Rodrigo Duterte’s Deadly Promise

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

When Rodrigo Duterte ran for the presidency of the Philippines and won, in 2016, the Western press noted the similarities between this unconventional candidate and Donald Trump—who also liked to casually espouse violence on the campaign trail and beyond. Duterte used provocative and obscene language to tap into the country’s fears about a real, albeit overstated, drug problem. “Every drug addict was a schizophrenic, hallucinatory, will rape your mother and butcher your father,” as reporter Patricia Evangelista puts it, “and if he can’t find a child to rape, he’ll rape a goat.” But, unlike Donald Trump, Duterte made good on his promise of death. More than twenty thousand extrajudicial killings took place over the course of his six-year term in office, according to human-rights groups—and Duterte remained quite popular as bodies piled up in the streets. Reporting for the news site Rappler, Evangelista confronted the collateral damage when Durterte started to enact his “kill them all” policies. “I had to take accountability,” she tells David Remnick. Her book, “Some People Need Killing,” is published in the U.S. this week, and Evangelista has left the Philippines because of the danger it puts her in. “I own the guilt,” Evangelista says. “How can I sit in New York, when the people whose stories I told, who took the risk to tell me their stories, are sitting in shanties across the country and might be at risk because of things they told me.”

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1:12.6	This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick.
1:19.6	These are very hard times for democracy and for democracies all over the world.
1:25.2	If you look around the globe, you'll find plenty of evidence for that.
1:29.4	But of the many authoritarian rulers who rose to power in recent years, perhaps none embraced
1:35.7	violence as gleefully as Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Like Donald Trump, Duterte liked to
1:43.2	joke about hurting people. Except he wasn't
1:46.3	really joking. Duterte said he would execute criminals without an arrest or a trial. And if someone
1:52.9	was suspected of being a drug dealer or even a drug user, he would have them executed right on the
1:58.5	street. The first such killings happened within a day of his inauguration.
2:04.1	Officially, the Philippines says that about 6,000 people were killed under Duterte's regime,
	...

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