Duterte will go down in history a scourge to the Filipino people

By his own policies and actions, Duterte has already defined himself and his ruling clique as treasonous, tyrannical, mass murdering, plundering, and swindling. He will certainly go down in Philippine history as a scourge to the Filipino people.

  1. Supreme Protector of Drug Lords

He misrepresented himself as a crusader against the illegal drug trade and promised during the 2016 elections that he would solve the problem in three to six months. He used a bogus war on illegal drugs to incite and order the police to carry out the mass murder of 30,000 poor people tagged as drug users and peddlers and to spare the drug lords and smugglers under his protection.

Duterte has fully exposed himself as the supreme protector of drug lords and drug smugglers, that include his close Chinese friends and his close relatives. By his own admission, the drug problem has worsened, with drugs being freely smuggled and distributed to a clientele rising in number from 1.8 million to 8 million. Shamelessly, he uses his deliberate failure to stop the drug lords and drug smugglers as the pretext for perpetuating his license to engage in mass murder at the expense of the poor people.

2. Anti-Peace Scheme for a Fascist Dictatorship

Duterte has terminated the peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines since 2017 in order to use the continuing armed conflict as the reason for his tyrannical rule, de facto martial law nationwide and his scheme of fascist dictatorship through charter change to a bogus federalism in which the powers of government are concentrated in his hands and by which he can handpick his regional and provincial agents.

Duterte’s obsession with seeking to establish a fascist dictatorship is driven by his scheme to get a lion’s share in the plunder of the social and natural wealth of the people, to engage in selective and mass murders so as to entrench himself in power and prevent his arrest, prosecution and trial for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and by the people’s court of the people’s democratic government.

3. Chief Plunderer and King of Corruption

Duterte raised his 2016 electoral campaign funds from Chinese financiers and from such notorious Luzon-based plunderers as the Marcoses, Arroyos, Estradas, Enriles, Revillas and others who provided him with funds and bailiwick votes. Thus, he has gotten them off the hook in their plunder cases through the corrupt Supreme Court in exchange for their financial and political support.

Having become the president, Duterte is now the chief plunderer who cuts into all kinds of illegal and legal business enterprises, into big loan contracts with state banks and social insurance corporations, into the discretionary, intelligence, pork barrel and other accounts in the government budget and into contracts with Chinese and other foreign companies related to his infrastructure-building projects and other projects requiring the approval of the office of the president.

4. The Butcher Extends the Scale of his Butchery

Duterte has formed the national task force to destroy the revolutionary movement. This is both continuation of his all-out war against the people and the revolutionary forces and escalation of the same through the militarization of the civilian agencies, increased re-channeling of public funds for racketeering by the military and local officials, the faking of “localized peace talks”, ”mass surrenders” and “development” projects to divert funds from civilian agencies to military psywar and racketeering.

The worst and most brutal aspect of Implan Kalasag of Duterte’s national task force is to apply Oplan Tokhang methods of frame up and murder on the critics of his regime and suspected revolutionaries. These are red-tagged and listed. The list is used to label people as “communists or terrorists” and make them targets of “legal offensives,” and available for abduction, torture and murder by Duterte death squads embedded in the military and police. The murder of social activists, lawyers, human rights and peace advocates is now on the upsurge.

Duterte has turned the reactionary armed forces and police into his private armies by making their officers and men complicit with him in the commission of mass murder, corrupting and rewarding them with cash rewards and promotions and assuring them of presidential protection and immunity. The relatively more patriotic and saner elements of the reactionary armed forces and police have been offended by the privatization, criminalization and corruption of their armed services and are desirous of withdrawing support from their butcher commander-in-chief.

5. Puppet of Two Imperialist Powers

Duterte claimed that he was for an independent foreign policy and was favoring China only to even it up with the US. But in fact he is a puppet of both the US and the Chinese imperialists. All the treaties, agreements and arrangements that keep the US as the dominant imperialist power in the Philippines remain. But what makes Duterte’s connection with China outstanding is that he has received bribes in advance to allow China to build and militarize artificial islands in the West Philippine Sea and to turn the Philippines into a debt colony.

The Philippines is being turned into a debt colony of China by becoming burdened with high interest loans for overpriced infrastructure projects, which require the use of Chinese contractors, consultants, suppliers of equipment and construction-materials and even workers from the Chinese mainland. All the loans and construction projects are subject to Chinese laws and courts and to the conversion of loans to Chinese equity and acquisition of Philippine assets and natural resources as a consequence of defaults in loan payments.

6. Sabotaging the Philippine Economy

Duterte has kept and aggravated the same kind of agrarian, semifeudal and pre-industrial kind of Philippine economy by making it even more dependent on the export of raw materials and importation of foreign manufactures, principally catering to the upper class and mass consumers, and secondarily for semimanufacture of goods for re-export.


There is no industrial development. And yet agricultural production at per cent and import-dependent manufacturing have drastically fallen. The service sector is bloated at 58.6 per cent GDP.

What is passed off as industrial development is expanded mining, import-dependent semimanufacturing, private construction for the benefit of the big compradors and infrastructure building to facilitate the old pattern of economic and trade relations between the Philippines and foreign monopoly interests. Some 10.9 million or nearly a quarter of the work force of 44.1 million Filipinos are unemployed. More than 12 million Filipino are abroad as migrant workers for lack of employment in the Philippines . A big number are also underemployed. Thus, poverty has spread and become worse.

The budgetary deficit keeps on rising because of accelerated unproductive government spending for the military and the corrupt bureaucracy, financial outflows and the trade deficit keeps on widening because of the prolonged domestic conditions of semifeudal exploitation and stagnation as well as the global economic depression. The Philippines is more than ever dependent on onerous foreign loans and the foreign exchange remittances of overseas contract workers.

7. Generator of Inflation

Duterte is a generator of inflation in the Philippine economy. He is spending public funds at an unprecedentedly accelerated rate, raising taxes at the expense of the consumers, wantonly expanding credit to his cronies and outrightly printing money without support from real growth in production.

The tax burden in becoming heavier to cover the government budgetary and trade deficits and to assure foreign lenders that they have the priority in being paid back. The people are victimized by rising excise taxes on fuel and basic consumer goods and the soaring costs of imports due to the deterioration of the economy and the depressed incomes from mineral and agricultural exports.

Duterte is earning money for himself and his clique by increasing the budget for buying weapons from abroad and for intelligence funds which are not audited. In collaboration with the Chinese cartels in the trade of food staples (rice and corn), he allows them to manipulate the supply and prices in the country and at the same time to import the food staples by way of increasing their leverage against local food production by the peasants.

8. Patron of Land-grabbers

Duterte has boasted that he can carry out land reform and that the New People’s Amy is not needed for the purpose. In fact, he is distributing mere scraps of paper reminding so-called agrarian reform beneficiaries of their duty to pay for their arrears in land amortization. Ninety percent of so-called land reform beneficiaries in the bogus land reform program of the reactionary government have failed to make amortization payments.

In fact, Duterte is the patron of all land grabbers and land accumulators. He is accelerating the conversion or reclassification of land designated as subject to land reform to non-agricultural purposes. He is unleashing military offensives, bombing and forcing the communities of indigenous people and poor peasants to leave their land for the benefit of foreign and local mining, plantation and logging corporations. Thus, the people being displaced and dispossessed of their land are resisting and are relying on the armed democratic revolution to solve the land problem by undertaking genuine land reform.

9. Enemy of the Working Class

Duterte promised to end the practice of short-term contractualization, subjecting workers to a series of work contracts for less than six months. But he would make fun of his own lie by stating only fools could believe him because he would never do such a thing. Unemployment has worsened under the Duterte regime. Thus, the wage conditions of the working class have further deteriorated.

The regime is bound by neoliberal policy of unbridled greed, which his economic advisers pursue. The capitalist employers are allowed to employ more five-month contractuals and to press down wages in the face of growing unemployment. Thus, the surplus population in both urban and rural areas is rapidly increasing and is inclined to join the armed revolutionary movement. The pressing down of wages and suppression of workers’ trade union rights are effected by compulsory arbitration and state terrorism against the patriotic and progressive trade unions.

10. The Misogynist and Anti-Church Demagogue

To entertain his followers, Duterte loves to use vulgarity to slander and humiliate the women and the bishops and priests of the Catholic and other Christian churches. It is his way of generating an image of the strong-man in the same way that he uses the mass murder of the poor tagged as drug suspects and the social activists tagged as “Red”.

In fact, he has threatened to have his armed minions to shoot women suspected as NPA fighters in the vagina and to kill bishops and priests whom he ridicules as useless, stupid and gays because they are defending the people’s rights and opposing his mass murder of the poor people tagged either as as drug users and peddlers or as “communist terrorists”.

Already in power, he is not at all afraid of what the women’s movement and the churches can do to defend themselves because he is confident that he can prevail with the use of the government, opinion and poll surveys and mass media and he can also use the Comelec and the military to rig any process to determine the people’s will, like the forthcoming elections. It is after being elected to the highest office that the modern bourgeois tyrant or fascist dictator can do anything criminal with impunity. It takes an armed revolution to overthrow such a monster.###

Duterte will go down in history a scourge to the Filipino people