Rodrigo Duterte
Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, the mayor of Davao for twenty-two years who ran on the promise to kill the drug dealers and the addicts, won with thirty-nine per cent, and kept the promise: the police recorded some six thousand killed in anti-drug operations in six years, the human rights groups counted thirty thousand including the vigilante killings, and in March 2025 his own government's successor, the son of the dictator he had allied with, had him arrested at Manila airport on a warrant from the International Criminal Court and flown to The Hague, where he awaits trial for crimes against humanity. He was born in 1945 in Maasin in Leyte, the son of a provincial governor, was expelled from one school and shot a classmate at another by his own account, qualified as a lawyer and was a prosecutor in Davao, the city his father had governed, and became its mayor in 1988 after the fall of Marcos. Davao in the 1980s was a city of communist and vigilante killings, and the Davao Death Squad that cleaned it up in the 1990s and 2000s was, a Senate inquiry and a self-confessed member said, his. The city's order and his profanity made him a national figure. The campaign of 2016 promised to dump the bodies in Manila Bay and to feed the fish. In office he called Obama a son of a whore, said the Philippines was separating from the United States and would go to China and Russia, took Chinese loans and let the South China Sea ruling the Philippines had won in 2016 lie unused, put the country under martial law in Mindanao for two years after the Islamic State's siege of Marawi in 2017, jailed his critic Senator de Lima for six years on charges the courts later dismissed, and had the broadcaster ABS-CBN shut down. The drug war was investigated by the ICC from 2018, the year he withdrew the country from it, which under the statute did not end the jurisdiction. He left office in 2022 with approval ratings above seventy per cent, his daughter Sara as vice-president to Marcos Jr., and the alliance of the two families broke within two years. The arrest of 11 March 2025 was the Marcos government's answer to the Dutertes' threats. He was elected mayor of Davao again from his cell in May 2025.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Filipino
- Roles: president, politician
