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As I write this, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is in The Hague, where he is facing charges of crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court. I watched video footage of his arrest, on March 11, and saw photos of the Gulfstream 550 jet lifting off from Manila airport, bound for the Netherlands.
And yet I still could not believe it was happening.
For years, Filipinos had been subjected to Duterte’s unrelenting barrage of shock and awe. His malevolent persona had so conquered our information space—and our imagination—that we believed he was invincible. Holding him to account seemed unimaginable.
Duterte was president for six years, starting in 2016. Even before Steve Bannon boasted of Donald Trump’s strategy to “flood the zone with shit,” Duterte had already unleashed a deluge. He seemed to be everywhere all at once, giving fiery speeches on TV and radio, streamed online and echoed across social media. On Facebook, his messages surged with such force and velocity that they drowned out all other voices.
His language was profane, his call for blood and vengeance compelling. Many cheered when he vowed the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat on the corpses of drug dealers. They applauded when he told policemen that if they killed more, “we could cure what ails this country.”
And so the bodies began to pile up.
Daily, during the first months of his presidency, corpses appeared on the streets of Manila. Some had their faces swaddled in masking tape, with cardboard signs bearing crude warnings—sometimes even smiley faces or Batman drawings—placed beside them. Others had rags stuffed in their mouths or wires wound around their necks, as if strangled. The dead bodies amplified Duterte’s message of redemptive violence in ways that social media could not. By the end of his term, the official death toll was around six thousand. Human rights groups say the real number could be four or even five times higher.
Duterte hated the press and lashed out at journalists who documented the carnage. He called them “bullshit,” “garbage,” and “sons of bitches.” He said they had no shame, that they were corrupt hypocrites who “pretend to be the moral torch of the country.”
He banned the feisty news site Rappler from covering the presidential palace. At his behest, police arrested Rappler’s CEO, Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa, twice. Prosecutors filed twenty-three lawsuits against her and her staff. Duterte also threatened the Philippine Daily Inquirer, one of the country’s biggest newspapers, accusing its owners of evading taxes. His coup de grâce came when he engineered the shutdown of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest and most powerful TV network, by ensuring his congressional allies denied it a franchise renewal. The equivalent in the US would be if Trump shuttered NBC.
Many newsrooms bent the knee. Fearful of Duterte’s wrath—and of the troll armies that flooded their phones with rape threats and death warnings—editors shushed criticism, reporters held back on stories, and self-censorship became the norm.
Duterte came to power when the media was already losing its profits and prestige. After the fall of Ferdinand Marcos, in 1986, there was a hunger for truth. Journalists were hailed as democracy’s heroes. But before long, powerful families bought up newspapers and broadcast networks, using their media clout to advance their own interests. Sensationalism ruled in a crowded and competitive industry.
By the 2010s, audiences and advertisers had migrated online, where more than one hundred million Filipinos—85 percent of the population—spent hours scrolling Facebook. Duterte attacked the press where it was weakest. His tirades against sensationalist journalists and elite media owners resonated, accelerating the media’s decline and demoralizing its ranks.
Never mind that the smaller, feistier news organizations persisted. Never mind that many others were quietly collecting evidence of state-sanctioned killings, protecting witnesses, mobilizing protests, filing cases, feeding and caring for communities ravaged by the war on drugs. None of that seemed to matter. Until it did.
If you had told me before March 11 that Duterte would be arrested by the police—the same force he had ordered to kill, the same men he had promised to protect—I would have said you were delusional. Nearly three years after stepping down, he remained powerful. His daughter Sara Duterte is vice president. He still held the loyalty of many Filipinos, especially on Mindanao, in the south of the country. As recently as November, testifying before Congress, Duterte—who turns eighty on March 28—grabbed a microphone and threatened to punch a former senator questioning him about suspicious bank transactions. He did not act like a man whose time was up.
What ultimately sealed Duterte’s fate was his family’s falling-out with the current president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the former dictator. Sara Duterte ran with Marcos in 2022; her family believes its support made him president. The Dutertes wanted more power than Marcos was willing to concede, knowing Sara would use it to fuel her own run in 2028. But the Marcoses had their own plans for succession.
By late last year, the already frayed alliance had turned toxic. Sara Duterte claimed she had contracted an assassin to kill Marcos, his wife, and his cousin, the House Speaker, if anything happened to her. Last month, Marcos allies in Congress voted to impeach her. The political rift made it far easier for the administration to surrender Rodrigo Duterte to the ICC.
But the Marcoses are no paragons of accountability. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were accused of amassing up to $10 billion in ill-gotten wealth, and for nearly forty years, their family has fought efforts to make them forfeit their stolen assets. They still owe some $4 billion in unpaid taxes on the estate of Ferdinand Sr., who died in exile in Hawai‘i in 1989.
Impunity is the norm for the powerful in the Philippines. Duterte’s arrest is a fluke. Yet it would not have been possible without years of difficult, dangerous, painstaking work. Journalists, photographers, lawyers, Catholic clergy, and human rights activists persisted even when hope for accountability seemed nonexistent. There would have been no case if the mothers, sisters, and daughters of the drug war dead had not dared to tell their stories. If former death squad assassins had not found protection and safe passage out of the country, they would not have been able to testify in The Hague.
Anyone who reads the ICC prosecutor’s request for an investigation will see how much of it was built on the collective efforts of so many. It takes a nation to hold a president to account.
We had forgotten the lesson we once learned from dictatorship: strongmen project invincibility to convince people resistance is futile. They want to crush any hope of justice. By sowing fear, they seek to stifle our democratic imagination. They perform omnipotence so convincingly that only when they fall do we see how brittle their power truly was.
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