When Emily Soriano recounts how her 15-year-old son was gunned down along with four friends and two other residents while partying in a Philippine slum six years ago, she weeps in grief and anger as though the massacre happened yesterday.
Police concluded at the time that the bloodbath in a riverside shantytown in Caloocan city in the Manila metropolis was set off by a drug gang war, but Soriano angrily blamed four plainclothes police officers and the brutal anti-drug crackdown of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte for the 2016 killings.
“He didn’t lead like a father to the country. He became a monster. His persona and the fury on his face are scary,” Soriano said of Duterte.
Illustration: Lance Liu
The thousands of killings under Duterte’s brutal campaign against illegal drugs — unprecedented in its scale and lethality in recent Philippine history and the alarm it set off worldwide — are leaving families of the dead in agony, an International Criminal Court investigation and a savage side to Duterte’s legacy, as his turbulent six-year presidency comes to an end on Thursday.
One of Asia’s most unorthodox contemporary leaders, Duterte, 77 and frail of health, is closing out more than three decades in the country’s often rowdy politics, where he built a political name for his expletive-laced outbursts and his disdain for human rights and the West while reaching out to China and Russia.
Activists regarded him as “a human rights calamity,” not only for the widespread deaths under his so-called war on drugs, but also for his brazen attacks on critical media, the dominant Catholic church, and opposition parties and groups.
An opposition senator and one of Duterte’s fiercest critics, Leila de Lima, has been locked up in high-security detention for five years over drug charges she said were fabricated to muzzle her and threaten other critics. Duterte’s decision — just months after he rose to the presidency in 2016 — to allow the burial of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos in the country’s Heroes Cemetery significantly boosted efforts by the Marcos family to burnish the name of the man widely considered a dictator.
Marcos’ namesake son won last month’s presidential election by a landslide. Ferdinand Marcos Jr succeeded Duterte on Thursday and is to govern alongside Duterte’s daughter, Sara, who won the vice presidency, also by a huge margin.
Duterte himself has remained popular based on independent surveys, despite the drug campaign deaths and his foibles, which endeared him to many poor Filipinos. His aides have often cited his high popularity ratings when dealing with critics and the opposition.
The state-run TV network has been running Duterte legacy documentaries, mostly highlighting his administration’s infrastructure and pro-poor projects. At a Thanksgiving rally in Manila over the weekend, his supporters waved Philippine flags and cheered him on as he relented to belt a song with an orchestra and popular singers backing him up.
In the dim squalor of Soriano’s shanty, however, an air of indignation and mourning still permeates. A wall brims with cluttered photographs of Angelito, her slain son, along with portraits and a statue of the Virgin Mary and a small card that reads: “End Impunity!”
INTERNATIONAL PROBE
Soriano pleaded to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to resume an investigation into the drug campaign deaths, which was suspended in November last year upon the Philippine government’s request. She said she was ready to testify before the international court.
“When my son was buried, I promised I’ll give him justice,” Soriano said.
The ICC launched an investigation into the drug killings as a possible crime against humanity. The range of the investigation covers from Nov. 1, 2011, when Duterte was mayor of southern Davao City, to March 16, 2019.
Duterte won the presidency in mid-2016 on an audacious, though failed, promise to eradicate the menace of illegal drugs and corruption in three to six months.
The ICC, based in The Hague, is a court of last resort for crimes that countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute. Only one murder case, against three policemen accused of gunning down a teenager they linked to illegal drugs, has progressed into a conviction so far. Duterte’s opponents have cited the lack of convictions to highlight the difficulty of prosecuting law enforcers, and possibly Duterte, for extrajudicial killings.
A drug suspect, who was gunned down and left for dead by police officers, although surprisingly survived the violence in Metropolitan Manila in 2016, said he still fears for his life. He asked that his real name not be used by journalists for security, but added he would be willing to testify before the ICC if its investigation progresses to a trial.
Asked to comment on Duterte’s legacy, he shook his head, but expressed hope that he and other victims would get justice and possible state reparation.
“I still have a phobia,” he said, adding that with Duterte’s exit, “it has eased a little.”
POOR TARGETED
More than 6,250 mostly poor drug suspects have been killed in Duterte’s crackdown, based on a government count since he expanded the campaign nationwide after becoming president in 2016.
Human rights proponents have reported much higher death tolls. They added that under his two-decade crackdown against crimes in Davao City, where he served as mayor, vice mayor and a congressman starting in 1988, more than 1,000 had been killed.
Arturo Lascanas, a retired police officer who served under Duterte for many years in a unit fighting heinous crime in Davao City, said that as many as 10,000 suspects might have been killed in the vast port city on the orders of Duterte and key aides when he was mayor.
Duterte has denied authorizing extrajudicial killings in Davao City or elsewhere in the country, but has long openly threatened drug suspects with death, and ordered law enforcers to shoot suspects who threaten them with harm.
“All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you,” Duterte told a huge crowd in a 2016 presidential campaign sortie in Manila’s Tondo slum district. “I have no patience, I have no middle ground, either you kill me or I will kill you idiots.”
Lascanas, 61, said he was also ready to testify in a potential ICC trial, and provide crucial evidence that could prove Duterte ordered and funded many killings and abductions in Davao City.
“The No. 1 physical evidence is myself,” said Lascanas, who is hiding outside the Philippines.
“Duterte must be given his day in court to face the consequences of his madness, because this is a very dangerous precedent for the next generation of public officials in the country, and probably to the entire humanity,” he said.
Lascanas has provided details of many of the alleged killings in a 186-page affidavit and in testimonies he made at the Senate before he left the Philippines in 2017.
Catholic missionary priest Flavie Villanueva said the widespread killings have left many orphans — depriving poor families of breadwinners — and have sparked other complex problems that Duterte is leaving behind.
Villanueva heads a religious center in Manila that provides food, shelter, livelihood training and burial assistance to more than 270 families of slain victims. He said that is just a tiny fraction of the many families devastated by the drug-campaign violence in a largely unnoticed humanitarian crisis sparked by the killings.
Another tragic consequence of Duterte’s populist and coercive style is the blurring of the line between right and wrong that has sparked arguments among people, and even within the church, Villanueva said, adding he often asks Duterte’s apologists: “Are we reading the same Bible?”
As Duterte leaves, Villanueva said: “We’re not only broken and wounded. We are even divided as a church and as a people.”
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