Duterte (L) in happier times with his close friend and "spiritual adviser," cult leader Apollo Quiboloy. Duterte is now in the hands of the International Criminal Court, while Quiboloy is jailed on charges of human trafficking, sexual assault, fraud, and money laundering here in the Philippines, and is wanted on similar charges in the US. Incredibly, both are still candidates for offices in the May, 2025 elections; Duterte is running for his old seat as mayor of Davao City, while Quiboloy is running for the Senate.
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IN my Manila Times column for Thursday, March 13, I put aside the topic that I had intended to discuss (subsidized electricity rates), and decided to ride the tsunami of the local news cycle, as the biggest story to hit this country in years happened on Tuesday. That, of course, was the arrest and speedy extradition of former president Rodrigo Duterte on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, where he has been charged with crimes against humanity for his bloody "war on drugs," first as Davao City mayor, and then during the first half of his term as president, between 2016 and 2019.
Duterte, in a panic over potentially being hauled before the international tribunal for overseeing the murders of between 6,000 (the official government tally) and 20,000 people (the number claimed by human rights groups), withdrew the Philippines from the ICC in 2019. But, due to his habit of doing things in a half-assed manner and surrounding himself with equally doltish advisers, he neglected to read the fine print of the Rome Statute, under which the ICC reserves the right to assume jurisdiction over crimes committed prior to a country's exit from it. Nor did he withdraw the Philippines from the Interpol compact, meaning that the government would remain duty-bound to honor any warrants served by Interpol, which is exactly what happened this week.
Early on in my career as a commentator here -- those interesting, low-income days when I was still freelancing, treating my own blog as an actual job, and doing radio -- I had no compunction at all about commenting freely on the state of politics and politicians here in the Philippines, but in the years since I've "gone mainstream," so to speak, I've become more circumspect about doing that. Thus, in my Thursday column I confined myself to addressing the mechanics of Duterte's arrest and removal from the country -- all of which happened within the span of about 12 hours -- rather than discussing him or his crimes.
I should say "alleged crimes," but I personally saw bodies in the street, and watched the news clips, along with everyone else, where he straight-up said that he would have all the drug pushers and users killed, so yeah, I'm pretty sure he's guilty. A lot of those people weren't "drug personalities," either.
Just because I don't express an opinion in my column because I deem that an inappropriate platform for it doesn't mean I don't have an opinion. The majority of my audience here in the Philippines might not appreciate or find any value in my perceptions about Rodrigo Duterte and the people in his orbit, but the rest of the world ought to know who this guy really is.
Rodrigo Duterte is a pig and an intentional misanthrope, a bully to his core who delights in making people uncomfortable. He is not unintelligent, but is probably best described as impatient and incurious, bored by technicalities or complex problems. His slovenly appearance and rough way of speaking is a political act, one he honed through long years as a mayor in his hometown of Davao because it resonates with the hicks, and practiced for so long that it became his actual personality. His children are all cast from the same pretentious "every-man" mold as well, and are equally boorish, especially eldest daughter Sara, who is the Vice President of the Philippines. She is currently facing an impeachment trial in the Senate -- set to begin in July -- for embezzling millions in funds from her office and from the Department of Education, where she served as Secretary for a time before having a public falling-out with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. after questions began to be raised about the missing funds. Her response to Congressional efforts to investigate the matter was, at one point when one of her staff was detained for refusing to answer questions, to post a terrifyingly insane video rant to her social media wherein she threatened to have President and Mrs. Marcos assassinated.
Sara's two brothers, one the current mayor of Davao and the other a congressman, are equally as charming, as is her little sister Victoria -- known as "Kitty" -- who is all of 18 years old and has gained notoriety in the past days for going completely apeshit online about her father's arrest. That has been tempered somewhat, however, by some enterprising Gen-Z non-fans of hers (I am rather proud to say that my daughter is one of them), who uncovered a number of "Kitty's" social media posts in which she extols the excessive use of marijuana. This has earned her a new nickname, "Wake & Bake," after one of her posts, which I believe was on TikTok. For those who didn't know, possession of marijuana is strictly forbidden here in the Philippines, and so this is a particularly bad look for the daughter of "kill all the drug users" Duterte.
As far as Duterte himself is concerned, the allegations in the charges from the ICC are all true; he did explicitly order law enforcement to liberally use deadly force in pursuit of drug offenders, promised protection from legal consequences for them, and authorized a bounty system for each suspect killed or captured. He did apply violent methods against political opponents by tagging them as being connected to the drug business, and he turned a blind eye to vigilantes at the national level. While mayor of Davao in the early 2000s, he actually organized these into the infamous "DDS" -- Davao Death Squad -- and while he wasn't so overt about it as president, he made it clear enough that the police should not waste their time investigating vigilante killings. Virtually none of them, which may number from several hundred to several thousand, have ever been solved.
Duterte also publicly admitted, while president, that he had personally killed several (the number seemed to change with each retelling) criminal suspects while he was the City Prosecutor and then Mayor in Davao; and in an admission that rattled even his diehard supporters, he confessed to having sexually molested his family's housekeeper when he was a teenager. The way that particular story was told strongly implied that she was not the only woman to have suffered that through the years, a notion that was only reinforced by his close friendship with and staunch support for Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, a Davao-based cult leader who, after hearing a performance by Billy Graham in Korea in the late 1980s, decided he was the son of God. American readers can make of that what they will.
It is hardly possible to separate Duterte from his drug war; it was, after all, the centerpiece of his administration, at least before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the single issue he had campaigned on in the run up to the 2016 elections. But if one sets that aside for the moment and examines the rest of his record as president, it was thoroughly unimpressive; of the four presidents who have served during my time here, he was by far the worst. Although he was not as authoritarian as he is sometimes characterized, particularly by foreign media, he was by no means a champion of democracy; as president, he was simply what he always had been, a provincial mayor accustomed to managing relatively simple concerns, and relying on a combination of a reputation buoyed by shallow populism and cronyism to do so. It didn't scale up to a national level well at all, and as a result, Duterte distinguished himself as a poor administrator and even worse policymaker.
His Cabinet was a collection of some of the most laughably ineffective yahoos and grifters this country, even with its relatively low standards, has seen for in a long time, and was only saved from being a complete disaster by a few perhaps accidentally good staffing picks, such as Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III, and Budget Secretary -- later governor of the central bank -- Benjamin Diokno. Whatever they accomplished, however, was overshadowed by the farcical performance of some of his other appointees, such as Alfonso Cusi, a political party bureaucrat, as Energy Secretary, and Arthur Tugade, a lawyer and business speculator, as Transportation Secretary. Duterte's choice for Health Secretary, and the point man for the government during the Covid-19 pandemic, Francisco Duque III, had at least held the position before, but had spent more time during his years out of government service in the real estate business rather than medicine, which became apparent in the ham-fisted way the pandemic was handled. The Philippines had the world's longest lockdown -- about five months in total -- and suffered one of the most severe economic recessions in Asia. As part of the lingering fallout from the Covid-19 nightmare, Duque, along with a former official of the Office of Management and Budget, is still facing charges of graft for the improper transfer (and implied skimming) of 41 billion pesos of Health Department funds during the pandemic.
What comes next in the strange saga of Rodrigo Duterte is unclear; but given the glacial speed at which the ICC works, it is doubtful he will leave the Netherlands alive. He is 79 years old and in poor health, and even though he can expect adequate medical care, his surviving the three or four years, at a minimum, it will take for there to be any resolution in his case is far from certain. No matter; there was something satisfying in seeing him brought to heel, and as an added bonus, his removal to the Netherlands caused most of his toxic family and coterie of thuggish buffoons to follow him. Out of sight, out of mind doesn't do people with political aspirations much good here, and so there is the happy prospect that this particularly unpleasant political clan has just been put out of business. There are still too many others, here in this country and in the world at large, and unlike some people, I have little hope that this one arrest has any greater significance as a sign of the possible end awaiting the likes of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu. But if it's a small w instead of a big W, it's still a win, and I'll be happy enough to enjoy it for its own sake.
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