Tough guy

To youth gangs: “I’ll break your bones.” To drug pushers: “I’ll execute you.” To alleged rice hoarders: “I will kill you.” To corrupt cops: “Not in Davao or I’ll kill you.”

Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte utters one more variation of his favorite warning to criminals and lowlifes who make the mistake of operating in his city, and his admirers and supporters swoon. Such pluck! they say. So unlike the effete politicians out there who hem and haw and hedge and waffle, desperate to be seen as similarly resolute against criminality but unwilling to go down and dirty with them.

The man is different; he suffers no knaves, and loves the idea of bludgeoning them to submission—or to kingdom come, if need be. His vocabulary is a thesaurus on one word—“kill.” He doesn’t mind being seen as violent; if it’s the language of the blackguards and heels he’s up against, then he’ll dish it to them, in full glare of the media and an adoring throng weary of the everyday lawlessness around them. Forget action movies, here’s the real Dirty Harry, and he doesn’t slink back into ambiguous darkness after the hit. No, he is Rodrigo Duterte, proud scourge of criminals—and, if the enthusiasts of his brand of governance will have their way, the next president of the Philippines.

It’s what we need, we’re told. This is a country that has gone to the dogs, with a justice system so weak and so rotten that it has robbed the people of the rights fundamental to their happiness and security in a decent, viable society—to walk the streets at night without fear, to drive to work without being flagged down by mulcting cops, to go to sleep without worrying about thieves entering one’s home.

The Philippines imagines itself a modern country, a vibrant emerging economy of gleaming malls and humming cities, but on the ground, among the harried and harassed millions who traverse its streets every day, it’s but the Wild, Wild West, without the glamour of horses and the grandeur of the desert. The republic seems in meltdown, with criminals getting away with their crimes and politicians getting away with their politics—the two often in cahoots with and indistinguishable from each other—while the desperate populace is caught in between, unable to look to its government for redress and largely left to fend for itself.

Radical times call for radical solutions, we’re told, and here is Duterte, whose track record in Davao should speak for itself. A former backwater city strewn with “salvaged” corpses and overrun by rascals and delinquents, Davao is now rated one of the world’s safest cities, free of the drug menace, clean and orderly, peopled by law-abiding, disciplined folk. Thanks to the iron-fisted mayor, the city’s miscreants have all but disappeared—summarily executed, according to observers such as Human Rights Watch, which has called for an inquiry into Duterte’s possible hand in the formation of “death squads” that are said to have visited cold justice on those who had dared bring their nefarious activities to Davao.

Hypocrites, fumed Duterte of the New York-based rights groups—these bleeding hearts who can’t even protect the citizens in their own countries, “the American-Africans” and the victims of genocide in Africa and other places, but who now have the nerve to question his unorthodox style of governance. Human Rights Watch says Duterte’s possible involvement in extrajudicial killings in Davao may have led to at least 1,000 deaths. At which Duterte once again whipped out the tough language beloved by his supporters: “You want a taste of justice, my style? Come to Davao City, Philippines, and do drugs in my city. I will execute you in public.”

The appeal is understandable; it was only a matter of time before our descent into the pits as a nation would produce another tough guy, another putative strongman whose penchant for legal shortcuts, whose disdain for the exasperating niceties of the law, becomes precisely his sterling qualification for the job of extracting Filipinos from the hellhole. Ferdinand Marcos once attempted this, too—his New Society, backed by martial law, was meant to save Filipinos from the rot and evil of the old ways, and for a while the country seemed functioning and orderly. The deaths under his watch eventually reached tens of thousands. Most of them, unfortunately, were not criminals, but people who simply had a different mind than the guy in power. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.