The city of Norfolk, Virginia has a heroin epidemic. The mayor takes decisive action to solve the problem—by sending death squads to murder the city’s entire addict population over the course of a single night. The following year this same mayor defeats Hillary Clinton by a thirty-point landslide to become America’s next president. In his acceptance speech he promises to kill all of the country’s addicts on his first day in office.
This outlandish scenario—the stuff of nightmares—just became very real for the people of the Philippines. The island nation recently elected Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency, embracing Duterte’s harsh stances on crime and his extravagant personality; his supporters celebrate him as ‘The Punisher,’ reveling in his willingness to use lethal violence against enemies big and small. As mayor Duterte recruited paramilitary death squads to kill everyone involved in Davao City’s drug underworld, from the richest drug czars and smugglers right down to homeless addicts, relapsed users and street children. According to a 2009 report from independent watchdog group Human Rights Watch, the Duterte regime compiled extensive lists of individuals targeted for killing, lists that numbered in the thousands. In many cases these lists were created in direct collaboration with the city police and the local bureaucracy, who provided names from census records and other official documents. The report describes a reign of terror in Davao City; armed men appear, often in broad daylight, to execute their targets at point-blank range before immediately disappearing. The youngest victims were no older than 14.
When politicians are confronted with allegations of supporting extrajudicial killings, the expected response is a vehement denial. Not so with Duterte. The president-elect has repeatedly declared his wholesale support for the death squads, saying on multiple occasions that “for as long as I am mayor you [suspected criminals] are a legitimate target of assassination.” But Duterte’s love for violence extends beyond mere endorsement. Duterte claims to have himself been a part of the extrajudicial killings, stating in an interview that, in his time as Davao City’s mayor, he had personally killed three suspected rapists, shooting them one by one at point-blank range in a rural district several miles from the city proper. These three, it would seem, weren’t the only targets of Duterte’s unchecked wrath; as mayor, Duterte reportedly killed a criminal by throwing him out of a helicopter. That was in 1988. But it would be a mistake to think that Duterte has mellowed out since then; just this year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Duterte made a grotesque promise to kill 100,000 criminals if elected. At one point on the campaign trail he declared to an adoring crowd that he would dump so many bodies in the rivers of Manila that the “fish will grow fat.”
It is in part because of this unrepentant brutality that Duterte’s rise to power has been widely covered in the Western press. The American fascination with Duterte began with a 2002 Time Magazine article titled “The Punisher,” a piece that mixed hard reporting on the Davao City death squads with a profile of Duterte himself. Duterte is as renowned in the Philippines for his maverick personality as he is for his murders. In a predominantly Catholic nation where social conservatism is deeply imbedded in the political culture, Duterte has declared himself an atheist—actually a ‘Deist’—and is a supporter of same-sex marriage and the legalization of prostitution. Duterte has also made headlines for revealing himself to be a survivor of sexual abuse experienced during his time at a Jesuit school, a deeply taboo subject in the Philippines. If this were not enough of a system shock, Duterte openly discusses his own marital infidelity, and, though a puritanical enforcer of alcohol and smoking bans, has a penchant for patrolling the streets of Davao City on one of his several vintage motorcycles, often wielding a semiautomatic shotgun in his hand. In the lead-up to the election the Western press has reported extensively on some of Duterte’s most controversial comments, including his recent joke about the rape of an Australian missionary. Some commentators—including comedian John Oliver—have labeled him ‘The Trump of the East.’ While certainly evocative, this nickname doesn’t capture the true horror of Duterte’s impending reign. Duterte is much more than a racist buffoon—he is a murderer. Now he is on the threshold of having absolute dominion over a country of 100 million.
Why would anyone vote for Duterte? What is the allure of his promises of blood? The answer is tragically simple: desperation. For its entire modern history, the Philippines has been plagued by staggering poverty, episodic outbreaks of violence and intractable corruption. After securing independence in 1946 from the United States—which ruled its “Little Brown Brother” with an iron fist—the Philippines established an American-style republic. The new government seemed to be working decently for its first decade. But the struggling democracy experienced severe economic setbacks and robust communist and Islamist insurgencies, both of which enabled the rise of authoritarian ex-generals, culminating in the 1965 accession of Ferdinand Marcos to the presidency. Marcos’ eighteen-year rule—eleven years of which were under martial law—was an unmitigated disaster for the Philippines. The regime was as kleptocratic as it was brutal, with the Marcos family stealing billions of dollars from the public and stashing the loot in offshore accounts. The 1983 People’s Power Revolution brought an end to the Marcos dynasty—but subsequent administrations did nothing to stem the corruption and violence that had turned the Philippines, once a promising new republic, into the embarrassment of Southeast Asia. Even as its neighbors—Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia—have experienced remarkable economic and social development, very little has changed in the Philippines. Thirty years of stagnation, coupled with recalcitrant Islamist and communist insurgencies in the provinces, has brought the Philippine people to the boiling point.
Thus the appeal of Duterte. During Duterte’s two decades as mayor, Davao City went from a crime-ridden backwater to a prosperous international tourist destination. Davao City’s status as an economic miracle is indisputable; through numerous infrastructure projects, literacy efforts, and public health campaigns, Duterte’s administration pursued an unprecedented social agenda—a standout both domestically and abroad. With Davao City as the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, Duterte has offered the voters of the Philippines a choice: the violent status quo or prosperous order—but at a bloody, bloody price.
For the people of the Philippines the choice seems to have been a clear one. May’s presidential election, initially thought to be a horserace, gave Duterte a stunning mandate almost without precedent in Philippine political history. In a five-way race Duterte won nearly 40 percent of the vote, outpolling his nearest challenger by 15 points. Included among the defeated were Liberal Party standard-bearer Mar Roxas, the handpicked successor of incumbent President Benigno Aquino III, and unaffiliated anti-corruption candidate Grace Poe, long considered a favorite for her independence from the political establishment. With rivals left and right swept away, Duterte has a clear mandate. He is set to take office on June 30th. No one knows exactly what will happen, but one thing is a dead certainty: there will be blood.