Each March 16, residents of Davao, in the Philippines, line major streets to witness parades, performances and traditional dance as part of Araw ng Dabaw, or Davao Day, which commemorates the city’s foundation.
In 1937, when Davao became a city, the Philippines was a commonwealth of the United States and was about to endure occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army. This year’s Araw ng Dabaw featured cosplayers dressed as Japanese video game and anime characters, signifying the postwar Pacific’s changing allegiances. But protesters a few streets away warned Davaoans that they faced a new colonial menace — this time in The Hague.
Each day since the International Criminal Court’s arrest and extradition of former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, his supporters in Davao, where Duterte was mayor for seven terms, have protested in convoys of vehicles or at downtown basketball courts. Filipinos have even gathered in the Netherlands to demand the release of Duterte, whom Davaoans dubbed “The Punisher” for his bloody crackdown on crime.
Few are more vocal in their support of Duterte than Joel Valles, owner of Sana’s Carinderia, a barbecue joint a couple of blocks from Davao’s Pacific coast. A billboard above the venue’s entrance claims it is Duterte’s favorite such eatery. Its interior is plastered, floor to ceiling, with photos of Duterte and his family, including Sara, his daughter and the current vice president of the Philippines, and his sons Sebastian and Paolo, who currently serve as Davao’s mayor and city representative, respectively.
Davao was a dangerous place before Duterte came on the scene, said Valles, pointing at a busy road outside: Carjackings and muggings were commonplace. But that ended when Duterte took office. “You have to make [the criminals] fear,” he said.
“A lot of hard-headed people, especially drug pushers [and] rapists [were] put … 6 feet below the ground,” Valles added. “That’s why a lot of people were very careful.”
Valles celebrated Davao Day at the restaurant and claims diners have come from as far away as Luzon, the island on which Manila is located, to pay their respects to Duterte. It’s “business as usual,” he said. “It’s just so sad that we are celebrating without our father, without our president. … We are not a full family.”
Some groups estimate that during Duterte’s term as president, between 2016 and 2022, police and vigilantes killed 30,000 citizens as part of a brutal “war on drugs” (the Philippine government has acknowledged 6,248 deaths). Victims of Duterte’s campaign have erected big screens in neighborhoods across the Manila metropolitan region, where the majority of deaths occurred, to watch news of the 79-year-old’s incarceration.
“The nation itself needs to heal herself from the lies, from the killing of the truth, from the killing of the democratic institutions, from the wounding of history,” said Father Flavie Villanueva, a Manila-based priest and anti-drug war campaigner.
Long before Duterte rose to the country’s highest office, he had already unleashed a drug war in Davao. From 1998 to 2016, he was allegedly behind the Davao Death Squad (DDS), a group of cops and gangsters responsible for up to 1,400 killings. The ICC, citing testimony from former DDS members, claims that Duterte is criminally responsible for the deaths of at least 43 people during his tenure as mayor of Davao between 2011 and 2016.
Among the victims were the four sons of Clarita Alia, a 71-year-old woman. She claims that vigilantes stabbed her four teenagers to death with knives and screwdrivers after Alia’s altercation with a local police officer. Alia now lives in a shanty in an inner-city market overrun by rats and roaches. Her only source of income comes from her son-in-law’s pineapple stand. Through tears, she described each murder to New Lines. “Many Filipino people are already aware of [the Dutertes’] true colors,” she said. “I pray that their family never returns to power.”
For years, Duterte’s role atop the DDS has trickled out via a series of bombshell affidavits. Former cop and DDS member Arturo Lascanas told the ICC that he was handed between 10,000 and 20,000 pesos ($85-170) for low-level murders. High-profile hits, however, could earn his team over 100 times more. Duterte is even believed to have greased his killing machine with assassins belonging to the New People’s Army, a Maoist guerrilla force founded 56 years ago.
“At first, the group’s mission was to ‘neutralize’ (in police parlance, it means kill) suspected illegal-drug pushers, users, drug lords and other organized crime syndicates in Davao City,” said Lascanas in his affidavit. “The kill, kill, kill order of Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte resounded unabated and obeyed blindly to the letter. … On several occasions during our operations, Mayor Duterte would always remind us: kill everyone. Leave no one alive so there would be no evidence. This has become our DDS motto.”
The grim testimony of a fugitive ex-DDS member named Edgar Matobato has similarly rocked the Philippines. Matobato told The New York Times that targets would be identified by a team spotter carrying a towel over his shoulder with the words “good morning” on it. He then used packing tape to mask victims’ screams when he murdered them — most via pistol, but some stabbed and one fed to a crocodile. He would cut bodies into small pieces before pouring engine oil on them to cover the smell. “I was good at chop-chop,” Matobato said.
In the same article, he described one gruesome episode from 2013, when he and DDS colleagues kidnapped, raped and killed three young women they were told were drug dealers. Reflecting on the episode, he seemed remorseful. “They were so young,” he said. “They weren’t criminals. I don’t even know their names.”
Juan, who asked that his name be replaced with a pseudonym, is a former police officer who served in Davao when the DDS was active there. There was an unspoken rule, he said, when encountering “akyat bahay,” or “fence-climbing,” thieves. “If you catch him, kill him,” Juan told New Lines. “We have codes … you know what to do.” Central to this campaign was Oplan Tokhang — an operation whose name roughly translates as “knock-and-plead” — during which officers called at the houses of drug suspects. Visits often ended in suspects’ deaths, the vast majority of which were chalked up to “nanlaban,” roughly meaning “self-defense.”
“Knock-and-plead” became national policy in 2016, when Duterte promised to scale up Davao’s drug war. “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews,” he said in October that year, vastly understating the scale of the Holocaust. “There’s 3 million drug addicts. … I’d be happy to slaughter them.” Duterte appointed the “knock-and-plead” policy’s architect, Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, as head of the Philippines’ police soon after his election victory.
Dela Rosa, who became a senator in 2019, is cited in the ICC’s case against Duterte. Following the former president’s arrest, he moved to an undisclosed location in the country. “If all legal remedies are exhausted and still justice is to no avail, then I don’t want my family to suffer from cops. … I am ready to join the old man hoping that they would allow me to take care of him,” dela Rosa posted to Facebook on March 12.
Davaoans and the 26 million people living on Mindanao, the Philippines’ second-largest island, have long prided themselves on being different from their compatriots — especially those almost a thousand miles away in Manila. Mindanao has long been shaped by conflict. Decades of Islamist insurgency have left scars, most notably in 2017, when militants affiliated with the Islamic State group laid siege to the historic city of Marawi. The New People’s Army has bivouacked in Mindanao’s dense jungles since 1969 and still carries out sporadic attacks. And as a major maritime gateway to Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Davao is a target of organized criminal groups who use it as a transshipment point for narcotics — particularly “shabu,” or methamphetamine.
For these reasons, many Mindanaoans have long felt surrounded by violent crime and view the government in Manila as either unable, or unwilling, to help. “We have a different kind of justice here,” Juan said. As mayor, Duterte used this reputation to craft his tough-guy image. He began by signing into law a raft of conspicuous policies, such as heavy fines for jaywalkers, a ban on firecrackers and curfews on booze sales and karaoke, the Philippines’ favorite pastime.
The DDS came soon afterward. The majority of Davaoans bought Duterte’s claims that he was cleaning up the city — albeit at a huge human cost. For a long time, Juan said, he would say goodbye to his kids before a shift feeling like one foot was in the house and “the other foot was in the grave.”
Duterte’s drug war was a necessary defense against Davao’s lawlessness, he added. Whether it actually worked is far less clear-cut.
Duterte’s rise coincided with the dissolving of the Philippine Constabulary, a gendarmerie notorious for corruption and its enforcement of former President Ferdinand Marcos’ tyrannical martial law from 1972 to 1981. The Philippine National Police that replaced it was so penurious that it often relied on city mayors for vehicles, personnel or even gasoline. Duterte turned city hall into a patronage system, awarding top jobs to loyal business owners and television personalities. Even today, Davao remains one of the Philippines’ most violent cities, ranking number two nationwide for rape. And despite Duterte’s national war on drugs, the use of shabu is still rampant.
“As mayor, Duterte was Janus-faced, capable of breathtaking doublethink,” writes British journalist Jonathan Miller in “Duterte Harry,” a biography of the former Philippines’ leader. “He could initiate a progressive treatment-based policy towards drug addiction, and at the same time sanction death squads to kill addicts in cold blood. He could rail against corruption and utter deadly threats to businessmen or politicians on the make, while turning Davao City Hall into a nepotistic cooperative, using public funds to buy votes and bankroll assassinations.”
Since his presidency, rumors have swirled that Duterte and his family are actively involved in the shabu trade themselves. Late last year, former customs official Jimmy Guban testified at a committee hearing, held by the Philippines House of Representatives, that Paolo Duterte and associate Michael Yang were responsible for a nearly $200 million shipment of methamphetamine, which arrived at the port of Cavite, near Manila, in 2018, hidden inside magnetic lifters.
Yang has been implicated in a wide range of criminal activities, including illegal offshore betting centers and overpriced COVID-19 personal protective equipment contracts. In 2017, a retired antinarcotics officer testified that Yang is at the heart of a Chinese triad, or syndicate, running shabu labs across Mindanao. Paolo Duterte is rumored to have a triad dragon tattoo on his back. He has refused to take off his shirt in public.
“Duterte is involved in the illegal drug trade, he is protecting his own cartel and used the war on drugs as a cover for his own involvement,” said Antonio Trillanes, a former Naval officer, senator and leader of the House Quad Committee hearings into the elder Duterte’s criminal links. According to Trillanos, the former president unleashed the drug war to consolidate “his power, essentially — and to eliminate the competition, and at the same time, as a measure of social control, so that different watchdogs of society, like the media, society and the others, would be kept at bay, and he can do whatever he wants.”
“He was the disciplinarian father figure who would root dissent or lack of discipline, and he would show that in public,” Maria Victoria “Mags” Maglana, a longtime political rival of Duterte in Davao, told New Lines. “He also readily built up the infrastructure for him, the armed infrastructure for him to be able to carry out his own agenda.”
“He’s really a political animal,” added Maglana. “He knows how to work with the groups, and what to give them to get their loyalty.”
The Philippines is holding a general election in two months, and almost every bit of visual real estate in Davao is plastered with placards depicting Rodrigo Duterte, his brood and Bong Go, a longstanding Duterte ally and senatorial candidate. Posters of Duterte in the style of Barack Obama’s “Hope” image remain almost a decade after the former’s presidential run — ironic given Duterte called Obama “putang ina,” or “son of a whore” during his six-year presidency.
Duterte is running once again for Davao’s mayorship, and it is unclear whether even an ICC conviction could stop him assuming the role. He would not be the only Philippine politician to govern from behind bars: Apollo Quiboloy, a televangelist and spiritual adviser to current leader Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, is aiming to become a senator, despite being detained on sex and human trafficking charges.
Duterte’s legacy is also visible in the sweeping highways and the piles of a bridge that will connect Davao with a nearby island popular with tourists. That infrastructure project — like others across Mindanao — was funded by China. During his tenure as president, Duterte steered Philippine diplomacy toward Beijing, and many believe the Chinese Communist Party was protecting him from the ICC. His arrest after having returned from a trip to Hong Kong hints otherwise.
The arrest is also part of a crescendoing battle between the Duterte family and the family of Marcos, the current president, whose kleptocratic father is believed to have robbed the Philippines of over $10 billion — including his wife Imelda’s infamous collection of 3,000 pairs of luxury shoes. The younger Marcos had hoped to keep the Dutertes and their supporters on his side by appointing Sara as his vice president. The relationship unraveled in June 2024, however, when Duterte resigned from her role as Marcos’ education secretary. A probe into Duterte’s spending followed in November, leading to her extraordinary announcement that she would have somebody assassinate Marcos if she herself were killed.
Marcos has since kicked off an impeachment process that would strip Sara, the most powerful member of the Duterte dynasty, of both her current position and any future political ambitions. If it succeeds, it will be a hammer blow for the Dutertes. Many setbacks have already unfolded. Sara attempted, in vain, to enter the air base where her father was being held after his arrest. She has since called his incarceration a sign of “oppression,” but beyond rhetoric, she and other family members have avoided any overtly political maneuvers. Still, as the ongoing protests in Davao and beyond show, the Dutertes continue to hold significant influence across the nation of 115 million people.
This moment recalls another period of the Philippines’ history: In 1986, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was ousted after a series of massive protests that culminated along Manila’s sprawling EDSA highway. Should Duterte remain in detention, said Valles, “it’s possible we will have the EDSA revolution” in Davao. “The region of Davao is Duterte.”
Others are less convinced. Jeoffrey Maitem, a Davao-based reporter, doesn’t believe there will be violence in Duterte’s name precisely because of the family’s popularity. “If a presidential election were held today,” he says, “definitely would Duterte win.”
Duterte, meanwhile, has vowed to fight on. “What was my sin,” he asked from Hong Kong. “I did everything in my time so Filipinos can have a little peace and tranquility.”
His fate now hangs in the courts — though it could be years before a verdict from The Hague is reached. Duterte’s lead lawyer, Nicholas Kaufman, has vowed to contest the jurisdiction of the ICC over his client’s case, arguing that the Philippines withdrew from the court in 2019. For now, it seems the Marcos-Duterte feud is far from over, with approval ratings for both the sitting president and vice president plunging since taking office.
Villanuevas, who has spent years exhuming the bodies of those slain during Duterte’s national drug war and working with forensic scientists to relitigate their deaths, believes that the true reckoning for The Punisher won’t happen in The Hague. “The impeachment, the ICC trials,” he said, “should just be the first step towards genuine renewal and democratic recovery.
“If there is a culture of violence and death,” he added, “then we must also create a culture of care and healing.”
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.