans, but, at the same time, rather than
freeing, they colonized us, he said. This mix brought
out strong, passionate feelings of both love and hate for
our former colonizers.
The U.S. military presence has been the most divisive
issue. During the Second World War, the Japanese
military occupied the Philippines for more than three
years. In October, 1944, U.S. forces returned to the
For twenty-one years, Duterte was the mayor of Davao, a
city of two million in Mindanao, and he often brings up
abuses from the colonial era in his anti-American rants.
But he has said that a more recent incident was
responsible for what he calls his hatred of America. In
2002, not long after U.S. special forces launched an
operation against Abu Sayyaf in Mindanao, Michael
Meiring, an American treasure hunter, was staying in a
hotel in Davao when a cache of dynamite stored in his
room exploded. There were rumors in Davao that
Meiring was a C.I.A. agent. In Dutertes telling, two F.B.I.
agents took Meiring from his hospital room and
repatriated him before he could be questioned by local
authorities. Duterte was furious at what he saw as an
infringement of his authority as mayor. He said he
demanded that the U.S. Ambassador at the time, Francis
Ricciardone, conduct an investigation, and he has fumed
about the lack of answers ever since. (In an e-mail,
Ricciardone told me that he did not recall discussing the
case with Duterte, but he called the allegations
preposterous.)
Hes pulled out the H.R. file! This is it, folksthe Atomic
Performance Review!
Since then, Duterte has repeatedly expressed his
displeasure with the U.S. military presence in Mindanao.
In 2007, he refused to let the U.S. and the Philippines
hold joint military exercises in Davao, saying that such
drills would be a magnet for terrorists. Because of their
arrogance and pretended superiority, the Americans
invaded Iraq to kill Saddam Hussein but ended up
destroying the country, he said. We dont want that to
happen to us. In 2013, he denied requests to launch
American drone flights from Davao. I do not want it, he
said. I do not want trouble and killings.
Duterte comes from a provincial political dynasty. His
father, Vicente, was related to Ramon Durano, a
notorious warlord in the central province of Cebu. In the
late nineteen-forties, Vicente served as mayor of Danao
City. Rodrigo Duterte was born in 1945, the second of
five children. After the Second World War, Filipinos
flocked to sparsely populated areas of Mindanao, seeking
economic opportunity. In 1950, the Duterte family
moved to Davao, a frontier town of plantations and
indigenous tribes that was settled by American military
veterans. Property disputes were common, and Duterte
says that his familys first home was demolished because
it was built on someone elses land. But the familys
hardship was short-lived. In 1959, Vicente became
governor of the province of Davao, and today the
Dutertes are the dominant political force in the region.
Dutertes daughter, Sara, is the mayor of Davao City, and
his eldest son, Paolo, is vice-mayor. His younger brother,
Benjamin, has served as a city councilman.
At a caf in a Davao City mall, I met Dutertes younger
sister, Jocellyn, who works as a real-estate agent. A
slender, elegant woman in her sixties with short-cropped
hair, she was accompanied by two male assistants. Her
composed manner bore little resemblance to her
brothers theatrical truculence. She spoke deliberately,
referring to Duterte as the Mayor or the President. Duterte was allowed to graduate. Despite his leftist
Jocellyn described a childhood dominated by her fathers
political career. Starting at 8 A.M., the house would fill
with locals seeking jobs or favors. Youre always in the
public eye, she said. You hardly had any freedom.
Rodrigo Duterte was fascinated by his familys
bodyguards. He was always in the company of
policemen, military men, Jocellyn said. As a teen-ager,
he was fond of motorcycles, girls, and guns, interests that
distracted him from his studies. It took him seven years
to finish high school.
According to Jocellyn, Duterte was peculiarly sensitive.
He could look at a dead body or a gunshot victim, but
when he sees his own blood he faints, she said. She
recalled one day when he was playing with a gun and his
finger got caught in the slide. We were all looking at it,
and it looked all right, she said. We saw him getting
paler by the minute. Jocellyn told me that when Duterte
feels threatened he lashes out.
Dutertes mother, Soledad, a teacher and a well-known
social activist, was a strict disciplinarian who often
punished Rodrigo by making him kneel on the ground
and pray for hours at a time. When she got fed up with
his staying out late, she locked him out of the house. He
started sleeping in a shed.
In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos, a young provincial senator,
won the Presidency of the Philippines with the pledge
This nation can be great again. Marcos appeared to
have the will necessary to reduce the influence of the
colonial lite. He was viewed as a technocrat, but he
merely replaced the old oligarchy with his own friends
and relatives, including his glamorous wife, Imelda. Over
time, his family amassed a fortune of up to ten billion
dollars. In 1972, during his second term, Marcos declared
martial law, citing Communist and Muslim insurgencies.
Marcoss closest advisers, who were known as the Rolex
12, for the wristwatches that he supposedly gave them,
rounded up and tortured the regimes political rivals.
Vicente Duterte was briefly a member of Marcoss
cabinetDuterte has said that his father was a supporter
until the endwhile Soledad was a leading anti-Marcos
protester in Davao. Duterte, at least initially, took after
his mother. At the Lyceum of the Philippines University,
in Manila, Duterte studied under Jos Maria Sison, the
now exiled founder of the Communist Party of the
Philippines. Sison saw U.S. imperialism and the
Philippines feudal state as inextricably linked: in
exchange for maintaining access to military bases during
the Vietnam War, the U.S. allowed Marcos to continue to
oppress the Philippines. Duterte joined Sisons
nationalist youth organization, Kabataang Makabayan,
and he still occasionally speaks fondly of Sison. Soon
after Duterte was elected President, Sison released a
recording of a Skype call in which an unusually
deferential Duterte chats with him about ongoing peace
talks with the New Peoples Army.
Duterte attended law school in Manila. According to a
story he recounted with glee on the campaign trail, while
he was a law student he shot a bullying classmate in the
leg. The classmate sustained only a minor wound, and,
thanks to the intervention of sympathetic professors,
tendencies, he took a job as a prosecutor in Davao. The
Marcos regime had jailed tens of thousands of prisoners,
and one of Dutertes tasks was prosecuting political
subversives. According to Luz Ilagan, a former
congresswoman from Davao, Duterte was able to help
dissidents without compromising his position in the
government. Ilagans husband, Laurente Ilagan, was one
of three human-rights attorneys in Davao who were
arrested in the nineteen-eighties. Duterte made sure that
he wasnt abused, and they later became friends.The
best he could do was to take custody of the activists, to
insure that they would be physically safe, Ilagan told
me.
I still think what unites us is crisper and more
refreshing than what divides us.
On August 21, 1983, after three years in exile in the
United States, the opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr.,
was shot dead after he landed at the Manila airport. The
assassination galvanized the anti-Marcos forces,
culminating in the People Power revolution of February,
1986. Disaffected military leaders staged a coup, and
hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded
the EDSA highway around Manila to demand that Marcos
resign. Finally, Ronald Reagan, who had long seen
Marcos as a valuable ally in the fight against
Communism, withdrew his support. Marcos fled the
Philippines for Hawaii, leaving the Presidency to
Corazon Aquino, the widow of Benigno.
The new government asked Soledad Duterte to be vice-
mayor of Davao, and she recommended her son instead.
In 1988, Duterte ran for mayor. According to Carlos
Zarate, a reporter for a local paper at the time, Duterte
was the chosen candidate of Marcos loyalists who had
been deposed during the revolution. That was a very
peculiar situation, Zarate said. He was the candidate of
some pro-Marcos guys but he was also close to the left.
Duterte campaigned on a law-and-order platform and
won.
Davao was one of the most violent cities in the
Philippines. It was there that Communist rebels, after
years of waging war in the countryside, first
experimented with urban warfare. The New Peoples
Army was firmly entrenched in the slums, where it drew
support from a population fed up with corrupt police and
an abusive military. N.P.A. sparrow squads
assassinated police officers and government officials; in
turn, a government-backed vigilante group known as
Alsa Masa, or Masses Arise, murdered Communists.
Criminal gangs kidnapped prominent members of the
business community, targeting them for ransom. The
Bankerohan Bridge, over the Davao River, became
known as a dumping place for bodies. If a victim had
been dispatched with a single bullet, journalists would
attribute the killing to N.P.A. assassins.
Duterte took over the kidnapping investigations, working
closely with REACT, a network of businessmen. They
developed a rudimentary tracking system: when a
kidnapper used a pay phone to make a ransom
call, REACT members were alerted by C.B. radio. They
would sound their car horns in distinctive patterns,
according to which neighborhood they were stationed in,
and, based on the honking in the background,
investigators could get a rough idea of where the
kidnappers were calling from. After Duterte solved a
couple of high-profile cases, the number of kidnappings
decreased.
In Davao, Duterte, known as Digong, is more popular
than ever. When I visited in September, a few months
after the election, civic groups, nurses, and local
politicians had hung congratulatory banners from the
concrete buildings that line the major streets. A
barbecued-chicken restaurant was offering a discount in
honor of Dutertes election. His house, a modest two-
story green building, has become a tourist attraction; a
cardboard cutout of the President stood in the driveway,
and, a few houses down the block, a teen-age boy sold
Duterte key chains and mugs to tourists.
Residents of Davao credit Duterte with bringing
prosperity to their city. A self-described socialist, Duterte
nonetheless championed pro-business policies and
employed market-oriented officials in the city
government. His administration lured investors with tax
breaks and incentives. There was a seventy-two-hour
deadline on the processing of business permits, after
which any delay would have to be explained to Duterte. A
board made up of government officials and business
leaders aggressively courted investors in Manila and
abroad, resulting in a growing outsourcing industry and
the construction of high-rise condominiums and malls.
In 2014, Davaos economy grew 9.4 per cent, a rate
higher than that of any other region. As President,
Duterte has promised to implement the Davao model
nationwide.
Today Davao has a central 911 system, and new police
vehicles can be seen whipping around the city. The
absurdly low speed limit of about twenty miles per hour
is strictly enforced, as is a public smoking ban. Residents
see these small disciplinary measures as indicative of the
strength of Dutertes political will. One local
businessman recounted with admiration the time he
tried to talk his way out of a ticket for smoking. The
police officer told him he had to fine him, because he did
not want to make the Mayor mad.
In 1996, in a press conference, Duterte announced a
crackdown on petty crime. According to a journalist
named Editha Caduaya, soon afterward, seven alleged
criminalsdrug dealers and purse snatcherswere killed
in one day. Some of the bodies were dumped, along with
a cardboard sign that read Solugon Sa Katawhan
(Servant of the People). Between 1998 and 2009,
Human Rights Watch reported a total of eight hundred
and fourteen killings, mostly of teen-agers, street kids
who were small-time drug dealers or petty thieves. The
killings were attributed to a shadowy vigilante group
called the Davao Death Squad. According to a report by
Human Rights Watch, the D.D.S. often worked in a style
known in the Philippines as riding in tandem: two men
on a motorcycle ride up to a target, shoot him with a
handgun, and speed off. D.D.S. members told H.R.W.
that they worked off a list given to them by police officers
and were paid between five thousand and fifty thousand
pesos ($104 to $1,041) per target. One member said that
the police had established a bidding process to choose
among various cells of hit men. If several cells want the
job, they would discuss which cell can do it better, he
said.
For a death squad, the D.D.S. has a surprisingly good
reputation. The killings had the support or backing of
the middle classes, a journalist in Davao told me. They
said that it makes the city safe. Another resident said,
The general sense is, if you dont do anything bad, you
dont have anything to fear. Its become like the
bogeyman that you tell the kids about. In 2012, a local
television channel polled its viewers on their preferred
response to a crime wave that was sweeping the city;
sixty-seven per cent suggested reviving the D.D.S.
Duterte has frequently spoken approvingly of the killings
and intimated that he had a hand in the D.D.S. When
Caduaya asked him about his role, he told her, I am a
lawyer and I will not do the extra-judicial thing, but I will
clean the city for my people to live in peace. Caduaya
told me, We know he is there, but you cannot see him.
A 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks
reported that Duterte had all but admitted his role in
the D.D.S. to the Commission on Human Rights. When
the commissions regional director pleaded with Duterte
to stop the killings, he reportedly responded, Im not
done yet.
It is difficult to find a resident of Davao who is willing to
speak out against the death squads. One day I visited
Clarita Alia, a sixty-two-year-old vegetable vender, who
became a strident critic of Duterte after her four teen-age
sons were killed within six years. She lives in a one-room
shack on a narrow street in Bankerohan, the site of the
largest market in Davao. An ancient television sat on a
plastic barrel, and bedding and clothes were stacked
along one wall. Alia sat cross-legged on a wooden bed
frame with no mattress; next to her, her daughter played
with her three-year-old granddaughter. When I asked
Alia what she thought of Duterte, she said, He is a
demon.
Speaking in Bisaya, the regional language, she explained
that her trouble began in July, 2001, when police came to
her home to arrest her eighteen-year-old-son, Richard,
for an alleged rape. They had no warrant, so she sent
them away. One of the officers told her that if she didnt
allow them to arrest Richard all of her sons would be
killed. On July 17th, Richard was stabbed to death. Less
than three months later, her son Christopher was also
stabbed to death. Bobby was killed in 2002, Fernando in
2007. I have heartaches even now, she told me, starting
to cry. Every interview, I keep crying. If they were still
alive, they could help me make a living.
The Alia boys were troublesome street kids, typical
targets of the D.D.S. The police told Alia that her sons
had been killed in gang wars, but they never produced
suspects. I asked Alia who she believed was responsible.
Who but Digong? she replied.
Before Richard was killed, he sought help from
Tambayan, a nongovernmental organization that
provides aid to Davaos street children. As more children
turned up dead, Tambayan began to agitate for Duterte
to stop the killings. The group organized mothers who
had lost children to the killings and staged a protest
outside city hall. In 2002, Tambayan invited Duterte to a
forum of twenty mothers, but he didnt show up. Duterte
does not hide his disdain for victims of the D.D.S. Im
more interested in solving crimes against innocent
people, he told a reporter from the Washington Post, in
2003. Im not at all interested in the killings of
criminals, especially people involved with drugs.
Alia had written a letter that she intended to read to
Duterte at the forum. She keeps it in a plastic folder
along with news clippings of her interviews. She handed
me the creased and yellowed paper, which read, If a
child has committed a crime, it is not necessary that his
life should be lost. They dont deserve to die, because
they can change. . . . Where is the justice? Is it only for
the rich?
Alia tries to persuade other mothers to speak up. Some
are afraid, she said; others seem resigned to the fact that
this was the fate of children who stepped out of line in
Dutertes Davao. There are mothers who approach me
who also cry, but then fall silent, she said. I asked
them, What if your child is innocent? And they just fall
silent.
In 2013, a grassroots movement on social media arose,
urging Duterte to run for President. He responded with a
performance of agonized indecision. One day he would
lament that he was too old for the long hours required of
a President and too poor to fund the campaign; the next
day he would muse about the dire actions he would take
if elected. If ever I get to file my certificate of candidacy
for President, I am telling the Filipino people not to vote
for me, because it will be bloody, he said in a TV
interview in August, 2015.
In November, 2015, shortly before the start of the
Presidential campaign, at a birthday party for a law-
school classmate, Duterte announced that he was
running. He became a replacement candidate for P.D.P.-
Laban, a nearly moribund party that was founded in the
nineteen-eighties to oppose Marcos. Duterte had neither
the family name nor the party machinery that is typically
needed to compete in a Presidential election. The early
front-runner, Senator Grace Poe, is the daughter of the
hugely popular movie star Fernando Poe, Jr.; another
favorite, Manuel (Mar) Roxas II, the grandson of former
President Manuel Roxas, was a member of Benigno
Aquino IIIs cabinet.
Duterte focussed on illegal drugs, an issue that has never
registered among voters major concerns. The usual top
three problems would be health, education, housing,
Cayetano told me. But the Philippines close proximity to
China has made it a lucrative market for drug smugglers.
Methamphetamine, known as shabu, is widely abused,
especially in the slums, where pedicab drivers and day
laborers use the drug in order to work longer hours.
Cayetano said, He was bullheaded in telling people our
problem is drugs. Were nearly a narco-state, and our
police are afraid. Our judges, fiscalsprosecutorsare
either afraid or on the take. Congressmen are in it,
mayors are in it. The idea that drug traffickers have
penetrated the government did not seem outlandish to
many Filipinos, who have seen two Presidents in the past
fifteen years enmeshed in racketeering scandals
involving illegal gambling syndicates.
Duterte speaks of drug use as an existential threat, a
contamination that will destroy the country unless
radical action is taken. They are the living walking
dead, he said of shabu users. They are of no use to
society anymore. Duterte sees drug use as a symptom of
a governments ineffectiveness, but his animus suggests a
personal vendetta. Duterte, who has four children by two
women, was asked at a Presidential debate what he
would do if he caught his children using drugs. None of
my children are into illegal drugs, he responded. But
my order is, even if it is a member of my family, kill him.
The WikiLeaks cable reported that the regional director
of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights had
claimed that one of Dutertes sons had a history of drug
abuse. The Mayor channeled his anger over his sons
drug use not just against drug pushers, but also drug
users, eventually leading him to embrace vigilante
killings as a means to reduce crime, the report read.
After one of Dutertes political opponents raised the
allegation of drug abuse, Dutertes eldest son, Paolo, took
a drug test and publicized his clean result.
Dutertes campaign had a rocky start. In a speech
announcing his candidacy, he rambled on for more than
an hour, offering an account of personally killing
kidnappers and setting their car on fire, pledging to kill
up to a hundred thousand criminals when elected, and
boasting of his womanizing. If I can love a hundred
million and one, I can love four women at the same
time, he said.
Dutertes language confirmed his image as a political
outsider. It was something people could relate to, Pia
Ranada, a reporter at the news Web site Rappler, told
me. She said that Duterte came across as the father who
would protect you but also the masa leader, the populist
leader who will look after your interests, who cares for
you because hes one of you.
On the campaign trail, Duterte typically wore a plaid
shirt and jeans. On the rare occasions when he wore
a barong, a formal embroidered shirt, he rolled up the
sleeves. He spoke not in the English-Tagalog mixture of
the capital but in a creole of English, Tagalog, and Bisaya
known as Davao Tagalog. At the beginning of the
campaign, he ushered Ranada and another journalist
into his house in Davao and showed off the
traditional tab, or water dipper, that he used to bathe.
His one extravagance was a large collection of shoes,
which he joked was the only thing that he had in
common with Imelda Marcos.
This was not quite true. Duterte took from the Marcos
years an ability to play both sides of a messy conflict.
Marcos, who died in 1989, in Honolulu, is still
surprisingly popular in the Philippines; most of his
loyalists never lost faith, and many younger Filipinos
look back at the charismatic leader with a kind of
secondhand nostalgia. During the campaign, Duterte
courted Marcos loyalists assiduously, making it a priority
to rebury Marcos in the national Heroes Cemetery. He
reportedly considered Marcoss son, a fifty-nine-year-old
senator named Ferdinand (Bongbong) Marcos, Jr., as a
running mate, and he praised the elder Marcos, saying
that he would have been the Philippines best President,
if he did not become a dictator.
Nicole Curato, a sociologist at the University of Canberra,
was doing field work in the slums of Tacloban, a
provincial capital in the central Philippines, and saw the
excitement inspired by Dutertes candidacy. It was a
very do-it-yourself campaign, she said. To attract
crowds to rallies, politicians typically rely on a strategy
known as hakot, in which poor Filipinos are given a free
meal, a couple of hundred pesos, and a campaign shirt,
and are bused from the slums to the city plaza, where
they cheer for the chosen candidate. But Curato said that
Dutertes supporters borrowed money to get to the plaza
themselves. Duterte is perpetually late, which meant that
supporters might be kept waiting in the sweltering heat
for as long as seven hours. Yet it seemed not to bother
them. People were really crazy about him, Ranada told
me. Its the only word for it.
Duterte relied on an army of volunteers to publicize his
campaign on social media. The Philippines has among
the highest rates of social-media use in the world, in
large part because millions of Filipinos employed abroad
use it to keep in touch with their families. Overseas
workers were a crucial segment of Dutertes supporters.
Since they were spread out all over the world, they could
post pro-Duterte messages on Facebook at all hours. One
of Dutertes most rabid supporters was a pop star and sex
blogger named Mocha Uson, the leader of a girl group
called the Mocha Girls. When Duterte was accused of
sexism, she posted on Facebook an account of how, when
the Mocha Girls came to Davao, he was always a
gentleman, unlike most mayors, who tried to arrange
liaisons with them.
Duterte won in a landslide, earning six million more
votes than Mar Roxas. Many people saw his victory as a
protest against the political lites continuing inability to
address the countrys problems. Dutertes predecessor,
the reformist Benigno Aquino III, had some success
addressing corruption and introduced some economic
reforms, but Filipinos saw little change in their lives:
they still endured hellish commutes on crumbling roads;
they continued to be victimized by crime, corrupt police,
and a broken justice system; and about a quarter of them
still lived in poverty. If these were the fruits of liberal
democracy, many thought, perhaps it was time to try
something new. Its a repudiation of the past six years of
a regime that claims to be after good governance,
participatory democracy, but really it doesnt deliver the
goods, Curato said.
In June, Duterte held a victory party at the Davao City
Crocodile Park. In a speech in front of two hundred
thousand supporters, he received the loudest applause
when he addressed drug dealers. You sons of bitches,
he said. I will really kill you.
During Dutertes first hundred days in office, the drug
war was carried out with a distinctly Filipino mixture of
high drama, mass spectacle, and enigmatic violence. In
early August, in a speech at a naval base, Duterte read
out a list of more than a hundred and fifty politicians and
police officers who he alleged were involved in the illegal
drug trade, the first of a number of narcolists that he
released in the following months. It was a tactic from his
days as mayor, when he went on his weekly television
show, Gikan Sa Masa, Para Sa Masa, and read lists of
names of alleged criminals and drug dealers, many of
whom ended up as victims of the D.D.S.
In Dutertes first three months as President, the
Philippine Daily Inquirer, which has been monitoring
the killings, listed more than fourteen hundred drug
users killed by police and vigilantes. Front pages were
filled with photos of the bloodstained victims, bound and
gagged with duct tape, who had been shot in the head or
garrotted; cardboard signs around their necks served as a
warning to others. In the slums of the big cities, police
carried out Operation Tokhang, or knock and plead,
visiting the homes of people who were suspected of
involvement with drugs and urging them to turn
themselves in. Government reports boasted that seven
hundred thousand drug personalities surrendered in
the first two months in mass ceremonies in malls, city
plazas, and auditoriums. An administration official told
me that the Guinness Book of World Records expressed
interest in certifying it as the biggest mass surrender of
criminals in history.
From Davao, Duterte brought with him Ronald (the
Rock) dela Rosa, who had served as the citys police
chief, and made him head of the Philippine National
Police. The federal police are notorious for corruption,
and Duterte has promised to clean up the force, calling
out ninja cops who resell drugs confiscated in busts.
But he dismissed those killed by police as drug-crazed
maniacs who had resisted arrest, and claimed that
murders attributed to the vigilantes were the result of
gang wars. In August, Dela Rosa announced that the
campaign had already cut the crime rate in half. The
killings have done little to diminish Dutertes popularity.
Its part of this narrative that killing has been
normalized, Curato, the sociologist, told me. Before, its
the state that turns a blind eye on it, and now a broader
society is also willing to just turn a blind eye on the
culture of violence. Extrajudicial killing is common
enough that theres a slang term for it: salvaging,
which, according to the writer Jose F. Lacuna, derives
from the Tagalog salbahe, meaning wild or savage.
Not long after Duterte took office, the Philippine
Commission on Human Rights started a task force to
investigate the extrajudicial killings. Chito Gascon, the
head of the C.H.R., has warned Duterte that he risks
prosecution by the International Criminal Court if he
fails to halt them. In September, I met with the leader of
the task force, Gwen Pimentel-Gana, at her office. Above
her desk hangs a portrait of her father, Aquilino
Pimentel, Jr., a Senator who was imprisoned by the
Marcos regime.
Pimentel-Gana told me that in the first sixty days of the
Duterte administration the commission opened more
than two hundred investigations into extrajudicial
killings, slightly less than half as many as were opened
during the entire six years of the Aquino administration.
We now will have to tell the government, she said, in
your fight against crime or in your fight against drugs, do
not forget that lives of people are sacred.
When I asked her whether Dutertes rhetoric was
encouraging the killings, she was equivocal: Its so
difficult sometimes to try to interpret what hes saying,
because one time he says, Im not for human rights. The
next time he says, All those who are abusing their
authority will be punished. I asked her about the
difference between her tone and that of Human Rights
Watch, which has declared the drug war a human-rights
calamity. She replied brusquely. I will talk like a
Filipino, O.K.? she said. An ordinary workerhe goes
home every night and, for the first time, when he passes
through the narrow streets of his home in a shanty or
what, he does not see any more drunkards or people
smoking on the streets or children running around and
being just left there, abandoned. He sees clean streets,
peaceful at night. What would you say?
Yet an overwhelming number of those killed in Dutertes
drug war have been poor. When asked recently about
criticism from anti-poverty groups, Duterte explained
that poor people are easier targets. Rich people do drugs
on private jets, and I cannot afford the fighter planes,
he said. Jose Manuel Diokno, a human-rights lawyer,
told me, Those who have a name or have some influence
or hold some position who are implicated in the drug
trade are given an investigation, theyre given due
process. But poorer people whose names appear on the
list are just simply killed. Diokno is the dean of the law
school at De La Salle University, in Manila, and the head
of the Free Legal Assistance Group, founded by his father
during the Marcos era to provide legal assistance to
victims of martial law; his father was an opposition
senator who was imprisoned for two years without
charge.
We spoke on the forty-fourth anniversary of the
declaration of martial law. Diokno was preparing to lead
a candlelight vigil that evening. He said of that period, A
small segment of the population were branded as
Communists. They were depicted as people who are
godless, who have no regard for human life. The
reasoning then was, since they are like that, then they are
not human. He continued, Instead of being branded a
Communist today, youre branded a drug user or a drug
addict or a drug pusher.
Diokno pointed to the impunity afforded the Marcoses
and their cronies, who have never faced charges. In many
cases, they have returned to positions of influence. The
more the authorities encourage themselves and other
people to take the law into their own hands, then the
more our system is going to become weaker and weaker,
Diokno said. My fear is that, at some point, it will
collapse. If that happens, what will replace it?
In August, the Senate launched a probe into the killings.
The first witness was a woman named Harra Kazuo, the
wife of a man who was arrested for shabu possession and
killed while detained at a police station. She appeared
before the Senate with her face hidden behind large
sunglasses, her hair wrapped in a colorful scarf. Police
claimed that her husband attempted to grab an officers
gun, but investigators found that he had been beaten so
badly by police that he could not have posed a threat.
Kazuo alleged that police officers had previously extorted
money from her husband. One investigator for the
Commission on Human Rights told me that he believed
most of the police killings in the days after Dutertes
election were done to conceal crimes committed by the
cops themselves. It will cover up their bad purpose, and
they might get promoted, he said.
On September 12th, a packed audience in the small
Senate chamber heard a remarkable story. Edgar
Matobato, an unassuming man with a mop of salt-and-
pepper hair, claimed to have been a member of the
Davao Death Squad. For more than an hour he calmly
narrated a gruesome tale that sounded like the treatment
for a Quentin Tarantino film. He said that the squad had
as many as five hundred members, and that Duterte was
intimately involved in its operation. According to
Matobato, Duterte had ordered the killings of a local
radio host; the romantic rival of his son Paolo; and his
sister Jocellyns alleged lover, a dance instructor. (When
I asked Jocellyn about Matobatos testimony, she seemed
particularly offended by the suggestion that she had been
romantically involved with her dance instructor. Are you
kidding? she said, scowling. Ive been dancing for
twenty years. Ive never involved myself in such a way,
emotionally or in any way, with any dance instructor.)
Matobato said that he had personally killed fifty people,
either kidnapping a victim before garrotting him in a van
or shooting him in the street. The D.D.S. would then
chop the victim into pieces and bury him in a quarry
owned by one of Dutertes political allies. Matobato said
that he had witnessed Duterte empty two magazines
from an Uzi into an agent from the National Bureau of
Investigations. (Duterte has said he does not know
Matobato, and referred to his testimony as perjury.)
The hearings were led by Senator Leila De Lima, a
former Secretary of Justice with a reputation for
doggedness. In 2009, as chair of the Commission on
Human Rights, she opened a high-profile investigation
into links between Duterte and the D.D.S. It was the first
serious inquiry by Philippine authorities into the D.D.S.
De Lima is an imposing woman, with cropped hair and
square glasses. She strode into her Senate office nearly
three hours past our scheduled interview time, after
denouncing Dutertes latest outrage to a scrum of
reporters in the hall, and then disappeared for twenty
minutes behind the privacy screen around her desk, like
a stage actor collecting herself after a performance.
Based on what I saw, what I heard, and what we have
researched on the phenomenon of killings in Davao, I
have no doubt in my mind that there existed such a death
squad, De Lima told me. It had the acquiescence, at the
very least, of the city government, particularly then
Mayor Duterte. De Lima and Duterte have publicly
feuded ever since. I lambasted him in public, lectured
him on human rights, she said. I think he has not
forgotten that.
In August, Duterte held a press conference in which he
accused De Lima of accepting campaign donations from
prisoners in exchange for turning a blind eye to drug
dealing at New Bilibid, the Philippines largest prison. He
alleged that De Lima was having an affair with her driver,
who acted as the bagman. Dutertes allies in the House
launched their own investigation into De Lima. Drug
lords were taken from New Bilibid and brought to the
chamber to describe how they had lived like kings in
prisonwith prostitutes, karaoke, Jacuzzis. Much was
made of a purported sex tape featuring De Lima and her
driver, and some congressmen threatened to play the
tape at the hearing. Duterte claimed to have watched the
tape. Every time I view the video, I lose my appetite, he
joked at a press conference. De Lima denied the
allegations about the sex tape, and told me, The entire
government machinery is going after me, making my life
so difficult now, and hoping that I will just surrender in
defeat. Dutertes supporters on social media have
followed his example, viciously attacking De Lima and
other critics. Nearly every journalist I spoke with
mentioned a newly oppressive atmosphere online, in
which people have begun to restrain their opinions for
fear of provoking an angry mob.
As I travelled around Manila, it seemed that every taxi-
driver on the congested roads had the radio tuned to the
hearings in the House and the Senate; televisions in
every bar were playing them, too. When the hearings
occurred simultaneously, one news channel showed them
in split-screen. But the public fascination centered more
on the political showdown between De Lima and Duterte
than on Matobatos revelations. Filipinos are wary of
assigning credibility to information presented at Senate
hearings, where anything can be entered into the public
record without even the modest protections of the
Philippines liberal libel laws.
The historian Alfred McCoy has described the Philippine
Senate as a collection of basketball players, television
personalities, movie stars, and failed coup plotters. One
member of the Justice Committee investigating the
extrajudicial killings was Antonio Trillanes IV, who has
led two coup attempts. Another, Panfilo Lacson, who
headed an lite Manila police squad in the nineties, was
accused of massacring eleven unarmed bank robbers.
Senator Manny Pacquiao, the boxing star and Duterte
ally, led an effort to depose De Lima as leader of the
Senate hearings. Her replacement was Senator Richard
Gordon, who recently suggested giving Duterte the power
to suspend habeas corpus. After the Matobato hearing, a
journalist texted me, What you witnessed was another
installment of our national telenovela.
On September 17th, a few weeks after the ASEAN summit,
Dutertes administration secured the release of Kjartan
Sekkingstad, a Norwegian who had been kidnapped by
the Islamic terrorist group Abu Sayyaf the previous fall.
Abu Sayyaf fighters had stormed a beach resort on an
island near Davao and bundled Sekkingstad and three
other men into a speedboat. Two of the men, Robert Hall
and John Ridsdel, both Canadians, were beheaded. Abu
Sayyaf, which has only about four hundred fighters, has
conducted a series of kidnappings, beheadings, and
bombings. In 2004, the group bombed a ferry near
Manila, killing a hundred and sixteen people, the worst
terrorist attack in the history of the Philippines. In
August, Duterte ordered the military to destroy Abu
Sayyaf.
Even as Duterte takes a ruthless approach to drug
dealers and petty criminals, he has shown sympathy to
various rebel groups that have been in a violent struggle
against the state for more than fifty years. As mayor of
Davao, he posed for snapshots with commanders in
Communist guerrilla camps and urged local businesses
to pay the so-called revolutionary taxes that the
Communists demanded in the areas they controlled. He
considers Nur Misuari, the leader of the Moro National
Liberation Front, a rebel group fighting for an
independent Muslim nation, a friend. In 2013, after
Misuari was accused of orchestrating a siege of the town
of Zamboanga, leaving a dozen residents dead, the
government issued a warrant for his arrest. Duterte gave
Misuaris wife sanctuary in Davao. The M.N.L.F. has
repaid him by keeping its fighters out of Davao. Ruben
Bangayan, a wealthy businessman and a longtime
supporter of Dutertes, said that Duterte told the rebels,
If you want to come to Davao, you are welcome, but no
guns. Bangayan framed Dutertes actions as sage
pragmatism. He built on good relationships with those
groups for the selfish purpose of peace in Davao, he
said. You had to do that.
The day that Sekkingstad was released, I was in Davao
with Ruben Bangayan and his brother Eddie.
Sekkingstad had been married to their late cousin, and
after he was kidnapped Eddie asked Duterte, who was
still the mayor, for help. He said, I will try, Eddie told
me. He always helps when it comes to kidnappings.
Eddie had rented the private jet that was, at that
moment, preparing to fly Sekkingstad to Davao.
Eddie explained that Abu Sayyaf had turned Sekkingstad
over to the M.N.L.F.; like Abu Sayyaf, the M.N.L.F. has
its stronghold on the island of Jolo, off the southwestern
coast of Mindanao. Duterte later revealed that Nur
Misuari had been crucial to the negotiations over
Sekkingstad.
The weather in Jolo turned stormy that evening, and they
could not fly Sekkingstad out. I joined the Bangayans the
next afternoon when they went to meet him. In order to
avoid the media, the plan was to fly Sekkingstad to a
beach resort in the city and clean him up before bringing
him to the press conference. We made our way down a
narrow road lined with thatch-roofed bamboo-and-
concrete shanties, and pulled into the parking lot of the
Seagull White Sands Beach Resort. Beyond a beach
where families were playing volleyball, a concrete pier
jutted into the sea. The Norwegian Ambassador, Erik
Frner, and his entourage were waiting on a helipad at
the end of the pier. A black helicopter approached,
circled three times, and touched down, sending up a
spray of seawater. The door opened, and Sekkingstad
stepped out, supported by Jess Dureza, an adviser of
Dutertes who had led the negotiations. Sekkingstad had
a huge beard and long scraggly hair that whipped in the
wind from the helicopter blades. He wore an ill-fitting
camouflage jacket with a bright-red M.N.L.F. patch. The
jacket revealed his emaciated forearms. Sekkingstad
hugged the Ambassador and the Bangayans, and we
hustled back to the beach, through the throng of families,
who were now recording the scene on their cell phones.
They burst into applause.
I asked Dureza, who wore mirrored Oakley sunglasses
and a black flight vest over a Jaguar racing shirt, how
hed been able to free Sekkingstad. Magic, magic, he
said, with a laugh. I can negotiate with anyone except
my own wife! (It was later reported that Sekkingstad
had been ransomed for more than six hundred thousand
dollars.)
The Norwegians and Sekkingstad went off into the hotel.
A few minutes later, Sekkingstad emerged, his gaunt face
clean-shaven and his hair roughly shorn, his body
swimming in the shirt and slacks that the Bangayans had
provided.
The Filipinos and the Norwegians huddled together to
plan the rest of the evening. The Norwegians claimed
that Sekkingstad had asked to be flown immediately
from Manila to Norway, where his family was waiting,
while the Filipinos insisted that he wanted to stay in
Davao.
I sat at a nearby table, straining to make out the
conversation. Dureza said, It is very important that we
brief him for intelligence. He argued that the Bangayans
deserved to spend some time with Sekkingstad before he
was whisked away. He lived with them, and, I tell you,
the Bangayans did a lot to bring him out, Dureza said. A
Norwegian security officer continued to press his case,
and Dureza started to shout, pounding his fist on the
table. Why are you telling him that you need to take him
out of Davao tonight? he said. You are still on
Philippines territory!
The argument lasted only a few minutes. Soon Dureza
was laughing and shaking Frners hand. It was settled:
Sekkingstad would fly to Manila directly after meeting
with Duterte, who was in Davao, where he spends almost
every weekend.
The press conference was scheduled for 7 P.M. at the
nearby Matina Enclaves, a luxury condominium
development owned by one of Dutertes supporters.
Forty journalists, photographers, and TV cameramen
waited in a small meeting room with a podium. Duterte
was more punctual than usual: at 8:22 P.M., his arrival
was announced with a song, Duterte for Real Reform,
by the Filipino folk star Freddie Aguilar. Aguilar had
written the song for Dutertes campaign, and a recording
is played before most of his public appearances. (Sample
lyrics: Look around you / Crime is rampant / Rape,
drugs, and stealing / Should be stopped.) Duterte was
accompanied by a number of security guards, who have
adopted the Presidents plaid shirt as their uniform. As
the Norwegians and the Bangayans took their seats,
Duterte chatted with a couple of journalists. When
Dureza took the podium, Duterte stood awkwardly in
front of him until an aide instructed him to sit next to
Sekkingstad.
Mr. President, may I then therefore present to you
Kjartan Sekkingstad, who is now a free man, Dureza
said. Duterte took the podium. He spoke in a low, halting
monotone, as if he had something else on his mind.
First of all, I would like to thank the effortsthe efforts
beyond human patienceof Secretary Dureza and, of
course, Nur Misuari, Duterte said. He went on, I was
just, you know, up there directing the traffic of where and
how to go about the job. He put his hand to his face,
stroking his chin with his thumb, which heightened his
air of disinterest. He often makes this gesture while
speaking; after a comedy show parodied the tic, he
explained that he does it to soothe a nerve that was
damaged in a motorcycle accident.
He trailed off, then turned to a subject that he clearly
found more engaging. The problem is, he said, raising
his voice and his eyebrows, is it safe in Mindanao?
As the Norwegians looked on, Duterte held forth on the
chaos that he saw engulfing his country: We are racked
with so many problemskidnapping in the south,
terrorism, drugs. He said that drug money had
corrupted even the smallest unit of local government, the
barangay. The barangay captains connive or coperate
or extend assistance to terrorists and drugs, he said.
And that will be the start of our perdition and our
agony.
He had a new narcolist, which he had checked twice for
accuracy. During the campaign, Duterte had promised to
end crime and drug abuse in three to six months, but
now he threw up his hands as he pleaded for more time.
Maybe another six months, he said. I didnt have any
idea that there were hundreds of thousands of people
already in the drug business.
He turned to Sekkingstad and assured him that his
captors would be held accountable. I assure you, he
said. When the time comes, I will inform you. I will just
inform you that we have been able to catch up with
them. His casual tone belied a menacing subtext.
Your travails in life are over, until such time that we get
the one true justice. He paused, then said, We will give
them that, if that is what they want.
Adrian Chen joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in
2016.
This article appears in other versions of the November 21,
2016, issue, with the headline The Tough Guy.