Paul Keenan
The new presidency bodes ill for the Church, writes Paul Keenan
They call him ‘The Punisher’. As he assumed the presidency of the Philippines on June 30, Rodrigo Duterte carried with him a fierce reputation that made him the landslide winner for an electorate hungry for an end to the nation’s enduring curses of corruption and crime.
Topping the May poll with a comfortable margin of six million votes, Mr Duterte sold himself expertly as the man to remedy the nation’s maladies in speeches that have been nothing short of ‘firebrand’ in threatening to undo dodgy officials and far worse to criminals.
Think of a Donald Trump for South-East Asia and one has a rather accurate summation of Mr Duterte’s brand of politics.
That said, Donald Trump comes across as a rank amateur when compared to the credentials the Filipino leader brings to his new post. In terms of verbiage, Mr Dueterte has shown there is no group which he deems in need of challenge that he will not openly abuse, regardless of its base, while in terms of hard action, he has more than proved his willingness to undertake the harshest of measures to gain his moniker as ‘The Punisher’.
On the first night of his presidency, the capital, Manilla, experienced a police blitz which saw young drinkers targeted and dragged bodily from the streets.
President’s ire
Those who have already received a measure of the president’s ire are the United States, Australia and the United Nations (the expletives used in addressing these cannot be repeated here). However, it is the Catholic Church, representing some 80% of Filipinos, to which Mr Duterte has turned his most frequent and poisoned invective.
Barking his way along the campaign trail over the last year, Mr Duterte levelled all manner of unsubstantiated accusations against the Church and its local representatives, from allegations of corruption (always a winner with the voters) to one of abuse committed on him by a priest. But the candidate topped all else when, in the final days of the campaign he openly called the Pope and his prelates “sons of whores”, rounding on priests and bishops who had dogged him with criticisms since he launched his presidential bid.
The cause of the gross outburst stemmed from Mr Duterte’s allegations that, throughout his time as Mayor of Davao, a coastal city of approximately 1.5 million inhabitants, members of the clergy had approached him in pursuit of favours and land.
It is here one begins to draw close to the true nature of Mr Duterte and his unfolding presidency.
First entering the political landscape in Davao in the late 1980s, Rodrigo Duterte served in the city variously as vice-mayor and mayor, steadily building up his strongman reputation across more than 20 years of service in high office. And across that time-span, it is the Church which has worked to record and highlight just how that reputation was formulated.
As early as the 1990s, serious questions were being asked of the tactics being employed in tackling Davao’s crime rate. People implicated in crimes began to disappear, while fatal shootings of known criminals by shadowy figures on motorcycles began to surge. There were whisperings of a Davao Death Squad operating with impunity. Such rumours were borne out when, after a television interview in which Mayor Duterte denounced a number of criminals and publicly named them, the same named persons fell victim to shootings and the Davao Death Squad (DDS) became an accepted reality.
Such incidents have been recorded over time, with one good source being The Preda Foundation’s online catalogue of DDS activities and Mr Duterte’s links to it. (Preda was founded by Irish Columban Fr Shay Cullen for the protection of Filipino street children, some of whom are alleged to have been prey for the DDS) Another active cleric has been Filipino Father Amado Picardal who has doggedly tracked each DDS killing. In April he presented his findings, which catalogued the murder of children as young as 12 by the group. “No justice has been given to these victims,” he said.
Linkage between Mr Duterte and the DDS is no longer a matter of conjecture. Quite aside from the US State Department’s declaration that it had solid evidence that he “is clearly behind a group called the Davao Death Squad” (revealed as part of the Wikileaks affair) in his laying the groundwork for his presidential bid in 2015, the mayor admitted his sanction for the group along with the promise that, if he were to gain the top job, 100,000 people would die in his bid to fight crimes and Manila Bay would be filled with bodies. On the night of his inauguration, the new president travelled to a slum area of the capital where he sounded off against drug addicts and told residents “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself”.
The local Church continues to dog Mr Duterte since his elevation, expressing concern that the practices of Davao have already begun to spread; in the first fortnight after the election, 40 alleged drug dealers were shot dead by police who cite ‘resisting arrest’ in every case.
The Filipino Bishops have also been forced to condemn another mayor who, no doubt inspired by his president, has offered bounty payments to police officers who kill drug suspects.
Mr Duterte is, at this point, not for turning. He has already announced plans to re-introduce the death penalty and, perhaps in reaction to Church criticism, has vowed to relaunch a campaign of family planning, arguing that having too many babies is the cause of poverty in the country, a nifty shift from the corruption argument.
But why would the tenets of Church teaching bother a man who so shamelessly ignores the rule of law? Ahead of his inauguration, Mr Duterte openly derided the rituals and practices of the Catholic Church, scoffing at how many saints were available for veneration and dismissing the relevance of the Scriptures. “Those were written 3,000 years ago,” he said.
Duterte’s promise to eradicate crime within six months of gaining the presidency offers a grim vision of the coming period in The Philippines. The overriding question must be how much ordinary Filipinos are willing to put up with for a demagogue’s promise of a better nation.
The question of what the Church will do is easier to answer and already has been in the words of retired Archbishop Oscar Cruz who said in response to Duterte’s admonishments and abuse: “We won’t be quiet … the Church will preach what it thinks is right.”