Boomerang effect

In the continuing overseas effort to demonize Rody, Rappler founder Maria Ressa recounted an incident in Tacloban City when it was ravaged by typhoon “Yolanda” in November 2013 and when she then interviewed a rather obscure Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte.

Rody, at that time, led a humanitarian team from Davao to deliver medical aid and cash to the flattened Leyte capital.

In presenting Ressa to promote the extreme black propaganda called “On the President’s Orders,” the American Public Broadcasting System (PBS) highlighted an interview with Rody during the chaos that ensued af ter the strongest typhoon on the planet hit parts of the Visayas.

Before flying to Leyte, Rody was overheard instructing his security staff to shoot “anyone who tried to steal from aid workers.”

In the interview with Rappler, Rody said “I told them to just shoot at the feet. They can have prosthetics after, anyway.”

The bravado and vigilante tactics were signature Duterte, Ressa said. She first interviewed Duterte while still a correspondent with CNN in the 1980s, after he was elected mayor.

“That’s part of the country in the south where law and order has been weak, and his vigilante tactics and how he’s governed the town is what he promised the Philippines,” Ressa said. “That’s what Filipinos voted for,” she narrated.

The narrative then went to another fiction that the yellow mob has been trying to propagate, which was the existence of the Davao Death Squad, or the vigilante unit against Davao City criminals being linked to Rody.

“As a former prosecutor, Duterte was predictably hard on crime during his two-plus decades as mayor of Davao City. But the severity of his crackdown wasn’t immediately clear. In 2017, former police officer Arthur Lascañas confessed to leading the so-called Davao Death Squad, which he alleged Duterte used to kill criminals,” so goes the recycled spin.

In a side story for the documentary, PBS said Ressa, “even as a longtime Duterte observer, said she could not have anticipated the violence that would unfold during his presidency.”

“In that context, the order to shoot looters following super typhoon “Haiyan” (“Yolanda”) was a sign of things to come,” Ressa said.

Of course, the bigger picture in the tragedy that Ressa recounted was the failure of Rody’s predecessor to effectively respond to the biggest disaster that hit the nation and who instead injected political color to it at the outset.

Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez was politically harassed by the yellow occupants in the Palace to relinquish his authority over the city to the national government, but which he repulsed.

The standoff and the confusion led to delayed relief operations that sparked the looting and chaos that Ressa recounted.

Shooting looters is among the options given to government officials to put order to an otherwise unruly environment.

Several governments, including that of the United States and Indonesia, have issued shoot to kill orders against looters in the aftermath of recent disasters.

Also, Rody who was a local executive then was merely talking tough to which Ressa volunteered an admission as she said, “That’s part of his appeal. He says what he thinks. He’s not a cautious politician. When you were coming from an era of politicians who watched their words, he seems refreshing — a voice made for social media. He’s authentic. He admits he kills people and he promised that he would kill people.”

The problem with Ressa is that she knows Rody enough to realize that his tough talk serves to bring across a message which, in the case of the “Yolanda” disaster, was for the government to exercise a strong will that was solely lacking then. Yet she still paints him as a killer based on his rants.

The supposed vilification of Rody on US national television turns out, instead, extolling his strong will during a critical situation in contrast to the incompetency shown by the ruling yellow leaders then.

“That’s part of his appeal. He says what he thinks. He’s not a cautious politician. When you were coming from an era of politicians who watched their words, he seems refreshing — a voice made for social media. He’s authentic

“Of course, the bigger picture in the tragedy that Ressa recounted was the failure of Rody’s predecessor to effectively respond to the biggest disaster that hit the nation and who instead injected political color to it at the outset.