MANILA – Former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte earned international infamy for the deadly narcotics crackdown that led to his arrest on March 11 on charges of crimes against humanity, despite enjoying huge popularity at home.
A tough-talking populist and self-professed killer, Mr Duterte’s anti-crime campaign resulted in the deaths of thousands of alleged dealers and addicts.
Yet, while drawing condemnation abroad, tens of millions of Filipinos backed his swift brand of justice, even as he joked about rape in his rambling speeches, locked up his critics and failed to root out entrenched corruption.
That trust was dented by the coronavirus pandemic, which plunged the Philippines into its worst economic crisis in decades, leaving thousands dead and millions jobless with a slow-paced vaccine rollout.
Mr Duterte’s woes deepened in 2021, when the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) sought an investigation into crimes against humanity during his drugs crackdown.
Mr Duterte, now 79, has repeatedly said there was no official campaign to illegally kill addicts and dealers, but his speeches included incitements to violence, and he told police to kill drug suspects if their lives were in danger.
‘Kill them’
“If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful,” Mr Duterte said, hours after being sworn in as president in June 2016.
Months later, he would liken the deadly crackdown to Hitler’s efforts to exterminate Jews, although vastly underestimating the number of people killed in the Holocaust.
“Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there are three million drug addicts (in the Philippines). I’d be happy to slaughter them,” he said.
His unfiltered comments are part of his self-styled image as a maverick, which found traction in a nation where corruption, bureaucracy and dysfunction impact people’s lives at every level.
While unable to run for president again after serving a six-year term that ended in 2022, Mr Duterte remains a major figure in politics.
He has been seeking a return to his old job as mayor of his southern stronghold of Davao mid-term elections in May.
A one-time ally of the Marcos family, Mr Duterte even allowed the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos, whose brutal regime silenced the legislature and killed opponents, to be buried in the capital’s Heroes’ Cemetery.
But the alliance of dynasties has long since collapsed, and Mr Duterte is engaged in a feud with Marcos’ son, the current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
His daughter, Vice-President Sara Duterte, faces an impeachment trial in the Senate.
‘I simply love Xi’
The former lawyer and prosecutor was born in 1945 into a political family.
His father served for three years as a Cabinet secretary before Marcos plunged the Philippines into dictatorship in 1972.
During his long tenure as mayor of Davao, Mr Duterte was accused of links to vigilante death squads that rights groups say killed more than 1,000 people there – accusations he has both accepted and denied.
EDITORS NOTE: Graphic content / (FILES) In this picture taken on July 8, 2016, police officers investigate the dead body of an alleged drug dealer, his face covered with packing tape and a placard reading "I'm a pusher", on a street in Manila. Former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte was arrested on March 11, 2025 after landing at Manila's international airport by police acting on an International Criminal Court warrant over his deadly war on drugs, the presidential palace said. (Photo by NOEL CELIS / AFP)
Mr Duterte has repeatedly said there was no official campaign to illegally kill addicts and dealers.PHOTO: AFP
His tenure as president was also marked by a swing away from the nation’s former colonial master, the United States, in favour of China.
“I simply love (Chinese president) Xi Jinping… He understands my problem and is willing to help, so I would say thank you China,” he said in April 2018.
As part of that rapprochement, he set aside rivalry with Beijing over the resource-rich South China Sea, opting to court Chinese business instead.
He claimed this friendship helped secure millions of doses of a Chinese-made Covid-19 vaccine, but supplies still fell far short.
Billions of dollars of promised trade and investment from its superpower neighbour also failed to materialise.
Mr Marcos, the current president, has made both Mr Duterte’s perceived coziness with Beijing and his bloody drug war a centrepiece of his campaigning ahead of the May midterms.
Mr Duterte was arrested at Manila’s international airport after returning from a brief trip to Hong Kong.
The former president previously said he was ready to go to jail for his anti-narcotics crackdown, but vowed never to allow himself to come under ICC jurisdiction. AFP
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