Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was arrested Tuesday, March 11, in Manila by police acting on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant citing crimes against humanity tied to his deadly war on drugs.
The 79-year-old faces a charge of “the crime against humanity of murder,” according to the ICC, for a crackdown in which rights groups estimate tens of thousands of mostly poor men were killed by officers and vigilantes, often without proof they were linked to drugs.
Good
Fuck Duterte. He did to his country almost a decade ago what Trump is doing to the USA now. I remember this Philippine-American journalist saying in 2016 that
Isn’t his daughter president president now? No doubt that’s better, but by how much I wonder.
IIRC the Philippines was also the testbed for the facebook-cambridge analytica thing.
This or some other company, that’s essentially what Maria Ressa said (with proof).
That daughter is the current vice president (who ran together on the same ticket as the current president: another dictator’s offspring). Seems like the daughter would be gunning for the presidency the next election (since presidents in the Philippines are only allowed one term) and is now have been waging a word war against the current president and their camp.
Anyways, the fear is that this arrest will be used for pity points amongst Duterte’s base. Filipinos in general love dramatics and the underdog. They will milk this arrest for all its worth, painting the elder Duterte as being oppressed, at the behest of “foreign interests” and agitating the base.
Familiar playbook.
Thanks for the update-in-a-nutshell!
Sounds like that journalist was Maria Ressa. She was on Jon Steward’s podcast recently and talked about the same thing.
Yes! Thanks, I couldn’t remember. Was an amazing podcast series on PBS iirc.