BECOMING DUTERTE
The making of a Philippine strongman
President Rodrigo Duterte relishes the image of killer savior. He boasts of killing criminals with his own hand. On occasion, he calls for mass murder.
Speaking of the drug addicts he says are destroying the Philippines, he said, “I would be happy to slaughter them.”
Duterte and his friends have long cultivated legends of his sadistic exploits, like throwing a drug lord from a helicopter and forcing a tourist who violated a smoking ban to eat his cigarette butt at gunpoint.
It is a thuggish image that Duterte embraces.
Whether Duterte has done what he says — the killings he claims to have carried out are impossible to verify — he has realized his gory vision in national policy. First as a mayor, now as president of the Philippines, he has encouraged the police and vigilantes to kill thousands of people with impunity.
While his draconian justice and coarse manner have earned him widespread condemnation outside the Philippines, an in-depth look at his rise to power and interviews with many people close to him reveal a man of multiple contradictions.
He has alienated many with outrageous comments and irrational behavior, yet remains wildly popular. He is an anti-drug crusader, yet has struggled with drug abuse himself. And he grew up a child of privilege, the son of a provincial governor, yet was subjected to regular beatings.
His mother whipped him so often for his misbehavior that she wore out her horsewhip, according to his brother, Emmanuel Duterte. At parochial school, he was caned by Jesuit priests and, the president says, molested by one. By his teenage years, he was known as a street
brawler.
“Violence in the house, violence in the school and violence in the neighborhood,” Emmanuel Duterte said. “That is why he is always angry. Because if you have pain when you are young, you are angry all the time.”
Years later, a psychological assessment of Rodrigo Duterte, prepared in 1998 for the annulment of his marriage, concluded that he had “narcissistic personality disorder” and a “pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others and violate their rights.”
Nonetheless, his ailing ex-wife campaigned for his presidential bid last year.
That act of devotion only begins to unravel the paradox that is Duterte. Behind his brutish caricature, according to interviews with dozens of Duterte’s friends, family members, allies and critics, is a man who can be charming and engaging. He has many loyal friends and a soft spot for sick children.
As mayor of Davao City, he was known to help people in need by digging into his pocket and handing them a wad of cash. To many, his vulgar jokes only burnish his bona fides as a man of the people. When he appears in public, he is swarmed by fans.
Still, the bodies have been piling up. Since Duterte took office in June and declared a “war” on drugs, the police and unknown assassins have killed more than 3,600 people, the police say. Some put the toll at more than 7,000.
The dissonance between the image of the gentle, caring grandfather and the brutal strongman spilling blood on the streets is just one of many in a commonman president who was born to the elite and has lived a life surrounded by violence.
Young, armed and angry
Duterte grew up in war-torn Davao City, in the southern Philippines, the oldest son of the governor of Davao province.
As a teenager, he hung out with the toughest kids, got into fights and learned the rude expressions he uses today. By 15, he was carrying a gun, his brother said.
As a freshman at the Ateneo de Davao high school, he was fondled by a U.S. priest, an experience he revealed only in 2015. He identified the priest as the Rev. Mark Falvey, who later moved to California and died in 1975. The Jesuit order agreed in 2007 to pay $16 million to nine people Falvey molested at a Hollywood church.
Against another priest, Duterte retaliated for a punishment he had received by filling a squirt gun with ink and spraying the priest’s white cassock, his siblings said. For that, he was expelled. He often skipped classes and likes to tell audiences that it took him seven years to finish high school.
His father told him that since he was always in trouble, he could save legal fees by becoming a lawyer, his brother recalled, so Rodrigo went to law school. In his final year, he shot and wounded a fellow student whom he accused of bullying him.
Duterte graduated anyway and became a prosecutor.
“One thing about my brother is he is hardheaded,” Emmanuel Duterte said. “The more you tell him not to do it, the more he will do it. He needs to tone down on his anger. He needs anger management.”
In the 1980s, his mother led frequent marches against Marcos’ dictatorial rule. After Marcos’ ouster, President Corazon Aquino offered her the post of Davao’s vice mayor. She asked that Rodrigo be appointed instead, friends and family said.
Two years later, in 1988, he ran for mayor and won, starting a lifelong streak in which he has never lost an election.
The Davao death squad
Shortly after he became mayor, crime suspects started turning up dead on Davao’s streets.
Duterte and his supporters have long denied the existence of a death squad in Davao City. But in September, Edgar Matobato, 57, came forward and told a Senate committee that he worked as an assassin on the squad for 24 years, killing about 50 people.
In an interview with The New York Times, he said the death squad was founded in 1988 at a lunch he attended at the old Menseng Hotel with Duterte, several police officers and six other recruits. They were told their job was to hunt down criminals.
In February, a former police officer, Arthur Lascañas, 56, came forward and confessed to having led the death squad. He said that he received orders to kill directly from Duterte and that he had killed 200 people.
“All the killings that we committed in Davao City, whether they were buried or thrown in the sea, were paid for by Mayor Duterte,” he said.
Duterte has never directly addressed the accusations made by Matobato or Lascañas, and he declined to be interviewed for this article.
‘A simple man’
Becoming president has been an adjustment for Duterte, who is 71. For months, he still thought of himself as mayor and often called himself that.
He prefers to go home to Davao City rather than stay in the sprawling presidential palace complex in Manila. In a land that is notoriously corrupt and where government officials often live like kings, he has lived for decades in the same modest two-story house where he only recently installed airconditioning.
Pomilda Daniel, a neighbor, calls him “a simple man.” She said that Duterte once admired her large new television and asked if he could have it if it ever broke so that he could fix it and use it.
Yet when he discovered during a visit to the House of Hope, a child cancer treatment center in Davao, that the children had no televisions, he returned the same day with nine TV sets and had them installed, said Mae Dolendo, a pediatric oncologist who heads the center.
“He is very, very compassionate,” she said. “We have had presidents who conducted themselves like we would expect presidents to conduct themselves, but they haven’t solved the country’s problems. He’s not perfect. He curses. But he gets things done.”
Loose talk
Duterte’s outrageous remarks have left many with the impression that he is unhinged.
He says God speaks to him and made him president of this heavily Roman Catholic country. He has compared himself to Hitler. He used a term that translates as “son of a whore” to describe both Pope Francis and President Barack Obama.
Antonio Trillanes, a senator, recalled that when they met in 2015 to discuss a political alliance, Duterte only wanted to talk about people he had killed and “how the brains were splattered all over the place, gangland style.”
He seems never to have questioned the proposition that shooting people on the street is the best remedy for crime and addiction.
“I have my own political philosophy,” he said recently. “Do not destroy my country, because I will kill you.”