5 Years of Duterte: A Calamity Reaching Its Crescendo

At the onset, Rodrigo Duterte pegged himself as a wild card thrown into a deck of traditional politicians vying for the Philippine presidency. His emergence in the 2016 electoral race, however, revealed him to be more of a loose cannon, trigger happy and firing (quite literally) on all fronts. He always claimed that it was all rooted in his deep love for the nation. No doubt a large section of the public was endeared.

At the time, the Philippines was on the back end of a largely frustrating tenure by President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, whose liberal inclinations, soft power focus, and overall impotent administration perfectly set up any potential successor to stake a claim with a more action-oriented platform. There was a sense that anything was better than the status quo.

Like most populists, Duterte fit the bill. He was a man who capitalized, better than any of the other candidates, on the sentiment that something drastic had to be done. His highly questionable human rights record and past as a political turncoat didn’t much come into play during the campaign. With much fanfare, Duterte won the election.

His initial promises during the campaign and the start of his term – ending labor contractualization, defending Philippine borders from Chinese incursions, an independent foreign policy, peace with the communist insurrection, and a swift end to the corrupt bureaucracy – were welcomed by and large.

Duterte’s supporters often point to the fact that more than 16 million voters got behind the strongman in 2016. But five years later, what sustains Duterte’s popularity is his bravado. Everything else has more or less spectacularly collapsed.

Practically the only major promise intact from Duterte’s rise to power has been the bloody war on drugs. Duterte has unapologetically called for the genocide of drug users and dealers. While he has delivered on half that promise, much to the dismay of his victims, he has been suspiciously lenient on the cartels.

The blood-stained hands of the regime seem to be the most consistent feature of the last five years. Iron-fisted force, unseen since the martial law period under former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, has had a hand in almost all major political developments. From the arrests of opposition members, the brutal crackdown on activists, and the muscling-up of law enforcement, the last half-decade has been a violent and frightful period for many. What people wanted was for peace and stability to be wrangled from the red-tape ensnared Aquino administration; Duterte delivered something unimaginably worse.

As the country continues to grapple with the pandemic, propelling the population into a downward economic and public health spiral, the worst qualities of the current government – an inability to solve its problems without shooting at something – have been further laid bare.

The Diplomat spoke with experts, victims, documenters, and communities affected by one of the most polarizing governments in Philippine history as Duterte enters his final year in office.

Elite-Driven Economy

Once in office, the Duterte administration sought to dazzle the nation with a concrete plan to ease economic burdens. It unveiled a “10 Point Socioeconomic Agenda” emphasizing infrastructure investment, tax reform, and private enterprise. His initial showing expressed what Sonny Africa, the executive director of the think tank IBON Foundation, called a “deep commitment to neoliberalism.”

Despite the agenda spawning the catchphrase “Dutertenomics,” Africa concluded that it was doomed from the start. Concretely, he said “the result is pretty much as would be expected from a neoliberal policy trajectory – manufacturing’s share in the economy has fallen to as small as in the 1950s and agriculture is down to its smallest in the country’s history. The neoliberal obsession with fiscal austerity meanwhile means that essential health, education, and other public services are provided sparingly and certainly much less than needed by the still overwhelmingly poor and vulnerable population.”

However, in the first quarter of 2018, the administration boasted about being one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, pointing to a 6.8 percent rise in the Philippines’ GDP. It was still short of the regime’s 7 percent target, (which it has since still failed to reach) but was noteworthy relative to the country’s neighbors. This growth was mostly due to increased tax collections and infrastructure spending marketed to the public as “Build Build Build” or BBB.

Celebrations were short-lived. The economic slowdown became more evident the following year with GDP growth dropping to 5.9 percent for 2019. According to IBON, “the government has been attempting to boost a lackluster economy through more government spending and its infrastructure program. But this was not enough to stimulate growth. For instance, construction drastically fell from 14.9 [percent] growth in 2018 to just 7.7 [percent] in 2019.”

Amid the pandemic, the administration has maintained course, still searching for an infrastructure boom like a magic wand to solve its fiscal woes. Even while calls for beefing up the healthcare system grew louder, Senator Christian “Bong” Go, one of the president’s closest allies, urged state agencies in September 2020 to keep building: “Let us not leave our projects idle especially before President Duterte’s term ends. [The Department of Public Works and Highways] needs to act double time in their efforts to lengthen, widen, maintain and construct roads.”

IBON’s Africa commented that “the country’s real estate barons are seeing exponential increases in their wealth as publicly-funded transport projects boost the commercial values of their real estate projects especially in the Greater Manila area.” He went on to note that infrastructure spending has increased in absolute terms and as a share of GDP since 2016. “Yet despite this, economic growth has been slowing in every year since. Even the supposed employment benefits are not materializing – from 681,000 additional construction jobs in 2016, this even fell to an average of just 258,000 annually in 2017-2019.”

Duterte stuck to his guns by approving an allotment of 1.1 trillion Philippine pesos ($22.6 billion), around 24 percent of the total state budget, for various infrastructure projects in 2021. The president’s insistence from the start of his term and well into the pandemic that this was the path to genuine progress has been seriously undermined by the reality of the situation. Not only was growth slowed down, but the order-shattering events of the past year have led to the Philippines’ worst recession since World War II. The Duterte administration, meanwhile, has stayed its course: Doing the same thing, failing at it, and now under markedly more challenging conditions continuing to promise that a different result is on the horizon. The pandemic didn’t usher in a decline; it only made a noticeable set of problems more painfully visible.

There is a stark lack of financial assistance to low-income families, whose lives have become incomparably worse. Government aid for the pinpointed 22.9 million beneficiaries only amounted to around $20 each. The Department of Interior and Local Government or DILG admitted that as of late, only 7.4 million of the beneficiaries have received even that measly amount. Filipinos have been pushed to the furthest brink of economic peril, yet the government refuses to recognize this pressing need.

Moreover, this decline didn’t just come about because of mismanagement and misprioritization. Africa said that two of the most destructive policies enacted by the Duterte administration are the Rice Liberalization Law (RLL) and its tax reforms.

The RLL, implemented in January 2019, removed tariffs and quotas on rice imports. By November 2019, the Philippines, which culturally prides itself as being kept alive by grace of its hardworking farmers, suddenly became the world’s largest importer of rice.

Even a study by the Department of Agriculture concluded that Filipino farmers incurred losses of up to 129.54 billion Philippine pesos in 2019.

Danilo Ramos, chairman of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (Peasant Movement of the Philippines) or KMP, one of the largest farmer groups in the country, called the law a “gigantic man-made disaster unleashed by Duterte against poor Filipino rice farmers.”

At the end of 2017, Duterte also passed the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion Act or TRAIN Law, which added excise taxes to most consumer goods. Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III heralded its arrival as the government’s “biggest Christmas and New year’s gift” to its citizens.

In reality, it took less than a year for prices of basic commodities to be driven up by 4.6 percent while wages stalled. By October 2018, the Philippines had recorded its highest inflation in the past nine years at 6.7 percent, straining consumer pockets. At the same time, TRAIN reduced corporate income taxes and excise taxes on luxury items, allowing for the ultra-rich to enhance their spending. No wonder luxury cars and their patrons received a boost from the law.

Qualms about inequality in the Philippines prior to Duterte’s term were already present. Despite his common-man public projection, the Duterte administration has served only to cement the existing structural weaknesses in the Philippine economy rather than dismantle them.

The Fear and the Lies

Much of the remaining public trust in the administration, which has weathered numerous political storms, stems from the hype of Duterte’s cult following. A huge part of that influence arrived through social media platforms. Duterte has been dubbed the first “social media president.” His camp has been cited numerous times for employing click farms and a cyber army to do its bidding and influence public opinion through disinformation.

One study exposed that the Duterte camp spent $200,000 amassing an online following to spread erroneous news, such as the time the Pope supposedly endorsed Duterte for the presidency. The practice continues to this day. Even the police and military have online pages filled with unverified claims that have been taken down by Facebook.

The shaping of perceptions toward the president’s rule has become crucial to keeping order and drowning out any dissenting voices. Media expert Professor Danilo Arao explains that “disinformation under the Duterte administration has ended up polluting further the information superhighway. Many people are led to believe that something is true just because it went viral. It also does not help that certain official pronouncements, even coming from the president himself, would contain inaccuracies.”

The regime has been known to spout alternative versions of the truth and even alter government data when being presented in public. Fact checkers from the Vera Files concluded that Duterte had a “legacy of lies” as he manipulated facts on joblessness and infrastructure development, and spewed slander against his political opponents. The starkest example of Duterte’s inaccuracies being masked by his sheer audacity is evident in his most repeated assurances. Often Duterte has claimed that corruption in government will end during his term, a pledge that has helped to win over many a voter and supporter.

One significant indicator of how well Duterte has fared in curbing corruption in the country was exposed in September 2020. Officials of the state-owned Philippine Health Insurance Corporation or PhilHealth allegedly stole more than 15 billion Philippine pesos worth of public funds. Duterte ran on a strong anti-corruption pledge, yet when the country needed funds for public health the most, his top officials were shown to have pocketed them. While Senator Go strongly reiterated that the administration has a “zero tolerance” policy for this kind of indiscretion, there have yet to be any meaningful repercussions or criminal cases against the corrupt in the last five years.

The Philippines’ ranking in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) dropped from 99th in 2018 to 113th in 2019 and 115th in 2020.

Professor Bobby Tuazon teaches political science at the University of the Philippines and is also the policy director for the Center for People’s Empowerment in Governance. He feels that Duterte’s anti-corruption drive has been mostly for show.

“In the last five years of his presidency, Duterte has not even instituted basic reforms leading to the reduction if not elimination of corruption that continues to erode all levels of government and robs taxpayers [of] billions of dollars every year which would have gone to essential social services,” Tuazon said. “If ever, what he has done are rudimentary actions like removing some officials only to be reassigned to other positions. So Duterte’s much-hyped anti-corruption campaign is a dismal failure,” he told The Diplomat.

Tuazon believes the former mayor of Davao has a more dangerous focus when it comes to public policy. He said “Duterte ruled like a 20-year strongman in the local fiefdom of Davao City. He has shown this [in his campaign] against illegal drugs – which is alleged to have led to thousands of extra-judicial killings – [as if it’s] a one-size fits all template that can be applied nationwide.” According to some estimates, the casualties of the drug war have reached around 27,000 with on-the-spot executions becoming the most prominent and shocking feature of the campaign.

Photojournalist and Redemptorist brother Ciriaco Santiago III has been documenting the effects of drug-related operations in poor communities while conducting various forms of outreach through the church. He noticed a marked change in the violence and fear once Duterte set the cops loose to fulfill his wishes.

“Under Duterte, the police have become like rabid dogs in urban poor communities,” Santiago shared with The Diplomat. “There is violence left and right, almost every night, an entire chunk of the population lost. In the beginning, and even now to some extent, it’s difficult for the families to look for help lest they become targeted as well. They’re left with nothing but the fear.”

Since 2016, the killings have not let up, Santiago noted. Police operations may have shifted to fit other administration policies, but he attests that slum communities in particular face abductions and summary executions regularly. Police violence has not stopped “even during the pandemic” he added, based on his visits to ravaged communities.

Santiago also notes how militaristic law enforcement tactics used in the drug war eventually set their sights on activists and critics.

By the end of 2018, Duterte had cancelled peace negotiations with the armed insurgents of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA). He issued Executive Order No. 70 instituting the creation of the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict or NTF-ELCAC. By this time, the president’s cabinet had become packed by military men and former generals. The new task force, which he showcased with much aplomb, was no different.

As a preferred method of counterinsurgency, the regime has targeted democratic activists and opposition. Labelling them as collaborating with communists or terrorists, both terms the authorities use interchangeably, rationalizes their liquidation, at least in the government’s eyes. The process has come to be known as “red-tagging” and in many cases is equivalent to a death sentence. In many of the president’s speeches, he has openly vilified such movements and called for their extermination.

In March, Duterte spoke publicly on the matter of tackling the insurgency and he ordered the police and military to “kill them all” and to “not mind human rights.” The next day, March 6, nine activists in four different provinces were assassinated in what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Police claim that their targets were carrying high-powered rifles, necessitating a brutal response, although all eyewitness accounts state that such evidence was planted by the authorities.

“Evidence-planting of rifles and explosives while falsely claiming that their victims were attacking them are also staples of a script peddled by the authorities. They did [it] with the drug operations and now with activists,” said Santiago.

Since the signing of Executive Order No. 70 in December 2018, extrajudicial killings have increased by 50.4 percent, the number of those incarcerated without a warrant or with a faulty one (only named with an alias) is up by 92.9 percent, and warrantless raids have increased by 101 percent. Human rights group monitoring the situation say that the current death toll is 379, with 1,040 people jailed and 855 illegally conducted searches.

Rius Valle is an educator for children of the indigenous Lumad and is the spokesperson of the Save Our Schools Network, formed to campaign against repeated incursions of government troops into their communities. Valle and the Lumad hail from Mindanao, the same region as Duterte, and they are all too familiar with the severity of the regime’s blunt aggression.

There has been no love lost for the leader who rose from their own soil. The Lumad schools, independently run, have been a consistent target for Duterte’s camp. In 2017, the president threatened to drop bombs on their campuses, and in 2020 he warned that the Lumad would face extinction should they continue to be aligned with the “Left.”

Valle noted the escalation of incursions, strafing, and physical harm done to their students, staff, and communities under the current administration relative to the previous one.  He said there were “368 documented cases of attacks on schools, with 12 of them forcibly closed down during Aquino's six years. Meanwhile, from July 2016 to September 2020, we documented 1,030 instances of attacks affecting 93,977 individuals, while 178 schools were ordered to be shut down. It is that intense.”

Only during Duterte’s presidency have Lumad students been murdered in what Valle describes as “ethnocide.” He told The Diplomat that “Duterte is trying to erase the Lumad culture. By favoring the plunder of ancestral lands, the displacement of Lumad, a worsening culture of impunity, Duterte is slowly yet surely erasing the roots of our culture.”

Perfect Pretext for Authoritarianism

While the world toils in the throes of the virus, it’s almost as if Duterte was gifted the opportunity to advance his political objectives further. As of writing, Metro Manila and its surrounding provinces, the most populous area in the country, remain under strict quarantine with curfews, checkpoints, and low-level violators being routinely accosted by the police. The Philippines saw a 113 percent spike in COVID-19 cases from February to March this year. The seven-day moving average of new infections hit a high of 10,846 on April 15, indicative of how little has been done to control the disease while plenty has been done to control the people.

It has been over a year since the start of the pandemic and the regime barely recognizes the rudimentary steps necessary to address the crisis. In many ways, the country – which has the unfortunate reputation of having the longest lockdown in the world –  feels stuck at square one. Current testing capacity, pegged at 30,000 to 40,000 per day, has barely budged since the same period last year. The development of a unified system for contact tracing only just began in March 2021. By the second week of April, the WHO expressed grave concern over hospitals in the country nearing their capacity limits.

“Are we back to square one? Square one was when we had just shut down the economy, and people have spare change in their pockets and their small ayuda [financial assistance] became available, no matter how inept the distribution became. Cases are surging. The hospitals are once again full,” said Dr. Esperanza Cabral, former secretary of the welfare then health department.

Despite this, Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque lauded the government’s overall response, calling it “excellent,” considering how many casualties were avoided. As of mid-April, Roque was recuperating in the hospital after contracting COVID-19.

Judy Taguiwalo, a former Duterte cabinet member, commented, “The problem has always been [the administration’s] militarist handling of the lockdown, including use of harsh methods to enforce protocols among the people in what appears to be a consolidation of military rule.”

Rivalling the virus for its harm against the people, the lockdown has made it easier for the administration to pursue a crackdown on dissenters. People staying in their homes are easy targets, and when outside, they can readily be arrested. Last year, police averaged around a thousand arrests per day nationwide for low-level violations. This time around, once curfews were reinstated, it took the authorities only two days to round up 6,498 people in Metro Manila alone.

Meanwhile, the state undertook even more repressive measures while the population was ordered to stay at home. In July 2020, Congress passed the controversial Anti-Terror Law, which allows for warrantless arrests and legalized surveillance against perceived threats to national security. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana cancelled the agreement that previously made the University of the Philippines one of the few places where military personnel were barred from entering. A slew of killings and arrests of high-profile opposition personalities were enabled by the courts, which have been faulted by activists for become mere “warrant factories.”

With the persistence of the pandemic, it feels like this calamity of an era is reaching its crescendo. The pandemic combined and compounded the problems of the past five years.

Duterte’s term ends in May 2022. By law, he isn’t allowed to run for the presidency again, but his daughter Sara, the current mayor of Davao, looks likely to carry on where he left off. Only once in the country’s history has a candidate allied with the preceding administration won election, with votes typically handing the opposition a turn at the reins. The current administration seeks to buck the trend.

Tuazon’s remarks on the matter are foreboding. “Until reforms are instituted to dismantle the ruling political dynasties with a real political party system that promises an even playing field and platform-oriented election, the outcome of the post-2022 polls will basically remain the same or even worse.”

Conversely, the question of whether the state of affairs will continue will be answered by the Filipino people.

With much of Duterte’s term echoing the dark days of Marcos’ martial law it’s worth remembering that that period ended unceremoniously with a popular uprising in 1986. The current situation begs the question of how far the parallels will stretch.