🇵🇭 Six years of Duterte

Hello friends!

It’s surreal to think the Duterte years are behind us and a new era has begun. The Philippines president has dominated so much of the regional news over the last six years. I’ve taken a look today at what those six years looked like. I haven’t covered some things I would’ve liked to, like his flip-flopping relationships with the US and China, or drilled down into his handling of the pandemic.

His war on drugs and war on the media and opposition is so all-encompassing I ran out of space.

What really strikes me as I take a look back over all this older news is that as dark and horrific as it is, there is no rejoicing at seeing the back of Duterte. The unknown is a source of serious anxiety. Marcos Jr is unlikely to unleash hell like Martial Law, but what is he going to do? He hasn’t said much beyond banging on about the wind farms.

Erin Cook

Duterte said his goodbyes to Malacañang and flew down to Davao City. Quite an inauspicious exit for him. He spent so much of his six-year term hanging out down south and doing not much of anything that the ‘proof of life’ photo became integral to keeping the government together and dispelling rumours that he’d died. 

He’s got big plans for his retirement. He’ll be picking up where he left off in Davao. “Now that I won’t be president anymore, nobody can dictate what I do. I will go riding on a motorcycle and roam around the… And I’ll search for drug peddlers, shoot them and kill them,” he told media in May. Are the Davao Death Squads coming back, or is he just making sure he still keeps getting the attention?

Then-candidate Duterte promised he would his war on drug pushers and traffickers national when he was swept into power, and he held himself to that. 

The drug wars in the Philippines have wound down in recent years but revisiting some of these stories has reminded me just how dark and confronting and awful those violent years in 2017 and 2018 were. I reread the Lynzi Billing and Regine Cabato 2019 Washington Post piece in preparation for this newsletter and it will still send a jolt across the nervous system. This is, I think, the quintessential drug wars piece. That the pair later wrote at length about the extreme trolling and threats they both received online after publication makes it doubly so. 

Their piece profiles Ferdinand Jhon Santos, who was found dead in a waterway off the Pasig River, in January 2019. Through Santos’ story, they look at the broader war, ostensibly on drugs, but largely targeting only the poor. At the time this was published, deaths were believed to have hit around 20,000.

It wasn’t Duterte cruising the streets with a gun every night (not this time). This video from Coconuts released in September 2016 shows how quickly and enthusiastically law enforcement and other groups embraced Duterte’s promise of impunity. 

The moment that will stand out forever for me, that will always define the Duterte presidency is one that stunned the Philippines and the world. The murder of Kian delos Santos, a 17-year-old high school student was shot and killed in Manila in August 2017. CCTV footage of the killing was eventually released which challenged the police narrative that officers fired and killed him only after he shot at them first. Other children, including some much younger than Kian, had and would be killed in the war on drugs but the availability of the footage meant the horrific incident became a lightning rod for criticism of the campaign. 

His funeral, which more than a thousand attended, became one of the most stunning of the anti-drug war protests. Three local police were jailed for the crime, which is highly unusual and speaks to the depths of shock Kian’s murder brought on the community.

The International Criminal Court has indicated its investigation into the drug wars will continue (and, as a friend said, should go quite easily given Duterte repeatedly said on record that he was killing people) shortly after being suspended late last year on the request of Manila. I don’t know much about the ICC or its powers but I do hope they at least make a lot of noise. Digging through the old links has made it clear to me how quickly the world has not quite forgotten, but certainly faded in thinking about the drug wars. 

Duterte fought other wars. He fought wars against media and wars against opposition voices. He wasn’t even in Manila before he began threatening journalists. "Just because you're a journalist you are not exempted from assassination if you're a son of a bitch," then-president-elect Duterte told media in June 2016. 

Maria Ressa, who founded Rappler, ended up winning the Nobel Prize for her role in standing up for press freedoms. The Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission revoked Rappler’s media licence, saying an appeal had failed, with just hours left in the Duterte presidency. Ressa vowed Rappler isn’t going anywhere just yet: “We have been harassed, this is intimidation, these are political tactics and we refuse to succumb to them.”

It’s just the latest legal drama for Ressa and the news portal, which has spent six years covering Duterte and his administration with a critical, journalistic eye — not something all publications in the Philippines can say. ABS-CBN certainly can. But the broadcast network has also found itself in legal trouble because of it. ABS-CBN licenses have been revoked over petty grievances dressed up as legal disputes.

CNN Philippines reports Duterte addressed this in late June, saying he told Congress that the network was full of “scoundrels” and hadn’t paid any taxes. Last year, friend and former aide Bong Go told a Senate hearing that Duterte’s feelings had been hurt by an ad aired by the network which was paid for by the opposition and suggested Duterte might not be a great fit for the presidency. He showed them! 

He also repeatedly turned his ire on opposition lawmakers and figures. The dispute with former senator Leila de Lima is emblematic, I think, of his overall view of challengers. De Lima and Duterte have a long-time feud (if you can call it that) dating back to Duterte’s Davao Death Squad days and an investigation helmed by De Lima in her role as chair of the Commission on Human Rights in the late-2000s. 

Duterte got his own back — by 2017, following a year of vocal criticism of the drugs war's mounting death toll, de Lima was jailed on spurious charges of drug trafficking. She’s still there. She ran for the Senate again this year from her cell but failed to make much of an impact despite her very high profile among opposition supporters. Still, there is some hope. Witnesses have recanted their testimony and the Department of Justice has suggested it may be forced to take another look at the case. 

I was also very interested to see a lot of analysis before this year’s national election on how Duterte and his allies worked to undermine his vice president Leni Robredo. The Philippines has a very curious system in which presidents and vice presidents are elected separately. In 2016, Duterte found himself in the odd position of having an opposition VP elected with Robredo barely pipping independent candidate Bongbong Marcos Jr. 

At the enormous Makati demo in support of Robredo’s candidacy in May, I saw a lot of posters that noted she had beat him before and so could do it again. That she did beat him by just a few hundred votes is a deep sore point for Bongbong, who spent much of the last six years mounting various legal challenges. 

Meanwhile, Duterte and Robredo governed separately. She left the cabinet very early in the piece and saw a hit to her approval numbers as Duterte only continued to climb. There has been an orchestrated campaign to undermine Leni, I was told repeatedly in Manila, which put her even further behind the dominating Uniteam Marcos-Duterte ticket by the time election season kicked off. It’s impossible to say if things went more smoothly for her tenure the election could’ve turned out differently, but that’s beside the point. 

The first few years of President Duterte coincided with those of US President Trump. Those years were filled with international headlines calling Duterte ‘Asia’s Trump,’ as though the Trump presidency had unleashed some sort of well-buried vein of authoritarianism. This couldn’t have been further from reality. Duterte had been Duterte-ing in Davao for decades and was widely considered the favourite ahead of the national vote. If anything, Trump was the Duterte of the US. 

Would a Mar Roxas win in 2016, on the Liberal ticket with Leni Robredo and the second-runner to Duterte with under a quarter of the vote, have changed the ecosystem? Would Roxas have handed over the keys to Marcos Jr, or another, less baggage-laden candidate? Who can say? 

Polling throughout those six years had Duterte consistently rated high. Even during the height of the pandemic, voters consistently polled him the highest in a field of potential vice presidents, not keen to see him disappear into the Davao City compound as he has done so many times as president. 

I think a lot weighs on President Marcos Jr. If he proves less popular than the enormous majority who voted him in, it is easy to see people cast a rose-tinted look back to the president who spoke his mind and delivered. I’m also curious to see what comes of the rift between father and now-vice president daughter. It feels like a jinx to say it, but so many others have without touching wood. It was Bongbong’s job to get over the line, to win back the presidency for the family name. It’s Sara Duterte’s job to win 2028. And then we start all over again.  

Further reading

‘This is Manila’ — The Washington Post (read on a desktop for the incredible photojournalism)

From the Bones of Victims, a Doctor Unearths a Drug War’s True Toll — The New York Times

Duterte's wealth remains secret until the end of his term — PCIJ