Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, was known for his arrogance. With a challenging attitude, he boasted of having traveled the streets on a motorcycle in search of alleged criminals to kill or have stabbed someone until death when he was 16 years old. In 2016, he joked about having lost the opportunity to violate an Australian missionary before he was killed in prison in 1989.
Months after assuming the presidency of the Philippines in 2016, he made an erroneous and shocking comparison between the Holocaust and his brutal “War against drugs”: “Hitler massacred three million Jews,” he said mistakenly (the Nazis murdered six million). “Now there are three million drug addicts. I would be happy to massacre them. ”
Duterte, a populist fond of hyperbole, misogyny and attacks against the press, was arrested Tuesday for his alleged role in the bloody “War against drugs”, which left thousands of dead in the Philippines.
According to the Government, the Interpol executed the arrest warrant of the International Criminal Court (TPI) upon arrival at the main Manila airport. The TPI had announced an investigation for crimes against humanity related to its role in the war on drugs.
Davao’s death squads
Former prosecutor and for years mayor of Davao, a city on the island of Mindanao, Duterte reached the presidency in 2016 with high promises to eradicate drugs and crime. He came to promise that his repression would end 100,000 people killed and that the bodies of drug addicts would be thrown into the Manila Sea.
During his term (2016-2022), it is estimated that between 12,000 and 30,000 civilians died in anti-drug operations, according to data cited by the TPI. Most were men from poor neighborhoods, dejected in the street by the police or by unidentified hitmen.
Nicknamed “The Punisher”, Duterte was born in the city of Maasin. As a child, he was expelled from school and, with 15 years, he had a gun.
“They threw him from several schools and even shot a classmate, but never punished him for anything. It always went unpunished, ”he told Guardian Filipino Senator Antonio Trillanes, one of his most staunch critics. “I think that contributed to his mentality of impunity: he never suffered consequences. He killed people and nothing happened. ”
Duterte studied law and became a prosecutor, until he was promoted to Vicealcalde and then mayor of Davao, charges he held for about 20 years in total.
“I think that the only real crisis in his youth was when his father died and the power and wealth of his family dissipated. I couldn’t stand being a normal guy, ”says Trillanes. “Since then, this man, who enjoyed power and money, did not want to live without them. So he never released them. ”
It was in Davao, in the 1980s, where Duterte first rehearsed his fight against drugs and crime, leaving corpses in the streets frequently. Human Rights Watch has been documenting the activities of the “Davao death squads” under his term, denouncing more than 1,000 murders, including those of alleged consumers and drug traffickers, street children and critical journalists with his government.
Even Duterte himself seemed to admit it publicly. “Am I the death squad? Yes, it is true, ”he told a local television in May 2015.
During their presidency, comments such as that unleashed chaos among their advisors, who insisted that they should not be taken literally or were mere jokes.
Duterte denied having ordered the murder of drug trafficking suspects and assured that the police should only kill in self -defense. But the reality in the streets was terrifying. The images of the executions toured the local and international press: people killed in the middle of the street in the middle of the night, with their heads wrapped in adhesive tape and posters by their side that accused them of being traffickers, consumers or criminals.
Despite the strong international condemnation, Duterte remained impassive.
Duterte, which sometimes appears with a cane, has shown signs of fragility over the years. But this Tuesday, when the Interpol arrest order was executed, it retained its challenging attitude. “What is the law and what is the crime I have committed?” He asked.
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