Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
FORMER president Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte had claimed more than once that he personally killed people. By his own admission, it would appear that he had been a killer at a young age.
“At the age of 16, may pinatay na ako, eh. Tao talaga. Rumble. Saksak. Noong 16-years old ’yun.
“Nagkatinginan lang. Eh lalo na ngayon Presidente ako,” Duterte said in a speech delivered to the Filipino community in Da Nang, Vietnam, in November 2017. The occasion was a side event of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit held in Vietnam that year.
His bloody war on drugs had already claimed thousands of mostly poor drug suspects in more than a year of implementation. While popular, his approach ignited protests from human rights advocates, which riled him.
He did not mind going to jail for the drug war killings. “Jail? Jeez. When I was a teenager, I was in and out of jail,” he said, in a mixture of Tagalog and English. You f*****g with my countrymen, hindi kita palulusutin. Bahala na kayong [mga] human rights,” he said.
Now fugitive Harry Roque, who was the presidential spokesman at the time, defended Duterte from criticism, saying it was a joke. “The President uses colorful language when with Pinoys overseas,” Roque said.
Duterte had also previously claimed that he had shot a classmate at San Beda University.
The late former senator Rene Saguisag, who was assistant dean and prefect of the law school when the shooting happened, said in a media interview that he regretted that the law school did not expel Duterte.
“Kinakantiyawan siya ni Octavio Goco na probinsyano, so inabangan, binaril. Noon pa lang, talagang medyo trigger-happy na,” Saguisag said. “Sabi yata ng mga fraternity brothers niya, ‘Digong, sabihin mo aksidente.’ Ang kwento sa akin ng reliable source, sabi niya, ‘Hindi, talagang gusto kong barilin.’” He added that he “voted to expel” Duterte over the incident, but was “outvoted by the priest and the dean” who, Saguisag believed, gave Duterte due consideration because he was a graduating student.
Saguisag said Duterte earned his law degree from San Beda in 1972 but was not allowed to attend the graduation ceremonies. “Siguro if he were disciplined in 1972, he would not be what he is today kasi ang tingin niya siguro he could get away with anything.”
The young, trigger-happy Duterte as backdrop to the recent killings and violent incidents in school premises deserves retrospection while refinements to Republic Act 9344, or the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006, are being debated. If redress of grievances through violent means to out-bully the bully — as Saguisag recalled it — can be seen as something that works, what will stop the next guy with a gun from getting away with anything he or she wants? What if being the super bully makes one popular not only on campuses but also in other public spheres, even paving the path to being elected president someday?
Violence in whatever form grows from grounds where its seeds had been sown, tolerated, and even deemed worthy of approval beyond the movies. Large crowds rooting for the protagonists in professional boxing matches and other contact sports are examples of how the lust for violence grows in our subconscious minds. When killings start, violence takes on a life of its own.
Most bloody encounters between troopers and communist rebels that happen today are less about ideology and the carrying out of official missions than the compulsion to get even. They are more about combatants whose fathers, grandfathers and family members have lost their lives to the anti-insurgency campaign.
In a year or two, thousands of family members left orphaned by Duterte’s drug war will come of age, old enough to weigh the options before them. Theirs is a world where choices are not limited to what is good or bad, but also about a past that frames the choices into a single-minded death wish.
Duterte himself had shared stories of what prompted him to kill. In a speech before business leaders in Malacañang in December 2016, he admitted that he personally killed criminal suspects as mayor of Davao City.
He said: “I used to do it personally. Just to show to the guys [police] that if I can do it, why can’t you? And I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike around, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble. I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill.”
Edgar Matobato, a confessed hitman and one of the prosecution witnesses in the crimes against humanity case against Duterte that is now pending before the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Netherlands, has claimed that he was involved in the killing of about 1,000 criminals on orders of Duterte, who was then-mayor of Davao City. His story, like that of Vito Corleone of “The Godfather,” mirrors the psychology of how violence is cultivated among the young.
His father was a member of the Civilian Home Defense Forces (CHDF) who was killed by communist insurgents in front of him when he was a teenager. He joined the CHDF himself in 1982, and later, in 1988, the so-called Davao Death Squad.