Rodrigo Duterte’s Deadly Promise

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When an outrageous yet charismatic candidate for president promises to kill suspected criminals, reporter Patricia Evangelista says, we should listen: it may not be just a talking point.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:15.5	These are very hard times for democracy and for democracies all over the world.
0:22.2	If you look around the globe,
0:28.5	you'll find plenty of evidence for that. But of the many authoritarian rulers who rose to power in recent years, perhaps none embraced violence as gleefully as Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.
0:37.3	Like Donald Trump, Duterte liked to joke about hurting
0:40.2	people, except he wasn't really joking. Duterte said he would execute criminals without an arrest or a
0:47.1	trial. And if someone was suspected of being a drug dealer or even a drug user, he would have them
0:53.2	executed right on the street. The first such
0:56.0	killings happened within a day of his inauguration. Officially, the Philippines says that about
1:01.6	6,000 people were killed under Duterte's regime, but the number is almost certainly higher.
1:09.0	Maybe most horrifying of all, this was done by a leader
1:11.7	who won an election in 2016
1:14.7	on the promise of murder.
1:18.2	To believe in Rodrigo Duterte,
1:21.0	you had to believe he was a killer,
1:23.4	or that he was joking
1:24.7	when he said he was a killer.
1:26.8	You had to believe in the specter of a narco state,
1:30.0	or you had to believe he was only playing to the crowd.
1:33.1	You had to believe drug addiction is criminal,
1:36.3	that drug addicts are not human,
	...

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