While I shall express no opinion on the subject of his innocence or guilt, here are a few thoughts on Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest on a warrant by the ICC for allegedly summarily executing thousands of criminal suspects during his war on drugs.
- Summary executions of criminal suspects are not unknown in the Philippines. There is in fact a term for it, an English loan word: to “salvage” a suspect, meaning not to arrest him but rather kill him outright to save the trouble of booking him. I do not know what the etymology of this word is but it was current from at least the 1980s.
- It also applies to the practice of silencing criminal informants who have outlived their usefulness, or killing off convicts who are released ostensibly to attend a trial or for hospital treatment who are instead used to perform contract killings brokered by the cops.
- It sometimes applies to sadistic killing sprees perpetrated by warlords because they can. Perhaps the clearest example is the Maguindanao Massacre, in which 58 people, a politician’s two sisters, journalists, lawyers, aides, and motorists who were witnesses or were mistakenly identified as part of the convoy were tortured, raped and buried alive. It remains one of the single biggest mass murders of journalists in recent history.
Typically “salvage” victims are the disposable poor, though not always. Perhaps the most famous victim was Benigno Aquino, who was shot in the head after returning from exile in the United States while being escorted from an aircraft to a vehicle that was waiting to transport him to prison. Classic salvage.
What distinguishes the charges against Duterte is the monstrous scale of the salvaging. Until recently the practice of summary executions, though rampant, met with social disapproval. Even the most savage warlords took pains to keep up appearances. And that kinda sorta kept the lid on. But those restraints disappeared in a kind of orgy of gratuitous malice. The New York Times described in January, 2025 the kind of black hole that developed in Duterte’s city:
The Davao Death Squad developed its own code and methods. “Trabajo” meant a hit. A towel emblazoned with the words “good morning” hanging over the shoulder of a spotter would signal the positioning of the target to be killed. Brown packing tape kept the victims’ screams from posing a distraction.
The men often worked at the Laud quarry, on the outskirts of Davao City, each cave and hideaway swathed in tropical green. There, the squad dismembered and buried hundreds of bodies over a quarter-century, according to statements from five men who said they were members of the group. Mr. Duterte sometimes presided over the torture, executions and grave digging, they said. …
Mr. Matobato said that at the quarry, which was owned by a policeman who was a founding member of the Davao Death Squad, he specialized in body disposal. He grew practiced at the geometry of butchery, turning a human into a package of flesh and bones fit for a compact burial space. It was also important, he said, that the corpses not be easily identifiable.
Mr. Matobato said he would slice through the thorax, remove the vital organs and lop the limbs. Then he would cut off the head and place it in the cavity the innards had occupied. He would pour engine oil over the butchered body to stanch the smell.
Cutting off the ears, he said, was for no real reason. But once he started, it was sometimes hard to stop. .. After busy days at the quarry, Mr. Matobato and the other hit men would often drive to the Vista View restaurant. They took over a favored cabaña overlooking the Laud quarry. They feasted on seafood and halo-halo, a kind of Filipino ice cream sundae.
Can there really be such people? Why sure there are and the euphemism for cannibalism is “sumsuman”, loosely translatable as ‘bar chow’ or ‘pub grub’. Now you have two words from the underground vocabulary. Pray you don’t learn any more. But here we come to the most interesting part of the Duterte-ICC saga. The real reason the former president was sent to the Hague for punishment is because no one of consequence can be punished in the Philippines. Neither Cory nor Benigno Aquino’s son could bring the killers of Ninoy to justice despite the fact that both became presidents. As you might guess the perpetrators of the Maguindanao Massacre were never brought to book because no one, but no one of consequence can be punished in the Philippines. But then I repeat myself.
Duterte is going to the Hague for the same reason El Chapo was extradited to the US, so that someone else can do what a failed or nearly failed state cannot ever do.