Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, well known for his violent war on drugs, was arrested this week after three judges from the International Criminal Court signed a warrant for his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity.
The warrant lists Duterte’s alleged connection to at least 43 deaths during his presidency because of his encouragement of extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and users. He is suspected of inciting the deaths of thousands of Filipinos across the country after rising to power in 2016. Upon arriving in Manila on Tuesday, he was arrested, put on a charter plane and sent to The Hague in the Netherlands.
He was in custody there by Wednesday, according to media reports.
“This will be a long legal proceedings, but I say to you, I willl continue to serve my country,” Duterte said in a video posted to his Facebook page from the charter plane taking him to The Hague.
In the Bay Area, many celebrated his arrest, which was characterized as bittersweet because it represents a small semblance of justice following Duterte’s reign between June 2016 and June 2022. The Bay Area is home to some 500,000 Filipinos — about 12% of the four million Filipinos in the United States, according to the 2017 American Community Survey, with many living in Daly City, South San Francisco, San Francisco, Union City, San Jose, Milpitas and elsewhere.
“The arrest of Duterte is a product of the Filipino people’s collective struggle for justice and accountability. And of course the rest of Duterte is deeply personal to me and those who live in the countryside, particularly the rural and indigenous masses,” said Brandon Lee, a Chinese American who survived a military assassination attempt on his life under the Duterte administration in August 2019. “It gives me and my family a sense of justice, as well as those in the Philippines, that this monster is being driven to trial. Hopefully, he’ll get caged.”
Lee, 42, was working with indigenous people in Ifugao, a province in the Northern region of Luzon, the Philippines main island, when he was repeatedly harassed and tailed by military troops. He said the military “red tagged” him, or labeled him a communist terrorist, for opposing several infrastructure projects in the region, such as mines and dams, which he said would have disrupted the way of life of the Igorot people.
Born and raised in the Sunset District of San Francisco, Lee was shot four times in the back and jaw, and suffered injuries which left him disabled. Lee said while he was hospitalized in the Philippines, he suspected military and police officials were going to try to “finish the job.” Fearing for his life, he was airlifted back to the US. His wife and daughter shortly followed him.
Officials and humanitarian groups estimate Duterte could be connected to the killings of up to 30,000 Filipinos during his tenure as president. He rose to power on a campaign predicated on reigning in drug gangs, and he was well known for saying he would kill some of them himself.
“There are things that were done under his administration that also have far reaching effects, and they’re still being felt now,” said Maria Ortuoste, an international law professor at Cal State East Bay in Hayward and a former research director for the Philippines government. “It is some form of justice. But we do have to remember that without this, all of the other people’s lives will be erased from our memory. And that’s unfair.”
Duterte’s supporters, including his children, have protested online and in media reports that he was “kidnapped,” and that his arrest was unlawful because Duterte removed the Philippines from the ICC’s jurisdiction in 2019. His son, Sebastian “Baste” Duterte, mayor of Davao City, filed a petition of habeus corpus before the Philippines Supreme Court to return his father from The Hague, which the courts denied on Wednesday.
Duterte’s arrest happened under the watch of current President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., whose family took control of the Philippines under martial law between 1972 and 1981. The Marcos family was fled in exile to Hawaii to escape persecution by the Philippines government after Bongbong’s father was ousted from power in 1986.
Though the Dutertes and Marcoses shared a politically close relationship, with Sara Duterte, Rodrigo’s daughter, currently serving as vice president, some are also calling for the persecution of the Marcos family along with the former president because their regimes’ tactics.
“Let’s just say there’s unfinished business with the Marcos administration,” Ortuoste said. “It’s really ironic that it happened under the Marcos administration, this arrest.”
Leloy Claudio, a Southeast Asian studies professor at University of California, Berkeley, agreed, though he added “we’ll take what we can get.”
He noted that this marks the first time an Asian head of state will be prosecuted by the ICC.
“When it finally happened, I was incredulous,” Claudio said. “It’s still not going to be a matter of months, it’s going to be a matter of years (in the courts)…I don’t see him going back to the Philippines anytime soon, if ever.”