They call him "The Punisher" and "Duterte Harry," a pun on the role played by Clint Eastwood in one of his earliest, and bloodiest, films. He is Rodrigo Duterte, mayor of Davao City, and he was elected president of the Philippines on Monday. As can be expected from those nicknames, Duterte ran a populist campaign, promising law and order and a fair deal for ordinary citizens who feel exploited and ignored by an entrenched political elite. It is, sadly, an all too familiar tale this year.
Duterte fashions himself as a plain-speaking tough guy, a political outsider, beholden to no one. In fact, he is the son of the former governor of Davao Province and a member of the family that ran Cebu province during the Marcos era. He trained as a lawyer and served as a prosecutor in Davao for nine years before becoming vice mayor in 1986; two years later he became mayor and has been re-elected seven times. He may be the law and order candidate, but he has enjoyed a privileged background and is an outsider only in the narrowest sense of the word.
He has been a success, however. He turned Davao City, once the murder capital of the Philippines, into one of the country's safest and most prosperous cities. His approach is simple: kill the criminals. He has been denounced by Human Rights Watch for using death squads, groups of men on the government payroll, to kill criminals, drug dealers and even street children. HRW believes that more than 1,000 people have been subjected to extra-judicial killings under Duterte. He counters that deadly force is used only in response to violence, but he has also warned criminals that if he became president: "The fish in Manila Bay will get fat. That is where I will dump you!"