Duterte exits with deadly legacy
— When Emily Soriano recounts how her 15-year-old son was gunned down with four friends and two other residents while partying in a Philippine slum six years ago, she weeps in grief and anger like 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 outgoing 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.
More than 6,250 mostly poor drug suspects have been killed in Duterte’s crackdown based on a government count.
The 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 ends Thursday.
One of Asia’s most unorthodox contemporary leaders, Duterte, now 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 expletives-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 caMANILA lamity” 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 the opposition. An opposition senator and one of his 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.
His decision — just months after he rose to the presidency in 2016 — to allow the burial of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the country’s heroes cemetery significantly boosted efforts by the Marcoses to burnish the family name.
The dictator’s namesake son won last month’s presidential election by a landslide. Marcos Jr. succeeds Duterte on Thursday and
will 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 to deal with critics and the opposition.
The state-run TV network has been running Duterte legacy documentaries, mostly highlighting his administration’s infrastructure and propoor projects. In 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.