[Philippine human rights violation] Duterte Harry fire and fury in the Philippines #1/272

FOREWORD:
ADDICTED TO KILLING

At about the time I was assigned as Asia correspondent for Channel 4 News and arrived back in the region, a foul-mouthed maverick mayor from Mindanao — an island in the far south of the Philippines — announced that he was going to run for president. Rodrigo Duterte possessed street charisma and had engagingly bad manners. Filipinos called this ‘gangster charm’, and swooned. When Duterte called Pope Francis a ‘son of a whore’ and got away with it in a country almost as staunchly Catholic as the Vatican, I began to pay more serious attention. This Mayor Duterte seemed like he could get away with murder. He presented himself as a man of the people, an insurgent outsider with no time for the corrupt oligarchs and dynastic elites of what he disparaged as ‘imperial Manila’. He loved guns and girls and motorbikes, and hated drugs and crime and protocol.

The Philippines, a tropical archipelago of over 7000 far-flung islands and 100 million people — a quarter of whom live in poverty — was on the look-out for a saviour. The mayor’s rough-edged appeal cut across both class and wealth divides. Duterte’s brazen, cavalier style made Filipinos laugh and feel good about themselves. In his own words, he did not ‘give a shit’ about what people thought — particularly when it came to human rights. After years of feckless liberal leadership and decades of deference to America — the former colonial ruler — here at last was a straight-talking politician with simple solutions to national problems. Duterte claimed to be a socialist, but didn’t peddle ideology: he spoke the gutter language of the poor and was a shameless populist authoritarian at the vanguard of an emerging new world order, way ahead of Donald J. Trump. Duterte promised that, as president, he would do just as he had done as mayor of Davao City: rid the place of bad guys and do society a favour. He revelled in his nom de guerre, ‘Duterte Harry’, after Clint Eastwood’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later vigilante cop, ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan.

‘I am your last card,’ he told an electorate in his thrall. ‘I promise you, I will get down and dirty just to get things done … All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you.