Some People Need Killing

What happens when a nation’s deepest insecurities—about safety, poverty, and belonging—are distilled into a single, brutal promise? In Duterte’s Promise and the Rise of a Violent Regime, the author explores how Rodrigo Duterte transformed fear into political power, turning rage into policy, and vengeance into governance. His rise wasn’t an accident—it was the product of decades of inequality, disillusionment, and an appetite for strongman certainty in the face of chaos.

The book argues that Duterte’s narrative—“Drugs are the root of all evil”—offered a simple answer to complex questions. For many poor Filipinos, it was an answer that finally seemed to make sense. This clarity, even wrapped in violence, was more comforting than the abstract promises of liberal reformers. But by labeling millions as enemies of the state, Duterte built his power on dehumanization. Ordinary citizens were recast as ‘durugistas’: addicts, pushers, parasites who could—and should—be killed.

From Populism to Blood Politics

After decades of elite-led democracy that failed to bridge the gap between rich and poor, Duterte emerged as the rage-filled alternative. He positioned himself as a man of the people who spoke the language of the street rather than the boardroom. Human rights, to him, were the vocabulary of the privileged—useful for those who already lived behind walls, not for the millions trapped in crime-ridden slums. This resentment became the foundation of his political persona.

What’s striking is not just the rhetoric, but the reaction it inspired: chants for blood, vows of loyalty, and a sense of moral renewal through violence. (In a similar pattern, as seen in books about populism by Jan-Werner Müller and Pankaj Mishra, populist leaders often redefine morality through force rather than ethics.) Duterte’s speeches, filled with shocking declarations like “Kill them all,” resonated because they simplified the complex web of poverty, crime, and state neglect into a moral war between the pure and the corrupt.

A Manufactured Enemy

To sustain this political mythology, Duterte needed an enemy big enough to justify unending warfare. The durugistas fit that role perfectly. His inflated numbers—claiming 4.5 million addicts and tens of thousands of murders attributed to them—were factually wrong but emotionally powerful. The reality, as UN figures showed, was far less grim: drug use rates were below the world average, and crime rates didn’t match his apocalyptic descriptions.

Yet, accuracy didn’t matter. Perception did. By convincing Filipinos that addicts were baby-killers, rapists, and demons, Duterte created space for moral indifference. In this new moral order, killing wasn’t a crime—it was salvation. The narrative was intoxicating: be afraid, but trust the man with the gun.

Why It Mattered—and Still Does

What the book shows so vividly is how violence becomes a form of governance when legitimacy falters. When you can’t deliver jobs or justice, you deliver vengeance. This is why Duterte’s story matters far beyond the Philippines. It’s a cautionary tale about how democracy can erode not through coups, but through applause. Every time citizens cheer for easy answers and strong hands, they trade liberty for the illusion of safety.

Ultimately, the author contends that Duterte’s promise—to cleanse the nation through death—was never just about drugs. It was about power built on fear, obedience enforced through violence, and a society convinced that some lives aren’t worth saving. Understanding this dynamic isn’t just about grasping one regime’s brutality. It’s about recognizing how despair, when left unchecked, can transform into something far deadlier than corruption or crime: collective complicity.

Duterte’s reign didn’t begin in Manila—it was born in Davao City. There, during his tenure as mayor, he tested the brutal tactics that would later define his presidency. The Davao Death Squad operated under the guise of justice but effectively functioned as a substate militia, systematically executing petty criminals, drug users, and street children.

Duterte’s infamous story of an infant’s murder—a crime pinned on an alleged shabu addict—became the foundation of his moral crusade. Whether true or folklore, it was a parable of vengeance. He used this narrative to imply that he personally executed the killer, never confirming but never denying it either, leaving audiences to fill in the blanks. The message was chillingly clear: the only good addict is a dead one.

Vigilantism as Civic Duty

The Davao Death Squad’s files—documented by organizations like Human Rights Watch—revealed over 800 targeted killings between 1998 and 2006. These executions often mirrored police operations, complete with lists allegedly approved by local officials. Duterte, meanwhile, cultivated his “Dirty Harry” persona, bragging about his resolve to do what the law could not. Ordinary citizens applauded, interpreting this renegade violence as proof of compassion for the law-abiding poor.

This transformation from mayor to mercenary leader aligned with a broader populist pattern: the promise of security, no matter the moral cost. (Similarly, in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, she describes how leaders redefine justice through state-sanctioned cruelty, turning violence into virtue.) For Davao, Duterte’s campaign brought temporary calm—but at the cost of normalized killing.

The Myth of the Failed State

Interestingly, Davao became a template for his national war. He claimed success there as proof that murder worked—conveniently ignoring that its so-called peace was enforced by terror. When the Davao Death Squad became national news, Duterte didn’t deny the killings; he boasted of them. It cemented his reputation as the man who’d “get things done,” no matter the cost.

By the time Duterte sought the presidency, the Davao model had become a political doctrine: law through death, order through fear, and leadership through cruelty. It was a rehearsal for a country yet to understand how lethal the performance would become.

When Duterte took power in 2016, his war on drugs—Operation Tokhang—became both a slogan and a death sentence. On paper, the program sounded benign: police would knock on the doors of suspects (“toktok”) and plead (“hangyo”) with them to surrender peacefully. In practice, it became a euphemism for extrajudicial killings.

Across neighborhoods, Tokhang turned fear into routine. The sight of masked men or uniformed officers was enough to paralyze entire communities. Suspects who tried to surrender were shot anyway; their deaths later justified as self-defense. The phrase “Duterte kami”—“We are Duterte”—became a terrifying declaration of impunity.

Death by Documentation

Police reports painted a surreal picture. In city after city, they claimed gunfights with remarkable consistency: every suspect shot, every officer unharmed. In Bulacan province alone, thirty-two alleged shootouts in a single day resulted in thirty-two deaths and zero police casualties. The statistics defied logic—but logic no longer ruled. As Duterte himself said, it was “good news.”

Operation Tokhang institutionalized the culture of killing. Its bureaucratic language—lists of “neutralized” suspects, standardized post-operation reports—gave mass murder a sheen of legality. What began as a political crusade became industrialized violence, performed daily by police who learned to speak the president’s language of lethal virtue.

The Two-Barrel Strategy

Duterte often described his campaign as a double-barrel shotgun: one barrel for high-value targets, another for low-level pushers and users. But in truth, only one barrel fired. The state’s fury was disproportionately directed at the poor, at those with no lawyers, no influence, no escape. As the killings mounted—up to 25,000 by 2022—the nation faced a grim truth: the war wasn’t on drugs but on poverty itself.

While the regime sought to silence victims, a few lived to bear witness. Among them was Efren Morillo, a poor young vendor from Quezon City whose story defied the fatal pattern. In August 2016, he went to collect a small debt from a friend and found himself in the middle of a police raid. Alongside four others, he was accused of being a drug dealer. Within minutes, his friends were dead. Efren would have been next—but the bullet that pierced his chest missed his heart by an inch.

Pretending to be dead, he lay motionless as officers executed the rest. Hours later, he escaped through nearby woods, making his way to a hospital. There, still bleeding, he was handcuffed to his bed and falsely charged with assaulting police. The report claimed the suspects had opened fire, justifying their deaths as self-defense. Efren’s survival destroyed that lie.

Bearing Witness in a System Designed to Forget

Morillo’s testimony became one of the rare legal challenges to the drug war’s legitimacy. Forensic evidence confirmed his story: the men had been shot execution-style while kneeling. It took five years before courts finally acquitted him. His persistence symbolized resistance in a climate of intimidation, where witnesses were silenced, and truth often died before the victims did.

Efren’s courage forced the world to confront the human cost behind the numbers. He wasn’t a statistic or a scapegoat—he was proof that the violence wasn’t accidental. In surviving, he did what thousands could not: expose how a government’s war on crime became a war on its own citizens.

Behind Duterte’s violent success lay a relentless propaganda machine. He mastered populist storytelling, turning moral panic into mass loyalty. Every killing was narrated as a victory for safety; every corpse, a sign that justice was being served. Like other populists before him (from Mussolini’s Italy to Nixon’s “law and order” America), Duterte understood that emotional truth outweighs empirical fact.

By repeating lies until they felt real—millions of addicts, countless drug-related murders—he rewrote national reality. His coarse language became authenticity, his cruelty, strength. The mainstream media’s obsession with his blunt talk only amplified the myth. Citizens caught between fear and admiration accepted the narrative: only Duterte could save them from themselves.

The Normalization of Fear

As violence escalated, moral boundaries eroded. Neighbors turned against neighbors; parents reported their children to the police. This was Duterte’s genius: he transformed moral responsibility into complicity. The “War on Drugs” became not just state policy but a shared civic ritual—a collective cleansing masquerading as patriotism.

In every authoritarian system, fear isn’t just a byproduct—it’s a governing tool. The book shows how Duterte’s rhetoric exploited centuries-old class hierarchies, postcolonial inferiority, and economic inequality. By weaponizing humiliation and frustration, he didn’t just control Filipinos; he made them partners in their own subjugation.

As Duterte’s term ended in 2022, the physical and psychological scars of his regime remained. Tens of thousands were dead, thousands more orphaned or traumatized. Streets once alive with commerce now whispered with fear. Though hailed by some as a savior, Duterte left behind a legacy of blood—one still under investigation by international human rights bodies.

The book’s closing reflections ask what justice means in a country where institutions were trained to kill rather than protect. It’s a haunting question: can a nation recover when truth itself has been executed?

The Challenge of Reckoning

Trials like those stemming from Morillo’s case represent flickers of accountability in a sea of silence. But the path to national healing requires more than courts—it demands a cultural confrontation with fear, obedience, and misplaced faith in strongmen. Without that reckoning, the cycle of vengeance will keep turning under new names and new messiahs.

Ultimately, the moral of this story is deeply personal: when we allow fear to dictate policy, we invite cruelty to define justice. Duterte’s promise—of order through death—may have ended, but the question it raises remains timeless: What kind of peace do we really want, and what humanity are we willing to trade for it?