Implicit in these traditions was an acceptance of punishment, of being killed in the process of killing, so that balance was returned to the flow of human life. To be killed anonymously, to have no one held responsible, to not even have the murders investigated, and indeed to reward murder—these were so profoundly in violation of the national psyche that the nation cowered in the initial months of Duterte’s murder spree. His digital army also poured forth a steady stream of accusations against the killed, labelling each murdered person an addict and labelling each addict a violent criminal. In the end, murder became almost a cursory by-product of even petty crimes, as it was the one crime not investigated and, moreover, perpetrated by state-sanctioned operatives and by the police who, at one point, launched an operation that killed eighty-seven in one week in what the police called a “one-time, big-time” operation. Most of the murdered were young men in Metro-Manila and four nearby cities.[9]
In a country where weapons were the preserve of the rich, there seemed no stopping the killings. Tatay Digong (“Father Digong,” Duterte’s nickname) morphed into Tatay Katay (“Father Butcher”)—and because this is a culture of 150 languages, the first pushback would be the dirge rising from the country’s poets and writers.
Tokhang
Yin/Yang
Overt machismo and its brother-in-arms, misogyny, are among the recurrent themes of Duterte’s governance, with special animosity toward educated women in positions of power. A Freudian explanation can likely be found for this, considering that Duterte’s favorite swearword, used liberally in his public pronouncements, irrespective of audience, is putang-ina, a combination of the Spanish word for prostitute (a practice unknown to native culture, hence the word borrowing) and the word for “mother” in many native languages. It is a many-layered word, denigrating of mothers even as it acknowledges the significance of one’s links to the mother. The country itself is the Motherland, never the Fatherland. And strangely enough, Duterte sank to his knees, presumably in tears, beside his mother’s tomb as soon as his election victory was announced.
Duterte sprinkles his public speeches with this swear quite liberally, irrespective of his audience. He also has a propensity to be scatological, to refer to his supposed sexual prowess or lack of it. It is both a casual and yet a serious swearword, the reaction to which can range from laughter to knives drawn. But it is a kind of nervous tic for Duterte, so pronounced that people have wondered if he has Tourette’s syndrome. Coupled with his propensity to speak about Viagra, his sexual (non) prowess, his handful of mistresses, he has been suspected of being afflicted with coprolalia, perhaps the result of his being sexually abused, as he says, by a priest when he was a boy. Others see this as part of the full spectrum of misogyny that he employs to silence critics, similar to the virulent verbal abuse men’s rights activists unleash on women and feminists. What is clear, though, is that he reacts very harshly and very intensely when a female contradicts him, even as some of his most anti-woman supporters are women. It is a symptom of the rather schizophrenic attitude toward women as a result of the clash between the values of indigenous and native cultures and the imposed cultures of colonialism and imperialism.
Senator Leila de Lima is probably the first political prisoner of the regime, jailed on allegations of drug trafficking involvement, though the government case against her has been revised again and again. The allegations are based on the testimony of convicted drug and murder felons, one of whom had to be nearly killed in prison before he would agree to appear before a congressional hearing. Unfortunately for Duterte’s “swing to China” foreign policy, the felons’ testimony also identified China as the main source of meth and the chemicals for meth production.
Here’s a rather revealing chart from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency:
But what offended Duterte was de Lima’s opening of Senate hearings on the Davao Death Squad. As chair of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, a constitutionally mandated institution, de Lima had dared investigate in 2009 a series of killings of petty criminals and street children in the city of Davao. Human Rights Watch had issued a report concluding that the killings were supported by the city government and detailing the existence of a Davao Death Squad (DDS—which would morph into Digong’s Death Squad, that being the president’s nickname and, during the presidential campaign, into Diehard Duterte Supporters, a standard presidential tactic of making light of any serious matter concerning himself).
President Duterte’s response was terrifying, classic in the brutality of its tactics. At one point, he said she should just resign and hang herself. The barrage against de Lima and the Senate investigation was a virtual carnival of sadist misogyny. She was portrayed as a sexual outlaw because of a seven-year relationship with her driver. President Duterte said he had viewed a sex video of the senator, which had made him want to puke (the video never surfaced; what did appear was a porn video featuring a woman who very vaguely looked like the senator). Convicted drug-trafficking felons were summoned to testify at a congressional hearing to allege drug payoffs to de Lima. de Lima was eventually stripped of her Senate committee chair position and in due time, was arrested. She remains in jail. Meanwhile, the drug trade continues unabated and meth smuggling has spawned for the public a litany of names, most of them of Chinese lineage—plus the name of Duterte’s son who was accused by Senator Trillanes of being a member of a Chinese triad.[10]
What caused Duterte’s secretary of justice to finally admit that there was no sex video was the pushback from a women’s group, a pushback that also became an organizing campaign. Every Woman launched a simple digital campaign, which trended rapidly; it asked women to post the simple statement “I am the woman in the sex video.” I posted one, of course, finding this disempowerment of a woman by rendering her a “sexual outlaw” a familiar tactic. The hashtag #EveryWoman dominated social media for weeks—and eventually killed the story of the senator and the driver.
But this tactic of disempowering a woman by destroying her reputation would be used against Vice-President Leni Robredo—who became a target of rumors propagated by Duterte’s troll bots, to wit, that she had a boyfriend, that she was pregnant, and so on. Duterte would himself allude to her looks, the length of her skirt… Robredo, it would seem, deliberately maintains a public image that is in direct contrast to that of the president’s. She is always polite, smiling, careful with her words, attends religious services, and is often photographed with the poor as part of her program of providing a livelihood for the disenfranchised. Duterte’s supporters must know how threatening this contrast can be, and have resorted to calling her lugaw (porridge). Nevertheless, she has been subjected to some direct humiliation, being informed via a text message by a president’s underling that she was no longer welcome to cabinet meetings. She immediately resigned her cabinet position and concentrated on consolidating her base. Recently, she accepted the position of titular head of the Liberal Party, the one remaining opposition party in the country. As some pointed out, the vice-president’s duty per the Constitution is simply “to wait.” And wait she does, speaking out sharply on a few issues, now contradicting the president and, rarely, supporting him.
10
“Trillanes: ‘Dragon-like’ Tattoo Links Paolo Duterte to ‘Triad’,”