Upon setting foot at Manila airport after a brief trip to Hong Kong, former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte was arrested this Tuesday after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against him following years of investigating the indiscriminate killings in the so-called "war on drugs," which left thousands dead in the Philippines.
Duterte (79 years old) swept the elections in 2016 after promising a ruthless and bloody campaign to end drugs in the Southeast Asian country. "Early in the morning, Interpol Manila received the official copy of the ICC arrest warrant. At this moment, he is under custody of the authorities," reads the statement issued by the Filipino government.
During his term (until 2022), there were officially over 6,000 deaths in the hunt ordered by Duterte. Those are police figures. But according to groups like Human Rights Watch, after several on-the-ground reports, the number was raised to 12,000 and other human rights organizations claim there were over 30,000 killings, a figure also reflected in the ICC report, which has been investigating the killings related to Duterte's bloody campaign since November 2011, when the politician was mayor of the southern city of Davao.
Many of the victims, mostly suspected drug traffickers from poor areas of the country, were detained and extrajudicially executed on the streets by police officers who bolstered the feared anti-drug squads. Duterte, during his presidency, withdrew the Philippines from the ICC in 2019, a decision that, according to critics, was an attempt to evade accountability in an investigation for crimes against humanity.
In January 2023, the international court, based in The Hague, announced it would resume an investigation that had already exposed numerous cases of how the Filipino government allowed - even encouraged - police forces to commit summary and extrajudicial executions against alleged drug traffickers.
This newspaper accompanied several relatives of the victims in Manila who gathered at the Parliament gate to demand a national investigation against the former president. "If you know any addict, kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful," Duterte once said in a speech.
Llore Pasco, who lost two sons during a police operation in 2017, was told that both had been involved in a robbery and were shot because they had tried to shoot at the officers. "The Police usually always say the same thing, that the victims pulled out a weapon, to justify the extrajudicial executions carried out during their operations," explained the mother.
Also present at the Manila demonstration was Sarah Celiz, whose two sons were also killed by the police. And Mary Ann Domingo, who lost her husband and son. All of them are activists from Rise Up for Life and for Rights, a group of mothers and widows of the drug war who have been fighting for years for justice.
Royina Garma, a former police colonel, testified before a parliamentary committee that Duterte's office offered agents up to $17,000 to kill suspected drug traffickers. Last year, another retired officer, Arturo Lascanas, testified before the ICC against Duterte and also against his daughter, Sara Duterte, the current vice president of the country, accusing her of planning the execution of around 10,000 alleged drug traffickers in the city of Davao, the family's usual stronghold, where Sara was also mayor in 2012.
The current president Marcos Jr, who succeeded Duterte in 2022, chose not to return the Philippines to the international court, but his administration, which has been cooperating with the tribunal's investigations, assured that they would collaborate if a request for the arrest of the always controversial former president was made. Duterte refused to apologize for the war on drugs in an investigation that the Filipino Senate initiated last October: "I did what I had to do."