As Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte was notorious for his boasting.
With cowboyish bravado, he bragged about a past when he cruised around on his motorbike looking for suspected criminals to kill, or at age 16 stabbed someone to death. In 2016 he joked about missing out on the chance to rape an Australian missionary before she was murdered in jail in 1989.
Just months after he was elected president of the Philippines in 2016, he made a glowing and erroneous reference to the Holocaust as an aspirational analogy for his brutal “war on drugs”. “Hitler massacred three million Jews,” he said, wrongly – the Nazis killed six million Jews. “Now, there are three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
A populist who appears to relish in hyperbole, denigrating women and attacking the press, Duterte was arrested on Tuesday for his alleged role in overseeing a bloody “war on drugs” that killed thousands of Filipinos.
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The Interpol arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) was served on his arrival at Manila’s main airport on Tuesday, the government said. The ICC had said it was investigating suspected crimes against humanity related to Duterte’s role in the drug war.
A former prosecutor and long-time mayor of Davao, a city on the island of Mindanao, Duterte rose to the presidency in 2016 on blustering promises to eradicate drugs and crime, pledging a crackdown that would see 100,000 people slaughtered and the bodies of drug users fed to the fish in Manila Bay.
During his presidency from 2016 to 2022, between 12,000 and 30,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed in connection with anti-drugs operations, according to data cited by the ICC. Most of the victims were men from poor, urban areas, shot dead in the streets by police officers or unidentified assailants.
Nicknamed “the Punisher”, the 79-year-old was born in the city of Maasin. As a child he was expelled from school and, aged 15, reportedly carried a gun.
“He was kicked out of some schools, and even shot a classmate, but he never got punished for anything. He got away with it,” the Philippine senator Antonio Trillanes, one of Duterte’s fiercest critics, previously told the Guardian. “So I believe that contributed to his mindset of impunity, because he was never punished. He killed people, but it just went away.”
Duterte went on to study law and become a prosecutor, eventually working his way up to vice-mayor and then mayor of Davao – positions he held for about 20 years in total.
“I believe the only real crisis he had growing up was when his father died and the political power and wealth dissipated. He couldn’t stand being a regular guy. So he was forced to eat humble pie and work his way up,” says Trillanes. “From that point on, this guy who relished that life of power and wealth did not want to experience life without it. So from that point on, he didn’t let go.”
It was in Davao in the 1980s that Duterte would first try out his crackdown on drugs and crime, which frequently saw dead bodies turn up on the streets. Human Rights Watch has long detailed allegations of the “Davao death squads” while Duterte was mayor, claiming that more than 1,000 people were killed, including suspected drug users and dealers, street children, as well as journalists critical of his rule.
Even Duterte once appeared to openly confess as much. “Am I the death squad? True. That is true,” he told local television in May 2015.
During his presidency such comments sent Duterte’s aides into furious damage control as they suggested the comments should not be taken literally or were meant in jest.
Duterte denied ordering the murders of drug suspects and said he instructed police to kill only in self-defence. But on the streets the reality of the so-called drug war was unforgettable. Grisly scenes of the killings flooded the local and international press, including jarring images of people slain in the street in the middle of the night, their heads wrapped in packing tape, often next to cardboard signs accusing them of being a drug dealer, user or criminal.
Even as Duterte’s war sparked major international condemnation, the president remained impervious.
Sometimes seen with a walking stick Duterte has grown more frail, but as he was served the Interpol arrest warrant on Tuesday, his swagger remained, as he asked: “What is the law and what is the crime that I committed?” − Reuters
