Strongmen

DUTERTE Nada in the Heart of Bluster ^{Ninotchka Rosca}

AFTER THE 2016 Philippine presidential elections, Rodrigo Roa Duterte who emerged victorious was praised for having run a “perfect social media campaign”—seemingly a shrewd campaign tactic in a country where fifty-eight percent of the population is active on social media.[1] Examined dispassionately, however, this tactic was both inevitable and necessary, to create an “irreality,” to transform into an icon of “change” a candidate whose only salient accomplishment was to maintain himself and his family in power for thirty years in a city ranked first in the number of murder cases.[2]

That “enhanced” digital narrative had all the elements of a telenovela—from thug-life rap imagery, mayhem, scatology, to a motley array of characters that was moved from the social margins to center stage: a soft-porn star, trans and queer people, dismally failed lawyers, and some cronies and members of the defunct Marcos dictatorship, left-wingers turned rightwing. These “sold” his iconography: a clenched fist, reminiscent of left militancy, but angled so that it was a full-frontal blow to the face of the beholder; Duterte himself cradling various over-sized guns and dubbed “The Punisher.” Sound bites from Duterte both shocked and titillated, the equation of power and lust being one enduring machismo fantasy. He was also adept at using the “two-steps-forward-one-step-back” dance (or his handlers were), now admitting to having killed at least three people, now saying he’d never killed anyone; now threatening to slap his opponents, now lapsing into silence when they responded to his challenge. He showed his contempt (or non-knowledge) for critical issues facing the country, joking he would take a jet ski and plant the Philippine flag on the contested Spratly Islands—a non-stand which effectively sidelined one pivotal foreign policy issue. He was quick to use people’s complaints without acknowledging his own participation in creating such problems, decrying, for instance, the loss of Muslim and indigenous land in Mindanao, despite the reality that the city he presided over for thirty years was a settler city, his own family having moved there from the Visayas, where his father had been a mayor in a round-robin system of power place-holding maintained by their relatives, the warlord Duranos. His bellows against such ills and on behalf of the afflicted were accompanied by the persistent claim that he had turned the city of Davao into the “safest” and most progressive city on earth—a lie unleashed by his trolls and picked up by media.

His fiercest opponent nowadays, Senator Antonio “Sonny” Trillanes, pinpointed this as the foundation of the supposed Duterte ability to bring change. The senator was upset that few challenged such an outright lie, enabling Duterte’s campaign to build the mythology that safety and progress needed a strongman who could face down the criminal, the oligarchs, and, of course, the imperialists. Senator Trillanes himself had been intrigued by the man and had approached Duterte for a possible team-up at the start of the campaign. The senator’s party had decided he should run for the vice-presidency, and he needed a presidential candidate to endorse. “I thought we would discuss policies,” he said, “but all he did was talk about people he had killed.” Not one to engage in a machismo slam dance, Trillanes and his party chose to endorse Senator Grace Poe—too precipitous a decision, as it would turn out, since that same afternoon, Mar Roxas, the standard bearer of the Liberal Party, which was in power, came knocking. “It was a few hours late,” he said, “and, truly, Leni Robredo, who was not even in the list of names being considered, was fated to be the vice-president.” Asked what he thought was the singular problem with the regime of Duterte, Senator Trillanes did not hesitate, “There is no core vision. There is nothing there to anchor policies—nothing at all.” He added, “Except to secure and maintain power for himself. He has seen how vulnerable former presidents can be.” The last two presidents of the Republic ended up in jail.[3]

It was a difficult election. A compound of both created and accidental opportunities, but what was most obvious yet studiously ignored was that only one of the four candidates was hostile to the clan and cronies of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. Enriched by his twenty years in power, clan and cronies had burrowed into the integument of the body politic for two-plus decades, preparing for a return to political power. Since the country had no provision for a run-off election should no candidate obtain a majority vote, the national electoral system was easy to game. The 2016 election had a three-to-one chance that a dictatorship-friendly candidate would win—which was what transpired. Duterte won, with a minority vote of sixteen million out of fifty million. One of his first acts as president was to declare, as he had promised during the campaign, that he would allow the burial of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos at the Cemetery of Heroes—something opposed by nearly every president for the last thirty years.

Some things that Duterte said in his campaign that he would do, he did and he does. Some he tap-dances around. A lot he denies having said, though he would repeat what he denies saying. But there are dominant themes to his year-old administration.

The Imagination of Murder

He was sixteen years old, said a friend, when Duterte made his first kill; and when he told his family about it, to ensure their protection, he also said he “liked” it.[4] Recently, Duterte declared that he had “stabbed” someone to death when he was only sixteen or seventeen years old—which made me wonder about the rest of the story—that this was the start of troubles with his mother, Soledad. In his defense of the Marcos burial at the Cemetery of Heroes, Duterte had claimed that, his father having “stood by” the late Ferdinand, he could not abandon the Marcoses. Duterte’s claim was not quite a lie but it was not true, either; his father had died in 1969, barely into Ferdinand Marcos’s second and constitutional term as president and three years before he imposed martial law. There was nothing for Duterte’s father to “stand by” at that time; lines would be drawn more firmly later on. But this statement about his father and the Marcos burial certainly was an insult to his mother. She had led the anti-dictatorship Yellow Friday rallies in the city of Davao in the 1980s. It was his mother who had recommended his appointment as Davao City vice mayor to the late Corazon Aquino, who had led the forces that overthrew the dictator. Now, here was Duterte, using his father to justify his decision to bury Marcos in the Cemetery of Heroes.

But Duterte also claimed to have been a student of and influenced by José Maria Sison, founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines (Maoist) or the CPP. One Mao quote then favored by Left activists of the era of the CPP’s founding was “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun”—which Duterte appears to have taken to heart. But strength through killing was not used, in this instance, for the growth of revolutionary power but in the classic reactionary method of intimidation and removal of rivals, under the guise of solving criminality. This methodology Duterte brought to the national scene as soon as he became president. Using as justification an allegedly massive drug problem, murder was conducted by both an amorphous band of “vigilantes” and the police whose anti-drug operations racked up a ninety-six percent kill rate.

Duterte did say during the campaign that the drug problem would be his focus—and to solve it, he was prepared to kill three million Filipinos, even comparing himself to Adolf Hitler.[5] “I hate drugs,” he would say again and again. Drugs and kill were the conflated ideas of his campaign—and since there couldn’t have been that many drug pushers or “drug lords” in the country, the millions Duterte wanted to be killed were presumably addicts, occasional users, and small-time vendors. His election victory came in June 2016 and the killings started immediately. Barely a month into his victory, four hundred and forty people had been murdered.[6]

The killings were theatrical, the presentation of bodies calculated for maximum shock and fear. The killed were wrapped in packing tape, their humanity obliterated. They were tossed down back streets, under bridges, in vacant lots, in garbage dumps. Near them would be a crude hand-lettered sign saying, “Addict. Do not emulate.” The killings occurred in the poorest sections of cities. About one in ten of the killed was female; but also LGBTQ people and, every so often, an activist or two. It was unprecedented in Philippine history. By the fourth month of Duterte’s term of office, the kill rate had climbed to a thousand a month. Any criticism of this murder spree was met with a raucous digital chorus accusing the critic of being either an addict, who should be included in the presidential list of drug lords, or a drug lord supporter. A few murders were done for both the image of invincibility and ruthlessness. Albuera City Mayor Rolando Espinosa, for instance, had surrendered and elected to stay in a police jail for safety. On November 5, 2016, shortly before dawn, a team of policemen entered the precinct, disabled the CCTV, and proceeded to gun down the mayor, claiming he had “fought back.” Nanlaban (fought back) would be a refrain in police operations where the kill rate approached one-hundred percent. A Reuters report noted, “Police have shot dead at least 3,900 people in anti-narcotic operations since Duterte took power in June 2016—always in self-defence, police say.” One police station, Precinct 6, accounted for thirty-nine percent of the police-operation kills; its anti-drug unit was manned by police from Davao City.[7]

The supposed anti-drug campaign is named Operation Tokhang, from a portmanteau of the Cebuano words for “knock” and “talk.” Critics have morphed that into “tok-tok” (for “knocking”) and “bang” (for “gunshot”). There is a degree of irony in the use of a Visayan language by a president whose one appeal had been his having emerged from Mindanao, the largest islands whose indigenous and native population have been so dispossessed by various settler populations, a great number from the Visayas. Indeed, during one trip to Davao City, I was mistaken for a Maguindanao, one of the Muslim tribes, because I spoke Tagalog, which the Maguindanao supposedly preferred over any Visayan language common to the settler population.

The initial murders so unnerved the poor communities that tens of thousands “surrendered,” banking on a government promise of “rehabilitation,” which did not materialize. Instead, thousands were crammed into prisons meant to hold only hundreds, in a truly barbaric situation. Meanwhile, a billion-peso mega-rehabilitation facility—a donation from a Chinese person who had made his wealth in the Philippines (nobody asked how)—stood empty. The killed continued to pile up—up—and up; the last estimate by media and human rights groups placed the killed at more than fourteen thousand. Murder as a solution to a social problem had been so anathema to Philippine culture, with its bedrock values of kapwa,“togetherness” and “empathy,” that a specific ritual and state of mind had to be created for killing—juramentado, a term that developed in the colonial period from the Spanish word juramentar, one who takes the oath.[8]

Implicit in these traditions was an acceptance of punishment, of being killed in the process of killing, so that balance was returned to the flow of human life. To be killed anonymously, to have no one held responsible, to not even have the murders investigated, and indeed to reward murder—these were so profoundly in violation of the national psyche that the nation cowered in the initial months of Duterte’s murder spree. His digital army also poured forth a steady stream of accusations against the killed, labelling each murdered person an addict and labelling each addict a violent criminal. In the end, murder became almost a cursory by-product of even petty crimes, as it was the one crime not investigated and, moreover, perpetrated by state-sanctioned operatives and by the police who, at one point, launched an operation that killed eighty-seven in one week in what the police called a “one-time, big-time” operation. Most of the murdered were young men in Metro-Manila and four nearby cities.[9]

In a country where weapons were the preserve of the rich, there seemed no stopping the killings. Tatay Digong (“Father Digong,” Duterte’s nickname) morphed into Tatay Katay (“Father Butcher”)—and because this is a culture of 150 languages, the first pushback would be the dirge rising from the country’s poets and writers.

Tokhang

Yin/Yang

Overt machismo and its brother-in-arms, misogyny, are among the recurrent themes of Duterte’s governance, with special animosity toward educated women in positions of power. A Freudian explanation can likely be found for this, considering that Duterte’s favorite swearword, used liberally in his public pronouncements, irrespective of audience, is putang-ina, a combination of the Spanish word for prostitute (a practice unknown to native culture, hence the word borrowing) and the word for “mother” in many native languages. It is a many-layered word, denigrating of mothers even as it acknowledges the significance of one’s links to the mother. The country itself is the Motherland, never the Fatherland. And strangely enough, Duterte sank to his knees, presumably in tears, beside his mother’s tomb as soon as his election victory was announced.

Duterte sprinkles his public speeches with this swear quite liberally, irrespective of his audience. He also has a propensity to be scatological, to refer to his supposed sexual prowess or lack of it. It is both a casual and yet a serious swearword, the reaction to which can range from laughter to knives drawn. But it is a kind of nervous tic for Duterte, so pronounced that people have wondered if he has Tourette’s syndrome. Coupled with his propensity to speak about Viagra, his sexual (non) prowess, his handful of mistresses, he has been suspected of being afflicted with coprolalia, perhaps the result of his being sexually abused, as he says, by a priest when he was a boy. Others see this as part of the full spectrum of misogyny that he employs to silence critics, similar to the virulent verbal abuse men’s rights activists unleash on women and feminists. What is clear, though, is that he reacts very harshly and very intensely when a female contradicts him, even as some of his most anti-woman supporters are women. It is a symptom of the rather schizophrenic attitude toward women as a result of the clash between the values of indigenous and native cultures and the imposed cultures of colonialism and imperialism.

Senator Leila de Lima is probably the first political prisoner of the regime, jailed on allegations of drug trafficking involvement, though the government case against her has been revised again and again. The allegations are based on the testimony of convicted drug and murder felons, one of whom had to be nearly killed in prison before he would agree to appear before a congressional hearing. Unfortunately for Duterte’s “swing to China” foreign policy, the felons’ testimony also identified China as the main source of meth and the chemicals for meth production.

Here’s a rather revealing chart from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency:

But what offended Duterte was de Lima’s opening of Senate hearings on the Davao Death Squad. As chair of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, a constitutionally mandated institution, de Lima had dared investigate in 2009 a series of killings of petty criminals and street children in the city of Davao. Human Rights Watch had issued a report concluding that the killings were supported by the city government and detailing the existence of a Davao Death Squad (DDS—which would morph into Digong’s Death Squad, that being the president’s nickname and, during the presidential campaign, into Diehard Duterte Supporters, a standard presidential tactic of making light of any serious matter concerning himself).

President Duterte’s response was terrifying, classic in the brutality of its tactics. At one point, he said she should just resign and hang herself. The barrage against de Lima and the Senate investigation was a virtual carnival of sadist misogyny. She was portrayed as a sexual outlaw because of a seven-year relationship with her driver. President Duterte said he had viewed a sex video of the senator, which had made him want to puke (the video never surfaced; what did appear was a porn video featuring a woman who very vaguely looked like the senator). Convicted drug-trafficking felons were summoned to testify at a congressional hearing to allege drug payoffs to de Lima. de Lima was eventually stripped of her Senate committee chair position and in due time, was arrested. She remains in jail. Meanwhile, the drug trade continues unabated and meth smuggling has spawned for the public a litany of names, most of them of Chinese lineage—plus the name of Duterte’s son who was accused by Senator Trillanes of being a member of a Chinese triad.[10]

What caused Duterte’s secretary of justice to finally admit that there was no sex video was the pushback from a women’s group, a pushback that also became an organizing campaign. Every Woman launched a simple digital campaign, which trended rapidly; it asked women to post the simple statement “I am the woman in the sex video.” I posted one, of course, finding this disempowerment of a woman by rendering her a “sexual outlaw” a familiar tactic. The hashtag #EveryWoman dominated social media for weeks—and eventually killed the story of the senator and the driver.

But this tactic of disempowering a woman by destroying her reputation would be used against Vice-President Leni Robredo—who became a target of rumors propagated by Duterte’s troll bots, to wit, that she had a boyfriend, that she was pregnant, and so on. Duterte would himself allude to her looks, the length of her skirt… Robredo, it would seem, deliberately maintains a public image that is in direct contrast to that of the president’s. She is always polite, smiling, careful with her words, attends religious services, and is often photographed with the poor as part of her program of providing a livelihood for the disenfranchised. Duterte’s supporters must know how threatening this contrast can be, and have resorted to calling her lugaw (porridge). Nevertheless, she has been subjected to some direct humiliation, being informed via a text message by a president’s underling that she was no longer welcome to cabinet meetings. She immediately resigned her cabinet position and concentrated on consolidating her base. Recently, she accepted the position of titular head of the Liberal Party, the one remaining opposition party in the country. As some pointed out, the vice-president’s duty per the Constitution is simply “to wait.” And wait she does, speaking out sharply on a few issues, now contradicting the president and, rarely, supporting him.

Two other women in powerful positions are currently under siege by the Duterte regime: Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales, who has opened an investigation into how 6.4 billion pesos worth of meth were smuggled at the Bureau of Customs, and Supreme Court Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, who has consistently voted against the regime in cases brought before the court. Both had been appointed by the Aquino administration. Despite her nephew being married to the president’s daughter, Ombudsman Morales opened an investigation into the Duterte family fortunes, upon the filing of information of the family’s unexplained wealth by Senator Trillanes. Duterte immediately threatened to create an agency to investigate corruption in the Office of the Ombudsman. Morales’s reply was succinct, “Sorry, Mr. President, but this office shall not be intimidated. The President’s announcement that he intends to create a commission to investigate the Ombudsman appears to have to do with this office’s on-going investigation into issues that involve him. This Office, nevertheless, shall proceed with the probe, as mandated by the Constitution.”[11]

Supreme Court Justice Sereno, on the other hand, is the object of impeachment proceedings in the Duterte-controlled House of Representatives, based on a complaint filed by a lawyer who is a member of a supposedly anti-crime organization, which seems to focus mostly on critics of the president. In response to the presidential spokesman’s call for her to resign, Justice Sereno’s lawyer said that resigning wasn’t even to be considered an option. “As previously declared, resignation has never been an option. The CJ [Chief Justice] needs to face the impeachment proceeding precisely to preserve the dignity and independence of both the Supreme Court and the Office of the Chief Justice. She has done nothing to ‘damage’ the institution, and she has been doing everything to strengthen it,” said lawyer Carlo Cruz, one of Sereno’s spokespersons.[12]

Duterte’s intimidation tactics had worked before on several of his male critics—but using such tactics on women who have likely faced a lifetime of intimidation is clearly not working. On the contrary, his pronounced dislike for intelligent women and pronounced liking for those who feed his ego—even with nonsense—contribute to a steadily hardening resistance to not only his policies but to his person as well. He could not have forgotten that it was a woman, now his ally, who survived a left-wing call for people’s power to oust an incumbent president.

An Abstract Leftism

President Duterte had a leisurely eight months to consolidate control over the government and the nation, primarily through weak opposition the mainstream left offered. Beguiled by Duterte’s claims that he was a “socialist,” a “leftist” and could possibly consider a “coalition government” with the Communist Party of the Philippines (Maoist), this section of the political left in the Philippines carefully calibrated its responses. At the start of Tokhang, the New People’s Army declared its support for Duterte’s “anti-drug campaign” and even carried out a few operations against supposed drug suppliers. Eventually, as some activists were killed, the NPA withdrew its support. The CPP, meanwhile, continued its flirtation with Duterte, principally through the National Democratic Front’s peace-negotiations team. Duterte rewarded the NDF with cabinet appointments—lucrative but not too powerful positions, from which they were ousted, nine months later, by the Congressional Committee on Appointments. Duterte washed his hands; it was not his decision, he claimed.

Did the CPP believe in its love fest with Duterte? The latter’s tirades against the West—he used his favorite swear against then US President Barack Obama, threatened to cut diplomatic relations with Australia because it denounced his crude rape joke about a murdered Australian missionary woman, swore to end the Philippines’ military agreement with the United States, and denounced a 1906 US massacre of Muslim men and women—were indeed astonishing for a country used to paying obeisance to the West. Even on the eve of his overthrow, the late dictator Marcos appealed to the US for help, not to any ideological opponent of capitalism.

On the other hand, the CPP has had a long relationship with Duterte in his city of Davao. A slew of photographs show him attending various celebrations of the NPA. The party knew him, not simply of him, and likely knew what he was—of the kind the party calls “bureaucrat capitalists,” i.e., people who use government positions for capital accumulation. Marcos was one of them and his family continues the practice. The richest Marcos crony in Davao, who contributed seventy-five million pesos to Duterte’s campaign in Davao belongs to the category. The former alliance between bureaucrat capitalists and the traditional landed gentry of the ruling class broke during the Marcos dictatorship. A struggle for economic dominance has been played out between the two reactionary forces, as the bucaps (bureaucratic capitalists) parlayed the capital gained through government corruption into control of mining, communications, cash crop plantations, power utilities, and technology. In the 2010 presidential elections, the CPP and its mass organizations chose to partner with one such bucap, endorsing Miguel Villar and allowing its legal personages to join the latter’s senatorial slate.[13] That made for some awkward moments, as the Villar party included Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos in its senatorial slate. Villar lost to Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.

When CPP founding chair José Maria Sison said in a press interview that he would perhaps be able to end his thirty-year exile if the new president were matino (reasonable) like Grace Poe or Rodrigo Duterte, it opened the door for the rank and file to support either one, despite the supposed alliance of their political parties with Grace Poe. How much that statement turned the elections into a poll on Sison no one knows. When Duterte won, the country was rife with rumors that Sison would be at his inauguration. Bayan, the largest left formation, conferred the Gawad Supremo, named after the title of the head of the Katipunan which launched the revolution against Spain in 1896, on Duterte and Sison. Peace negotiations were reopened shortly thereafter.

Still, there had been bad omens. During the campaign, Duterte threatened “to kill” the KMU, the labor federation of the “national-democratic” left. He also attacked the National Democratic (ND) left’s women’s organization, despite its rather tepid response to his rape jokes. And though some activist community organizers and peasants were killed in the first months of Tokhang, the response from the ND left remained muted. Indeed, its human rights organizations kept a tally only of “political killings,” keeping those killed in the anti-drug campaign separate. It would take some ferocious words from Duterte and the cancellation of peace talks to end hopes for a “coalition government.” As if to drive the point home, fifteen NPA members were killed in the province of Batangas on December 4, 2017.[14]

Duterte was backed by some of the most reactionary elements of Philippine society, from the Marcos family to former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada whom the left had helped oust, from Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who tried to imprison the ND left’s people in Congress, to former President Fidel Ramos, a Marcos era holdover and very definitely allied with the US military. If this is so, why did the CPP amiably accept the Duterte candidacy? One hypothesis is that the ND left believed in Duterte’s promises, because of their long relationship in Davao City. Another, which seems more cogent, posits that Duterte was the kind of brutal, power-hungry, and self-indulgent president needed to jumpstart the revolution from its long stasis. That is a kind of “Simon tactic”—it must get worse before it can get better—named after a character in the national hero José Rizal’s novel El Filibusterismo. A third hypothesis says that the CPP has been reluctant to let go of the analyses that served as a framework for its struggle since the 1960s and that it has not taken adequate consideration of the emergent imperialisms in a multi-polar world. Hence, it continues with its attack on the Duterte-US regime, ignoring Duterte’s growing dependence on loans from China, as his self-indulgence and his Tokhang deplete the Philippine government treasury. What is clear, however, is that the Philippines is once again, as in 1896, at the nodal point of powers contending for global dominance. How the Filipino people will conduct themselves this time could mean either dissolution or survival for a nation cobbled out of 7,400 islands and 150 ethno-linguistic groups.

By December 19, 2017, calling Duterte a “drug-crazed monster,” the “country’s number one terrorist,” and a “madman,” the spokesperson of the NPA’s Merardo Arce Command said, “The revolutionary forces join the broad united front of all peace-loving citizens in the country to oppose and oust Duterte and install a government respectful of justice, genuine democracy, and freedom.”[15] The lines were now drawn.

The Pushback Against Nada (Nothingness)

As Duterte’s term staggered toward the end of its first year, opposition was beginning to congeal into a hard reality. The blatant incompetence of many of his appointees and the unabashed self-indulgence of his coterie—some two to three hundred are said to accompany him on state visits—merely underscored the lack of a core vision to his administration. Whether Senator Trillanes fully realized (and he likely does, which explains the ferocity with which he confronts Duterte) the meaning of his statement that nothing(ness) lies at the core of the Duterte governance, it is clear such nihilism can only disrupt and break, not create. The degree of stability forged since the overthrow of the dictatorship, no matter how lurching it has been, enabled the archipelago to rebuild its economy, pay back the loans looted by the Marcos clan and cronies, and reinstitute means of governance destroyed during his one-man rule. It may not have gone far enough in terms of democratization—economically and politically—but the current recurrent shock and awe tactic of Duterte’s governance is a far cry from it.

Palpable evidence of how the policy of nada has been so terrible is the destruction of Marawi City, the only visibly Muslim city of the Philippines. While the rebellious Maute Clan allied itself eventually with ISIS, at least nominally, Duterte’s volatile handling of the Moro issue—now vowing to pass the Bangsamoro Basic Law which would give them self-governance, then conveniently forgetting it; now calling the rebellious Moros his friends, and then abruptly threatening to eat their livers—undoubtedly turned the conflict acute. No one now can foretell what will happen in the area.

Duterte’s supporters try to fill in the nada at the heart of his bluster, offering federalism, Constitutional change, and mass indoctrination through the barangay (village) councils, which are new organizations formed under the duress of Tokhang and in expectation of reward. Crowds of people are transported or made to transport themselves hither and yon—to call for national martial law, or federalism, or a revolutionary government, or even for the fraudulent promise of a distribution of the Marcos wealth. What is clear is a search for a vision that is absent, as Duterte takes the axe to the institutions of governance which, even to the paltriest degree, enabled some checks and balances. He warps the media, calling those who wouldn’t toe the line “fake news” even as his troll bloggers parlay a plethora of fantasy; he has transformed Congress into a rubber stamp, dominated by some exe crable personalities; he swings at the Office of the Ombudsman and the Supreme Court, miring them in chaos and controversy; he has purged the national police and filled the gaps with his “Davao boys,” and now attempts to bribe the Armed Forces of the Philippines with a one-hundred-percent increase in base pay.

None of these will enable the nation as a nation to survive. All his political moves have been simply to eradicate opposition and to strengthen provincial warlords—to what end, no one knows for certain. Mainly to keep himself in power, even as the currency plummets to its lowest value in eleven years and the balance of trade suddenly shows a deficit. There is reward and punishment aplenty in the Duterte government—largely based on flattery or what he calls “loyalty.” A newly appointed chair of the Dangerous Drugs Board made the mistake of saying that a billion-peso drug rehabilitation facility was useless. The president made the chair resign immediately. A congressman whose own party became so disgusted by his antics in defense of the president that they disowned and expelled him is the new presidential spokesman. The least taken in are the women who are familiar with how batterers maintain control and eradicate the self of the battered.

As the anti-drug campaign showed its essence as nothing more than a killing spree, the initial shock turned into outrage. The spark was provided by a nineteen-year-old, the son of an overseas worker who was brutally killed by fourteen motorcycle-riding “vigilantes”—the foot soldiers of Tokhang. He had no criminal record and was simply closing the small family store when he was abducted, taken to an isolated area, and beaten. He was then told to run and the poor young man couldn’t, because of his clubfeet. The assassins mauled him and broke his arm before shooting him dead. His mother, arriving from Kuwait, unleashed her grief with the declaration that she had to kiss her employer’s feet three times to be allowed to fly home and attend to her son’s burial.

With nearly ten million working overseas, this kill had a resonance that went far and deep. The country hasn’t managed to contend with its guilt over this semi-slave trade and the sale of women, and an untoward incident toward a female overseas worker taps into an abiding anger. The Catholic Church, which had been diffident in its dealings with President Duterte, decided to ring its bells for ten minutes for forty days in mourning of those killed in the “drug war.” September 21, known as the day the late Ferdinand E. Marcos imposed martial law on the country way back in 1972, was a day of rallies and marching and assemblies. By November 1, the Day of the Dead, thousands of candles were being lit for the Murdered of the Duterte Regime, which had earned for itself the ND left’s traditional denunciation of being linked to US imperialism.

Meanwhile, the BPO call center global industry, fifty percent of which the Philippines hosts, employing nearly a million workers, was at a standstill. Tourism was down. South Korean business was quietly closing its tent, following a case of extortion and murder of one of its managers in an incident designed to evoke the utmost repulsion: the policemen not only killed him but had the body cremated and the ashes flushed down the toilet. Nihilism creates its own unbearable cruelty. And the responding anger is equally unbearable.

Pact