It was a difficult election. A compound of both created and accidental opportunities, but what was most obvious yet studiously ignored was that only one of the four candidates was hostile to the clan and cronies of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. Enriched by his twenty years in power, clan and cronies had burrowed into the integument of the body politic for two-plus decades, preparing for a return to political power. Since the country had no provision for a run-off election should no candidate obtain a majority vote, the national electoral system was easy to game. The 2016 election had a three-to-one chance that a dictatorship-friendly candidate would win—which was what transpired. Duterte won, with a minority vote of sixteen million out of fifty million. One of his first acts as president was to declare, as he had promised during the campaign, that he would allow the burial of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos at the Cemetery of Heroes—something opposed by nearly every president for the last thirty years.
Some things that Duterte said in his campaign that he would do, he did and he does. Some he tap-dances around. A lot he denies having said, though he would repeat what he denies saying. But there are dominant themes to his year-old administration.
The Imagination of Murder
He was sixteen years old, said a friend, when Duterte made his first kill; and when he told his family about it, to ensure their protection, he also said he “liked” it.[4] Recently, Duterte declared that he had “stabbed” someone to death when he was only sixteen or seventeen years old—which made me wonder about the rest of the story—that this was the start of troubles with his mother, Soledad. In his defense of the Marcos burial at the Cemetery of Heroes, Duterte had claimed that, his father having “stood by” the late Ferdinand, he could not abandon the Marcoses. Duterte’s claim was not quite a lie but it was not true, either; his father had died in 1969, barely into Ferdinand Marcos’s second and constitutional term as president and three years before he imposed martial law. There was nothing for Duterte’s father to “stand by” at that time; lines would be drawn more firmly later on. But this statement about his father and the Marcos burial certainly was an insult to his mother. She had led the anti-dictatorship Yellow Friday rallies in the city of Davao in the 1980s. It was his mother who had recommended his appointment as Davao City vice mayor to the late Corazon Aquino, who had led the forces that overthrew the dictator. Now, here was Duterte, using his father to justify his decision to bury Marcos in the Cemetery of Heroes.
But Duterte also claimed to have been a student of and influenced by José Maria Sison, founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines (Maoist) or the CPP. One Mao quote then favored by Left activists of the era of the CPP’s founding was “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun”—which Duterte appears to have taken to heart. But strength through killing was not used, in this instance, for the growth of revolutionary power but in the classic reactionary method of intimidation and removal of rivals, under the guise of solving criminality. This methodology Duterte brought to the national scene as soon as he became president. Using as justification an allegedly massive drug problem, murder was conducted by both an amorphous band of “vigilantes” and the police whose anti-drug operations racked up a ninety-six percent kill rate.
Duterte did say during the campaign that the drug problem would be his focus—and to solve it, he was prepared to kill three million Filipinos, even comparing himself to Adolf Hitler.[5] “I hate drugs,” he would say again and again. Drugs and kill were the conflated ideas of his campaign—and since there couldn’t have been that many drug pushers or “drug lords” in the country, the millions Duterte wanted to be killed were presumably addicts, occasional users, and small-time vendors. His election victory came in June 2016 and the killings started immediately. Barely a month into his victory, four hundred and forty people had been murdered.[6]
The killings were theatrical, the presentation of bodies calculated for maximum shock and fear. The killed were wrapped in packing tape, their humanity obliterated. They were tossed down back streets, under bridges, in vacant lots, in garbage dumps. Near them would be a crude hand-lettered sign saying, “Addict. Do not emulate.” The killings occurred in the poorest sections of cities. About one in ten of the killed was female; but also LGBTQ people and, every so often, an activist or two. It was unprecedented in Philippine history. By the fourth month of Duterte’s term of office, the kill rate had climbed to a thousand a month. Any criticism of this murder spree was met with a raucous digital chorus accusing the critic of being either an addict, who should be included in the presidential list of drug lords, or a drug lord supporter. A few murders were done for both the image of invincibility and ruthlessness. Albuera City Mayor Rolando Espinosa, for instance, had surrendered and elected to stay in a police jail for safety. On November 5, 2016, shortly before dawn, a team of policemen entered the precinct, disabled the CCTV, and proceeded to gun down the mayor, claiming he had “fought back.” Nanlaban (fought back) would be a refrain in police operations where the kill rate approached one-hundred percent. A Reuters report noted, “Police have shot dead at least 3,900 people in anti-narcotic operations since Duterte took power in June 2016—always in self-defence, police say.” One police station, Precinct 6, accounted for thirty-nine percent of the police-operation kills; its anti-drug unit was manned by police from Davao City.[7]
The supposed anti-drug campaign is named Operation Tokhang, from a portmanteau of the Cebuano words for “knock” and “talk.” Critics have morphed that into “tok-tok” (for “knocking”) and “bang” (for “gunshot”). There is a degree of irony in the use of a Visayan language by a president whose one appeal had been his having emerged from Mindanao, the largest islands whose indigenous and native population have been so dispossessed by various settler populations, a great number from the Visayas. Indeed, during one trip to Davao City, I was mistaken for a Maguindanao, one of the Muslim tribes, because I spoke Tagalog, which the Maguindanao supposedly preferred over any Visayan language common to the settler population.
The initial murders so unnerved the poor communities that tens of thousands “surrendered,” banking on a government promise of “rehabilitation,” which did not materialize. Instead, thousands were crammed into prisons meant to hold only hundreds, in a truly barbaric situation. Meanwhile, a billion-peso mega-rehabilitation facility—a donation from a Chinese person who had made his wealth in the Philippines (nobody asked how)—stood empty. The killed continued to pile up—up—and up; the last estimate by media and human rights groups placed the killed at more than fourteen thousand. Murder as a solution to a social problem had been so anathema to Philippine culture, with its bedrock values of kapwa,“togetherness” and “empathy,” that a specific ritual and state of mind had to be created for killing—juramentado, a term that developed in the colonial period from the Spanish word juramentar, one who takes the oath.[8]
4
Confidential conversation with a journalist who has covered Duterte’s political career. Duterte later made the claim himself while speaking to a Filipino expatriate group in Vietnam, on November 10, 2017.
5
“Philippines’ Duterte Likens Himself to Hitler, Wants to Kill Millions of Drug Users,” Reuters News, September 29, 2016.
7
“How a Secretive Police Squad Racked up Kills in Duterte’s Anti-Drug War,” Reuters Special Report, December 19, 2017.
8
Isagani E. Medina, “A Historical Reconstruction of the Juramentado/ Sablallah Ritual,”