Since 1988, Rodrigo Duterte carefully reared an image of a tough prosecutor and official of Davao City, rising on top of the heap in the badlands of the once lush abaca plantations to lead a city after the Marcos Sr. dictatorship was toppled, thanks to the refusal of his mother to hold any government position. Soledad “Soling” Duterte naturally loved her son but no one should blame her for the abuses, the corruption and moral depravity of the son. Rodrigo was already 43 in 1988 and was old enough to know that what he was doing was damn wrong.
He earned the hatred of erstwhile political allies, from the families of Luis Santos to Elias Lopez and the kin of other former mayors and even relatives like the Nograleses, all because Duterte wanted to have an iron grip on the city. Creating a political dynasty is a surefire way of practically owning Davao City, never mind if they live in the nondescript Ecoland but is friends with the other equally controversial Pastro Apollo Quiboloy, whose family hailed from Lubao, Pampanga, the same town of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, after the likes of Senator Alejandro D. Almendras (who served from the Fifth to the Seventh Congress) and Rep. Maglana were no longer around. The only Maglana around is Mags Maglana and she is battling the political notables from the Duterte and Nograles dynasties.
We are not saying that, like Mae West, Rody’s mom should have kept the stork and threw away the spawn because that is not maternal instinct. A mother wouldn’t bear to see her son or daughter suffering, and the decision by Solomon to cut a baby to satisfy the demand of contesting “mothers” showed who the real mum was. Instead of seeing the baby chopped, with half the body given to each of the two contending women, the sobbing mother yielded. The Solomonic decision was then rendered. Yet, there must be some heroism in the mother of Rody to put up with him after all these years. Wife Elizabeth Zimmerman couldn’t, which was the reason why she secured a clinical assessment by Dr. Natalia Dayan that Rody was a womanizer and cannot perform his matrimonial duties, all because he suffers from an incurable anti-social narcissistic personality disorder (ANPD.) Thus, her marriage to Rody was annulled.
Woefully, ANPD was not a disqualifying factor for one running for president in 2016. Just as repeated tax dodgers are spared from been kicked out of the presidential race since recidivism deserves only a slap in the right wrist, the one where no Patek Philippe watch may sustain damage. Other relatives just don’t want to be told they are related to him, like the clinician Nuelle Duterte of New York while a sister described Rody as a “male chauvinist pig” for his misogyny and bigotry. Rody never wavered in his strange advocacy of murder. As mayor of Davao City, he had to create the myth that the city was a bedlam, where thieves and petty crooks crawl in the urban sprawl, preventing the development of the metropolis and pushing businessmen out within a 200-kilometer radius. Yet, Davao City hosted the Aboitizes, the Alcantaras, the Floirendos, Lorenzos and the del Rosarios, the Dominguezes and other wealthy families that thrived on abaca, prison labor in banana plantations and slave wages.
With Duterte lording it over Davao City, another wave of big guns came, like the Ampatuans, the Dennis Uys, the Sammy Uys and others with monosyllabic surnames, several centuries removed from the failed invasions of Limahong and the expeditions of the eunuch admiral Zheng He. Hordes of gold panners from Davao City also trooped to many areas in the Davao Region, particularly to the Mapula mine in Davao del Norte, Tagpura-Maangob mine in Davao del Norte, Kingking mine in Davao de Oro, Mt. Diwata in Monkayo and the Davao gold placer in Davao del Sur. Since the Davao gold rush started, the military and the Philippine National Police (PNP) had their own turfs, controlled the market for explosives and the toxic metals used to extract gold.
The Bangko Sentral was supposed to purchase all the gold extracted by small miners but with the creativity of the power holders, they end up in Singapore, ferried in private planes that the poor government couldn’t stop. The urban lore on his side of Davao City is that Rody became rice due to the gold trade and there was no need for him to steal from the city’s coffers. The myth about the rich not stealing has been burst asunder a long time ago. It is a myth as worse as the one about the need to kill to lead, with Duterte declaring that a President must be prepared to kill to keep the country clean and green, stripped of the weeds that nurtured 3-million drug addicts and guaranteeing that everyone would obey Duterte’s law. Now celebrating his 80th year, Duterte by his lonesome in a The Hague jail will have all the time in the world to reflect on how he wasted 80 long years by not doing good, by insisting that murder is the solution to drug addiction but sparing the real drug kingpins from the bullets of his highly-rewarded hitmen.
At 80, he has to think about the tragedy that he has caused the Filipino people, not only the 30,000 slain in his bogus anti-drug war but the thousands more felled by his anti-people war that was justified by Memorandum Circular No 32, which unleashed soldiers and police commandos to his the supposed rural bases of the New People’s Army (NPA) in Luzon and the Visayas, along with indigenous people’s (IP) communities in Mindanao, and Executive Order No. 70, which established the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and institutionalized red-tagging and covert operations like abductions and summary executions. The death toll for MC 32 and EO 70 continues to rise after they were issued in 2018, exactly two years after Duterte took power and the same year progressive Cabinet members were kicked out. He should be held responsible for hundreds initially killed by the mayhem he induced.
Now that he is in the winter of his life, Duterte should face the inevitable in a court that he cannot influence, before prosecutors he cannot pressure and the witnesses he cannot coerce. Thus, the situation hews closely to a fairer process despite the irrational actions of his cult followers in Europe, the lies that they have been spewing and comparison to the murdered Ninoy Aquino Jr., which is actually an insult to Ninoy, his family and the Filipino people. Sara, Bong Go, and the remnants of the Duterte cult should reexamine their tactics. They are digging a hole that may accommodate not only Duterte but all his co-respondents. They are promoting myths, like the myth that Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio as lily-white in the impeachment case filed against her, or that Kitty Duterte’s ever-loving daddy was snatched and denied due process. Shopping in Milan for Fendi eyewear, Christian Dior apparel, Dior bags, Celine sunglasses, three Hermes bags, Chanel, Loro Piana and Goyard bags worth more than P3-million isn’t exactly the behavior of a daughter who just “lost” his dad. The children of the 30,000 victims of the drug war never had the chance to fly business class to Milan to grieve. (DIEGO MORRA)
