Behind the Bastards - Part One: Duterte: The Mass Murdering Mayor

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

Duterte’s drug war in the Philippines is now the greatest mass slaughter of civilians in Asia since the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In episode 24, Robert is joined by comedian Blake Wexler to discuss what’s happening in the Philippines and how it is entirely intentional and directed by a single man, Rodrigo Duterte. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, on this show, I read a story about someone terrible to a guest who has come in cold and this week my guest is Blake Wexler, stand-up comedian. You just had an album drop called Stuffed Boy. I got Stuffed Boy. You nailed it.

You nailed it. Excellent. How are you doing today? I'm good, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I love this idea. It's so cool. Well, you don't know who we're talking about today. No.

Does the name Rodrigo Duterte mean anything to you? It does not, actually. Okay. Okay. This is good. Fantastic. I just took a sip of something that's not Doritos, so I'm not going to give them a free ad, but you did do see me wolf down the significant chunk of a bag before we got into this. You liquefied it with your mouth.

I'm fired up. I'm ready to get into this. So, let us start an episode that I'm right now calling Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Murdertown. This is part one. He's a politician, then. Oh, yes. Oh, is that true? He's a very successful politician.

Excellent title. Currently the president of the Philippines. Okay. Yeah, so. Early on in his presidency, Donald Trump congratulated Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, for doing a quote, unbelievable job on the drug problem. In February of 2018, a senior administration official said this to the website Axios. Quote, he, Trump, often jokes about killing drug dealers. He'll say, you know the Chinese and Filipinos don't have a drug problem.

They just kill them. Interestingly enough, large parts of both of those statements are accurate. It would be fair to call Duterte's drug war in the Philippines unbelievable. In the last two years, 118,287 drug users or dealers have been arrested, and 1.3 million drug users have turned themselves into the authorities. More than 20,000 people, many of them children, have been killed. Virtually all of them were murdered often by mask men on motorcycles. This carnage was all explicitly promised to the people of the Philippines when they voted for Rodrigo Duterte. He's been fairly open about his desire to murder drug addicts, mostly users of Shabu or methamphetamine.

In September of 2016, President Duterte said this, if Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have, and then he pointed it himself and continued, Hitler massacred 3 million Jews, there's 3 million drug addicts, there are, I'd be happy to slaughter them. So, that's who we're talking about today. Guy who became president promising to kill 3% of the country. And so far he's kept his promise, like say what you will. He has killed a lot of them, yeah. The guy will deliver on a promise.

Now, I think he had promised to have killed a lot more by this point. So, you could argue that he's, I mean, every politician, they've vented a little bit. I know, thank you. He promised something like 60,000 in six months or whatever, and he hasn't made that much, but... How do you make up for that, like, you know, like, we need more masked men? Well, we ran out of masks, so we can't... Have you seen the mask shortage lately? There's just nothing left on the shelves. People stop using drugs, now we just have to kill regular people.

Oh, we're just murdering people, which they are, they are. They also are killing petty criminals, pickpockets and stuff, or also getting shot dead by murder squads. Like, petty criminals and that, like, they're passive aggressive and, like, they like to... You interpreted that sentence differently than it usually is. Just major criminals who are really, really passive aggressive. Yes, exactly. No, no, no, that's not what's happening. Okay, that's fair.

They're just murdering poor people. Oh, that's bad, then. Yeah, no, it's really terrible. Right. So President Duterte's drug war in the Philippines is now the greatest mass slaughter of civilians in Asia since the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Jesus. But much of the death caused by the Khmer Rouge was accidental due to their insane and patently idiotic social experiments. What's happening in the Philippines is entirely intentional, directed by a single man.

So how did a man like Rodrigo Duterte come to be, and how did Filipino democracy allow for his rise to power? You ready for a history lesson? I'm very ready. Here's a quick... Is Manny Pacquiao in the Philippines? Yeah, he's a member of Congress and a supporter of Duterte. Right. Okay, cool.

Yeah, I mean, he doesn't play a big role in this, but he actually is, like, very politically active and a supporter of the mayor's murder people agenda. God, that guy just gets worse and worse pressed. Just over and over again. He's a homophobe, not good at boxing anymore, and he supports a murderer. All right, anyway, yeah, just wondering. Yeah, mass murderer. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Don't you dare take the mass away.

Don't undercut this man's accomplishments. He earned that title. He did. Yes, he did. Yes. Yes, he did, and yes, he can have people shot in the streets. That was his campaign slogan, by the way. Yes, we can.

Yes, we can shoot pickpockets. Yes, we can accidentally gun down children off of motorcycle back because it's hard to hit drug addicts when you're shooting at them from a motorcycle. It is. Yeah, it is. Well, accidents are going to happen. You miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. That's a really good way to look at gunning down people in the street. Yeah, I've been saying it for years in regards to that issue.

I think American police could adopt that as a motto, too. They definitely could, especially when they're, well, I mean, we all live in Los Angeles. We were all there for the, that's outside of the point. The police firing at a traitor Joe's, but. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. You do get a lot of cases like that in the Philippines right now because there's just essentially guys on motorcycles roaming around killing people who have been, the government has put on a list as drug pushers or whatever. And they're just kind of firing into crowds and stuff a lot of the time.

Do they have a cool name? Yeah, actually they do. I figured they'd have to, right? Yeah, we'll get into that. Very cool. There is a cool name. Yeah, no, for sure. They even have like a patch and stuff.

It's pretty sweet. Okay, good. All right, so let's get in some history so we can understand sort of the context that Duterte came to power in. So Spain was the first colonial power to take control in the Philippines. The rule there sort of began in the 1520s when Ferdinand Magellan successfully planted some flags and then got murdered. Spanish domination nonetheless spread across the island chain and for the next 300 and something years, they would be the dominant power in the archipelago. Spain brought many things to the Philippines, including the Catholic faith. It proved to be a decidedly mixed bag, but that's coming in a little bit.

So by the late 1800s, Spanish power had started to fade. In 1896, self-declared President Emilio Aguinaldo led a local insurrection in Spain. By the time the Spanish-American war kicked off and U.S. forces reached the Philippines, Aguinaldo had conquered basically everything in the Philippines but the capital of Manila. The Filipino rebels worked with the U.S. Navy to encircle the city, but the U.S. refused direct support until her troops were able to land and replace the Filipinos around Manila. See, the U.S. was actually communicating directly with Spain during this whole time because even though we were actively at war with them and fighting alongside the insurgents trying to cast off Spanish control, we still considered Spain the rightful government of the Philippines. The fact that the Filipino people had actually already picked a president and fought in blood for a new government didn't really matter to us. So we sat down and we worked out a deal with the Spanish garrison commander.

He agreed to surrender under the condition that the U.S. make it look like there'd been a battle. So he was like, I'll surrender this city, but you got to pretend that we fought for it. But people have to die in this surrender. Well, I don't think anybody died in the fighting. It was like a staged battle where they were just kind of like shooting so it looked like, okay, we didn't just surrender Manila. Like when you're kids, you just bang your swords together, you know, when you're fighting with fake swords. That, by the way, I was assuming that we've all had sword fights as children was, yeah. But it's not an actual stabbing motion. You're just hitting. Yeah, I would love to watch a fake battle. Yeah, it seems like it could have been a lot of fun.

Yeah, so there were other conditions to the surrender. No Filipino rebels could be allowed inside the city. So on August 13th, 1898, the fake battle of Manila was fake fought and Americans took the city. You might think that helping a captive people throw off the chains of colonial bondage would have been the U.S.'s thing. What with that being our history. But President William McKinley felt differently. He decided to annex the islands in order to better, quote, educate the Filipinos and uplift them and Christianize them. He did not believe that they were capable of governing themselves.

The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War, gave the U.S. the option of buying the Philippines for $20 million. In January of 1899, they were ours. Was he assassinated McKinley? He sure was. He shot dead by an anarchist and kind of had it coming. I'm going to go ahead and say it. Fuck William McKinley. Kind of a dick. So as you might have guessed, the army of free people who had just liberated themselves from a colonial oppressor were not happy with having another colonial oppressor land on top of them. In February, Aguinaldo and his army attacked the United States forces.

Conventional warfare was not successful for the Philippine rebels, what with the machine guns and such. So the Filipino army turned into the Filipino insurgency in November of 1899. The U.S. army proved profoundly ill-suited to guerrilla warfare, which is something that's never happened again in our history. Right, yeah. Yeah, no. That was the first and last time. First and last time. It's the uniforms. They're not breathable. You can't wear them in a jungle.

No, and once we figured out Under Armour, we really had counterinsurgency down. Yes. It turned out. A hundred percent. Camel backs. Yeah. It was a hydration issue. Yeah, it was a hydration issue. That was the problem.

So after about a year of fighting, Major General Arthur MacArthur took over the U.S. forces and declared martial law over the entire Philippine archipelago. He enacted General Order 100, which was an old civil war directive that allowed the army to execute ununiformed combatants and their supporters. The goal was to isolate the guerrillas, and that's exactly what happened. Aguinaldo was captured in March of 1901. Now at that point, things degenerated into severe ugliness. General Franklin Bell forced 300,000 Filipino civilians onto concentration camps, where a good number of them died of disease. In August of 1901, there was a machete attack that wiped out most of an American garrison on an island called Samar. Jesus. The army responded by massacring every man above the age of 10, which you may note included a lot of children.

You've never heard the phrase, oh, I saw this 11-year-old man the other day. Wait, what? An 11-year-old man. Okay, he's 10, but this son's a hard 11. You get him in the killing truck. There was a group of 12-year-old men yelling at me. This was a different time. People died of cholera when they were 14, usually, I guess, but still seems a little bit harsh. The average age of retirement, by the way, back then, 14.

We did make the general who carried out the massacre retire, so that's a version of justice. It really is. A shade of justice, yeah. By February of 1902, the insurgency finally ran out of steam. President Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, the bully guy, declared victory on the 4th of July 1902. They actually extended the length of the war so that he could declare victory on the 4th of July. Amazing. Yeah, that's a very Teddy Roosevelt thing to do.

A true equestrian thing to do. What's a few more days of war? July 4th. We'll save so much money on fireworks. Let's do this right. In total, 4,234 Americans died during the fighting, along with 20,000 Filipino insurgents and 200,000 civilians. So, it's a bad time. Yeah.

Bad time all around. Except for a three-year occupation by the Japanese, the Philippines remained in U.S. control until 1946, when we gave the country back to itself and helped them build a wonderful democracy in our image. From 1950 to 1965, this worked pretty well. Average economic growth was higher in the Philippines than it was anywhere else in Southeast Asia. So, a little bit of a rough start, a couple hundred thousand dead, you know? Not a great start. Right, but you can move on. But you can move on, and by the 50s, you're making bank.

Yeah, we use them as a base. We use this shit out of them as a base. We parked some planes on that fucking rock. Boats, all the damn boats. Aircraft carriers going left and right, U.S. soldiers getting real drunk in Manila. Oh, my God. I mean, how many generations of now-elderly Americans got their tattoos in Manila in that period? I would love to, if we can get that stat, that exact stat, how many staff infections from the tattoos they had.

Right. Yeah. Identical amount, by the way. It's the same number. It's the same number, 100%. Rodrigo Roa Duterte was born right on the cusp of this period on March 28, 1945. So, right before the Philippines gets its independence. So, like many Filipinos, he grew up Catholic, which I said before has been kind of a mixed bag for the people of the Philippines.

For the people of the United States as well. Really the world. Really for everybody. Right. In 2002, Archbishop Orlando Cuivado, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference, admitted that 200 of the 7,000 priests in the Philippines may have committed sexual misconduct over a 20-year period. I'm going to guess this means that actual abuse of Filipino children by Catholic priests goes back further than 20 years, probably to the beginning of Catholicism in the Philippines. One of the presumably many Filipino children molested by Catholic priests during this time was a 14-year-old schoolboy named Rodrigo Duterte. Shortly after taking office, he called Pope Francis a son of a whore due to a traffic thing that the pope had caused.

And when this caused something of an out... The most relatable thing this guy's probably... The only relatable thing, the defensible thing that he's done is get pissed off at traffic. Pissed off at traffic and calling the pope the son of a whore. Son of a whore. That's something of an outrage. And Duterte sort of talked to... Because most of the Filipino people are Catholic.

Right. And so Duterte sort of tried to walk this back by claiming that he'd been abused by an American Jesuit priest, Father Mark Falvey, in 1959 when he was 14. Duterte said, quote, it was a case of fondling. You know what he did during confession. That's how we lost our innocence early. Duterte claimed he was too afraid to file a complaint at the time, but he claims that Falvey abused several other boys as well. And this is very likely true. Falvey returned to the United States, I think in the mid-50s, after his time with Duterte and his classmates, and set up shop on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California.

And was there for a couple of decades and allegedly abused a number of children in the United States, although none of this came out until he was already dead. It's interesting that this guy is such a pile of shit that even someone who speaks out about his personal being sexually abused is still not a sympathetic character. I mean, there's a claim to be made that maybe this guy's a worse person, this may have contributed to some of why he is the way he is. It certainly couldn't have helped. No, no. Right. It certainly didn't make him a kinder person. This was not a positive thing.

He has a major anti-Catholic bias, and currently with all the fucked up stuff his government's doing, the Catholic Church is fighting back against it, which in this case I think they're right to be fighting against murdering people in the street. But also, he's got a real good reason to be angry at the Catholic Church. Yeah, what a mess. Yeah, it is a real mess. So obviously, it's hard to say how this abuse impacted adult President Duterte, but it undoubtedly had an impact on him as a child. He repeatedly got in trouble for acting up in school. On one occasion, he got in trouble for shooting rocks at a priest with a homemade catapult. Now, it is possible that the writer who related this story meant...

A slingshot. A slingshot. I didn't check up on that to see if that slang, because I want to believe that he fashioned a crude catapult. A trebuchet. Yeah, a trebuchet. That's... Imagine walking down... What the fuck is that?

You have to have a team as well. You have to have a team and you have to be very good at whittling. That is a very funny word confusion. I choose to believe that it was a catapult. He also got in trouble for shooting at a priest who was in an all-white outfit, some weird priest outfit with a water gun filled with ink. That was after Labor Day. Yeah, it's cute. It's fun so far.

He was known to go truant for months at a time, and of course, all of his acting out was punished brutally. Rodrigo's mother, Soledad Roa Gonzalez, was a harsh disciplinarian. She would flog him brutally for his misbehavior, like whipping him in the back and stuff. She was also a teacher known for forcing her students to stand out in the tropical sun for long periods of time when they misbehaved. Jesus. He's got a rough childhood in a lot of ways. He's also kind of a privileged kid in a lot of ways, because Rodrigo's father was Vincent Duterte, a prominent politician who became the governor of the DeVal province. Now, Rodrigo and his three siblings grew up with a private cook, a driver, a boy, which I don't know...

That's how he's described as a boy. So, I assume that's like a little go for a runner or something, but just a kid in the house. Just a child that we basically own. Right. That is a rich thing. Yes, no. I was born with only one boy, but I've worked my ass off, and now we have six boys in the house. Oh boy.

Oh boy. There we go. He also had several bodyguards. Rodrigo was even given a bodyguard of his own, and since his parents were too busy to talk to him a lot of the time, the bodyguards who took care of Rodrigo did a lot of the raising. Now, this next quote comes from a book called Rodrigo Duterte, Fire and Fury in the Philippines by Jonathan Miller, a British correspondent, foreign correspondent who spent years and years living in and reporting on Philippine politics. He adopted the persona of a bugoy, the term for hoodlum in his local Bessiah language. He developed what was to become a lifelong obsession with guns. He drank and smoked and slept around. Often he didn't come home at all, and if he did, he'd slip in at 4 a.m. He became increasingly nocturnal and remained so to this day. He holds press conferences that begin at 1 a.m. He appears groggy when he has to attend a morning function. Now, this is not that Duterte is a dictator, because he's not quite yet, but this is a thing that you will run into in dictators all throughout history, is they are all night owls, like Hitler, Stalin, Gaddafi, Saddam.

The list goes on and on and on. They all are famous for staying up really, really late and usually have trouble getting up in the morning. They often are watching movies late into the night and stuff. It's just kind of a dictator trope. Interesting. Yeah, I guess it makes sense, because I don't need all this sun. Not a lot of positive things happen at night after you get past a certain period of night. It's like, no, I need to be up at 4 for all the wonderful things that happen at 4 a.m. Oh, no. See, it's very isolating. Or are you like that? I am like that. I think that there's probably a reason, if you're the kind of person who is awake more often at night than you are in the day, you have a different perspective than everybody else does. That's useful in a lot of things, but one thing that may be useful is if you're trying to manipulate a political structure, maybe having that different perspective on things helps you do that.

Maybe the fact that these guys don't live in the same world as everyone else allows them to manipulate it better. Yeah, no, that makes sense. They wake up like, why do these bats have feathers? They just don't understand. Ah, the day bats. These day bats. These damn day bats. Somebody get my boy to get rid of these day bats. Well, that's the boys. You found it. That's his job. Getting rid of the day bats. What a lark. So, Miller, the guy just quoted who wrote Fire and Fury in the Philippines, that's a major source for this episode. It's the first, I think, biography of Duterte that's been published, at least for a world audience so far. And it has a very clear anti-Duterte bias. But the journalist writing it also has spent a lot of time talking to Rodrigo in person and a lot of figures in his life, his sisters and other family members, people who knew him as kids.

So, the book is pretty indispensable, even though it does have a clear bias. He got a number of anecdotes about young Rodrigo. One of them from his sister, Jocelyn, was about how when he was a teenager, Rodrigo would scare off her wannabe boyfriends by when they would come over to the house waving a gun at them. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this is what he's doing is like, you know, 14 or so. Right. Now, in 1965, when Duterte was 20, Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines. Do you know much about Marcos? I don't, actually. He was not a nice guy. No. No, no, no. It just so happens that this was at a time when the economy had started to level off, so Marcos comes to power in a time when sort of this 15 year boom is coming to an end and starting to reverse a little.

And with less money coming in, the problems inherent in the system that the Philippines had inherited from the United States became more evident. I'm going to quote from the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos from the University of California Press. Quote, the U.S. style judicial system with an adversary process that emasculated the poor in complex procedures that endlessly delayed decisions could not cope with injustice and crime. That doesn't sound. No, well, yeah. Yeah. That sounds old. Private weapons were more widespread than in any country. That doesn't sound familiar either. And it was common for cars to be stopped and robbed in daylight on major streets.

The Democratic patronage system inhibited removal of corruption and incompetent civil leaders. Democracy directly inhibited measures designed to ameliorate some of the world's worst social inequality. A Congress of elected landlords dragged its feet in passing land reform legislation and then funding it. A series of presidents who were landholders, including Ferdinand Marcos, initially refused to spend land reform funds. The landholders' lawyers defeated the valid claims of peasants who could afford no lawyers and exploited the complexity of U.S. style court procedures to delay adverse judgments for a decade or more. So basically, they handed the Philippines essentially the same sort of political system the U.S. has, but the Philippines did not have. One of the things that we have as a buffer against the very rich, or at least we used to have, was a very large middle class. And so these people could get in court and could make their cases heard. You know, it's still stacked against them, but they had more political power.

There was a chance, right? Yeah, it wasn't just very poor people and then very rich people, which is what the Philippines inherited. The problems that are becoming more obvious of our system now, in a time of increasing inequality in the United States, were started to tear apart the Filipino national unity in the 1960s. So that's essentially what's happened. Yeah, it was a fast-forward version of America. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now they've passed us.

Like, that's future. They skipped right to the end. Right, right. So we're going to get to the rest of Marcos' term and what Rodrigo Duterte gets up to during that period of time. And then his election as mayor of a city where he will murder people. That's what he does. Right, right. But first, something that won't murder you adds.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

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I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about Rodrigo Duterte, and actually we're talking about Ferdinand Marcos, who just became president of the Philippines. And we're going to talk about that and what Duterte's life was like. And the narrative of this podcast. And the narratives. We're not breaking news, he's not back. No, no.

If this is news to you, you should read a little bit. Why is this the first thing that you listen to after coming out of your coma? Oh my God. Shit. What else? A dictator in the Philippines. I'm going back to sleep. When I fell asleep in 1965, the economy was on fire.

So by the time Marcos' third term comes to an end, the Philippines is riddled with both increasing economic problems and also a lot more protesting and a lot of unrest. Many people in the Philippines wanted to become a U.S. state rather than chart an independent course, because they kind of had that right. They were like, you do your thing for a while, but there will be ways you could potentially be a state if you wanted to. And so there were a lot of people who were like, well, I mean, look at them. They got all the money in nukes. Let's just be part of that. And then there were a lot of people being like, no, let's do our own thing. Marcos being a nationalist decides he wants to take over and take more direct power over the country.

So he engineers a constitutional convention, which included a lot of reforms and was meant to transition the country away from U.S. style democracy and towards a different system with like a prime minister that was supposed to fit better and have less of the inequalities. The major sticking point came down to the fact that there had to be an interim period between these two constitutions. And during this interim period, the head of state, Marcos, would occupy the offices of president and prime minister simultaneously. So there was a debate over how long this interim period was going to be. Most people would say, okay, maybe a couple of days while we like, you know, do this thing. He wanted it to be indefinitely long. Yeah, I can see why he would want that. You could see why someone might want that.

So he instituted a scheme that sounds kind of like an info wars conspiracy theory. I'm going to quote again from the rise and fall of Ferdinand Marcos. One by one, the delegates to the convention were summoned by intelligence chief general Ver who reviewed with them their various failures to pay taxes, occasions on which their security guards had killed people under dubious circumstances, and other misdeeds which, according to the general, the judicial system would of course have to confront unless the delegates saw fit to serve their nation by voting appropriately on the duration of the interim period. The cream of the national political elite proved extraordinarily vulnerable to personal pressures and frequently valid accusations of felony. So basically everybody in power was so corrupt that when Marcos was like, I'll investigate you just a little bit if you don't vote with this. They were like, oh god, oh my crimes.

There is a lot to find. They'll learn that where all the boys are buried. All you need is a little bit and our whole career will come crashing down. Yeah, and that was apparently everybody in Congress. Right. So, I mean, we laugh, but it's just politics. So Marcos got their longer interim period and during that period, Marcos' government carried out a false flag attack on itself by shooting up the Minister of Defense's empty Mercedes Benz. This was announced as a communist assassination attempt.

The government also blew up several power pylons around Manila and blamed this as well on the Commies. They used the terror attacks that the government itself had carried out to justify implementing martial law in 1972. So this is the second time in our story that martial law has been declared in the Philippines. They're kind of getting used to it at this point. Right. It's a great kind of law. If you're going to have a law, let it be martial. Of course.

I've always said that. Yeah, I went to law school with an emphasis on martial law and it hasn't really come up yet. I've really been out of work for quite some time. See, what I'm imagining when I think of how that could be positive is just the instructor from the karate kit. Right. Just him enforcing all of the laws, which would legitimately be a better system than we have. Or the retail chain is that's their law, where they're just closed. Oh, martial's law.

Yeah, martial's law. You just throw clothes on the ground and people buy them. Clothing no one else would sell. Exactly. I guess that's a positive spin on it. That might be worse, actually. Martial's law, if it's just law by the most discounted, that might be what we have right now. Oh, boy.

I should go to Martial's. I need a torn yoga mat. I need a mug with the handle broken off of it. A partially opened bag of chips. Yes. Martial's. Martial's. We have it.

Probably. There's no inventory system whatsoever. There's no way to know what we have coming here and checking it out. But we do have shelves with things on them. Oh, Martial's really taking some hits today. Yeah, good. It's about time for the TJ Maxx Lobby. Yeah.

So yeah, Marcos declares martial law justifying that they've got to fight the communists, even though there were only about 800 communist insurgents in the entire Philippines at that point. But you know, you're never going to let the facts get in the middle of a good martial law bitch. So around this time, Duterte had finished college in law school. His bar exam was delayed because of the military takeover of the country, which good reason to delay a test. Rodrigo actually wound up missing his graduation ceremony for a completely different reason. He had ambushed and shot one of his fellow students to teach him a lesson. Well, the guy had mocked him for being from the south, and so Duterte had ambushed him and shot him,

I think several times, but the guy did survive. That is an institution of higher learning. That is how you teach a lesson. We'll let you be a lawyer, but you don't get to come to graduation because you shot somebody. Fine. Yeah. That's a fair punishment. Fucking rules.

Yeah. So Marcos ruled into the late 1980s. While the CIA had backed his rivals at first, they eventually came around to the old lug and his communists slaughtering ways. He and his wife, who stole an estimated $10 billion from the Philippines, enjoyed the strong support of the Reagan administration. The New York Times says that Ronald, quote, genuinely cherished Ferdinand and his wife, Emelda, quote. In 1969, Governor and Miss Reagan visited Manila, where Emelda's opulent parties dazzled them. From then on, Reagan, impressed by Marcos' exaggerated stories of his exploits as an anti-Japanese guerrilla, counted him among the world's freedom fighters in the struggle against communism.

In Reagan's eyes, one of his aides mused later, Marcos was, quote, a hero on a bubblegum card he had collected as a kid. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of deck do those cards come in, by the way? Oh. The fucking communist murderer. The Reagan bubblegum cards?

Yeah. Oh, man. Who else would be on those cards? I mean, Joseph McCarthy's probably on there, for sure. Hitler? Hitler? Yeah, we can throw him on there, probably. Hitler killed some communists, that's for sure.

A rookie Hitler card. Where he's just got his bullwhip and his shorts. Yes. Yeah. Right. I wonder what a Hitler rookie card's worth these days. Hundreds. Yeah.

So, yeah, one of the other people who helped out, Marcos, during sort of the late 80s, when he was having increasing trouble over all of the people, he was torturing tens of thousands of people. How many years, sorry, is this into his indefinite table? Like 20 years. Okay, cool. He pulled about 20-some years. Right. I mean, he only had about 14 years of martial law, from 72 to 86.

And during a good chunk of that, one of the people who represented him to the United States, who tried to help get him additional funds from the government, was a little fellow you might know called Paul Manafort. And in fact, one of Manafort's employees flew with Marcos when he fled the mob that was taking over his palace and went to Hawaii to go die. One of Manafort's employees flew with him on that flight. So, that's nice to know. The Marcos regime proved unpopular if they only held on to power through the application

of brutal martial law. More than 3,200 people were executed during his time in power. And more than 34,000 were tortured. Victims included student activists like the 23-year-old Lily Hillow, who edited a student newspaper critical of the Marcos regime. She was forced to commit suicide by drinking myriadic acid. Yeah, it's dark. Is that suicide?

Yeah. Yeah, because she was tortured and assaulted a bunch until she... Oh, right, right, right. Okay, semantics. Yeah. During this period of martial law, a new drug introduced in the Philippines. We know it as methamphetamine. Now, prior to Spanish colonization, the Filipino people had had a fairly mild drug culture.

I think betel nut was one of the big things they'd used. I think marijuana was around, but it wasn't super common. If you say betel nut three times, it appears just so you know. That's just the juice. Oh, fuck. Okay, I'm sorry. Which is, I think, what you spit out when you've been chewing it a lot. Yes, you're right.

Okay, sorry. I know. So prior to Spanish colon... Yeah, they did a fairly minor drug culture with no evidence of serious addiction to anything. Opium got to the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period because the East India Company would essentially drop it off during their trading. But the Philippines would not have a real drug crisis until meth got its grips on the new nation.

I found one account from a Filipino writer who claims that he first became aware of the drug in 1981. He wrote, a neighbor excitedly asked, have you heard about the new drug in town called Japanese Coke? It was called Japanese because the way they smoked it reminded people of a Japanese hot pot style dish, which they called a shabu-shabu dish. So meth acquired the local named shabu, and by the mid 1980s it had grown quite popular among a certain set, although it was still fairly expensive at this point.

So Ferdinand Marcos was forced out of office in 1986 by the People Power Revolution. The new president, Corazon Aquino, made Rodrigo Duterte the acting vice mayor of Davao City, the most populous city on the island of Mandano, and the third most populous city in the whole Philippines. In 1988 he ran for election and won as mayor. Now by this point, Davao City was one of the most violent cities in the Philippines. Duterte was elected as a law and order candidate. He promised to stop street crime, combat the use of shabu and other drugs.

And he was pretty straight away a strict mayor. He instituted a series of pretty harsh laws, including fines for jaywalking, a 10pm curfew for all children, a 9pm ban on karaoke, a ban on firecrackers, and a massive reduction in speed limits. Rodrigo was known to patrol the streets himself on his own Harley Davidson motorcycle, observing traffic and looking out for rule breakers. So he's a hands on kind of mayor. Yeah, feet to the pedal, feet on the ground.

And by the way, the 10 o'clock curfew for children, by the way, it was just people four years old and younger. Yeah, no, no, no, no. It's very loose. No, you're about four, you're an adult. Right, of course. Yeah, nine year old adults can do whatever the hell they want. Well, I mean, they'd better be getting to work at the factory factory.

Probably. Right. A factory that builds factories for smaller children to work in. Yes. I don't actually know if that's a... It's a big part of the economy. Yeah, we're still just riffing on US policy from 1901. Right, right.

So depending on your attitude towards jaywalking and karaoke, that may sound reasonable. And in fact, I support an earlier curfew on anyone under 18. Mm-hmm. I think they should be allowed out of the house from like 10 a.m. to like 2 p.m. Yeah. And locked indoors the rest of the time. Right. That's just...

That's your platform. Harsh but fair. Yeah. I think we can all agree. Mm-hmm. So yeah, a few years into his maritim, Duterte, basically for the first close to a decade, he's a harsh mayor and institutes strict policies against petty crime, but he doesn't really seem to have a huge amount of focus on the drug war on the radar.

This becomes more of a thing in the mid-90s, and especially by the late 90s, 1998, he really starts to ramp up persecution of drug users and drug pushers. And in fact, a few years into his maritim in the mid-90s, Duterte established what's now known as the devout death squad, which exists and existed to murder criminals. Quote, during the seven terms of Mayor Duterte, the bodies of hundreds of street kids and petty criminals, as well as addicts and dealers of crystal meth or shabu, as it is known in the Philippines, were found dumped in devouts back streets. Often their corpses were discovered with their faces wrapped in masking tape.

Their hands were tied, and handwritten signs were hung around their necks. Addict, pusher, thief. The people of devout city came to realize that these murders would all remain unsolved. So, again, it's hard to say exactly when the devout death squad became active. By 1997, they were tied to around 65 deaths. By 2015, they would be tied to well over 1,000 deaths. Was that their official title? Did he call them the devout death squad?

Everyone called them the devout death squad. He would usually call them vigilantes. Unknown vigilante killers is usually how these guys are officially known. And most of these victims were killed. Their signature weapon was a.45 caliber handgun, which was, interestingly enough, the.45 ACP handgun, the Colton 1911, that was used by the U.S. from World War I, World War II, up until almost the modern day, I think in the 80s, is when they switched over. That was developed for the Philippines, because before that, they were using a smaller bullet,

and Filipino warriors were essentially so imposing that they felt like it didn't have enough stopping powers. They needed a bigger round to clamp down on the insurgency. So, the.45 has a real significant reputation in the Philippines, and it has become now the gun of the mayor's death squad in Davao City. So, interesting little bit of history there. So, yeah, officially the murders committed by the devout death squad were the work of unknown vigilante killers, but the actual work was often done by off-duty police officers at the direct urging of Mayor Duterte. Several of these killers have now come forward to confirm that Duterte organized the Davao death squad.

Rodrigo himself denies this sometimes. On the TV show he hosted while mayor, also he hosted a television show while mayor called On The Masses. He stated, quote, they say I am the death squad? True. That is true. He's gone on to deny that again since, and basically said, no, I was saying they say that I'm the death squad, and it's true that they say it, but I'm not the death. You have a death squad. You have a death squad. And he wants to brag about it so badly, too.

How much does he love having a death squad? I mean, who wouldn't want a death squad? Yes. I would love a death squad. It would be incredible. Just to handle neighbors and drug addicts. People who drive too slow or too fast, mostly those groups. This goes without saying, but it is very interesting that his hatred for drug addicts and thieves goes way beyond his hatred for murdering. He loves murder, but hates, which on the crime scale is obviously generally above drugs.

Most of us would say, yeah, yeah. It's very interesting where he's like, no, being dead is more noble than wasting the time that you're alive by being addicted to drugs. Yeah, and for a guy who has rejected religion so thoroughly, that's a weirdly like almost fundamentalist religious sort of attitude to take towards drug use, which is interesting to me. Very interesting. I will say, if I had a death squad, I know who I would target first. So I go running in a couple of neighborhoods. And we'll be right back. We're going to have that for you in a moment. I'm just kidding. That's not my job.

Well, there's a couple of neighborhoods I like to run in Santa Monica. One of them, the speed limit in the neighborhood is 30 miles an hour, but people have put out signs that say, my kids live here, don't drive over 20. With that yellow fucking thing with the flag? Yeah, it's like, you don't get to make the speed limits, just because you've got to, that's who I'd target. People trying to make the speed limits. It sucks. I know. It's just so obnoxious. What a rich person thing, too.

Yeah, you don't get to make that choice. Anyway, we'll be back, not talking about people who want to have murdered by death squads. But maybe. But maybe. We may not be done with that. But maybe. But I can guarantee who doesn't use death squads is the people who support this podcast with advertising. No death squads are related to the operation of this podcast or its sponsors.

And we should have mentioned that earlier. We should have mentioned that earlier. Zero death squads, maybe one eventually. Alright, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the good-bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. His business is called You Broke It, he fixed it, and he is capitalized, obviously. So, obviously the main subject of this podcast is Rodrigo Duterte. And as we've gotten to this, he's become the mayor, and he's kind of sort of definitely started a death squad. So in 1998, which is the year that the death squad really ramps up, it's death squatting. Rodrigo's wife, Elizabeth, asks for an annulment of their marriage.

This is interesting because you can't get divorced in the Philippines. The Philippines is actually one of two nations on the planet, the other is the Vatican, where divorce is illegal. So again, very Catholic. This will become more remarkable later because Duterte, I'll give it to him, he doesn't give a fuck what people think about him. He's quite a fellow. So during this annulment, a clinical psychologist was asked to analyze Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. She wrote, quote, he is suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder with aggressive features. These features included, quote, his gross indifference, insensitivity, and self-centeredness, his grandiose sense of self and entitlement, his manipulative behaviors,

his lies and his deceits, as well as his pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others, and violate their rights and feelings. So this is a clinical psychologist analyzing the mayor of DeVau. Narcissistic personality disorder, which our regular listeners will notice. Alex Jones, who we just did a big episode on, was also diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. All your guests probably as well. I think we all probably have it. It's probably like 60% of Los Angeles, California. So some of Mayor Duterte's most celebrated moments are clear evidence of all of these things.

His tendency to demean, humiliate, and violate other people's rights. One of his signature efforts as mayor was an anti-smoking campaign meant to wipe cigarettes off the streets. Sounds fine, right? Yeah, yeah. Cigarettes? Bad. So that's probably the end of it, right? Probably the end of it. Nothing ridiculous ever happened.

No, of course not. Well, during this time, one of the most popular stories from Mayor Duterte's reign is that he spotted a tourist smoking outside. He confronted the man, and the tourist refused to put out his cigarette. So Duterte, quote, pulled out a snub-nosed 38 revolver and poked it at the man's crotch. He said, I'll give you these choices. I'll shoot your balls, send you to jail, or you eat your cigarette butt. The tourist is said to have apologized before swallowing the cigarette butt. Stories like this, whether or not they're true, are part of how Rodrigo earned the nickname Duterte Harry.

Cause like, dirty Harry. Oh, I like that. Exactly. The Philippines, obviously, we own them for a long time. We use a mix of resentment because we did a lot of fucked up things to the Philippines, but also really deep love of American pop culture and music and stuff like that. So people get a dirty Harry reference. Yeah, anyway.

They do. Yeah. Now, it is worth noting that there's some debate over the true nature of this story, because when questioned about it, Duterte Spokesman said that, quote, as far as he knew, the mayor had never pointed a revolver at anyone, although he did specify a revolver. Right, right. That's interesting. Yeah, but he didn't even say pistol.

He said a very specific type of handgun. It's also worth noting, and a little bit familiar to our own politics, that the same night his spokesman said that the story was bullshit, Duterte turned up on television to confirm the anecdote and add that he had told the tourist, I will make both your balls explode. So that's from the mayor now, President's mouth. He punched it up. He's like, no, no, no, no.

I didn't just say that. I told him I'm going to blow his balls up if he doesn't eat a cigarette. Let me add some imagery for you. There are a lot of stories like this, according to Fire and Fury in the Philippines, quote, and then there is the case of a man who was caught selling fake land titles. Duterte forced him to eat them in front of TV cameras. Reporters remember him instructing the cameraman to zoom in on him chewing. So, Jesus.

He's a character. You can see why this guy got really popular, because that's the kind of stories people love about a political figure. He's not just being tough. This tourist came in and thinks he can smoke in our city on the street and throw it a cigarette. But no, the mayor's going to make him eat it. They're going to make him eat it, and the other guy eat his land. It's very obsessed with making people eat their crimes.

Yeah, devour your crimes. It's not that big of a deal if you sell a stolen pizza. It's like, hi, I made him eat his pizza. Fuck, it was not that big of a deal. Yeah, be a pizza thief in Davao City. That's the smart money. That is the smart money. In 2001, Rodrigo Duterte got on local television and read out the names of 500 people on his watchlist.

Cash rewards were offered to citizens who could provide information on drug labs or dealers. A few days after this, he sat down for an interview and was asked how he felt about being called the godfather of the Davao Death Squad. He replied, quote, I don't give a damn. I don't give a shit. What I should do now is honor my commitment. To be really truthful and honest about it, I would rather see criminals dead than innocent victims die being killed senselessly. Now, when he said those words, four of the people on his list had already been murdered.

17 more died before the article was published. The victims were all either drug dealers or mobile phone pickpockets. Four were children. In less than three weeks, 26 people on the list had been killed, including, quote, marketplace vendors, construction workers, a housewife, and two members of a leftist political party. Now, in 2003, June Paula, a shock-jock radio guy in Davao City, made fun of Rodrigo's son Paolo for beating up a hotel security guard. He repeated persistent rumors that Paolo was addicted himself to crystal meth. This pissed Rodrigo Duterte off, and in September of that year, June Paula was ambushed and gunned down in the streets.

His murder is officially unsolved. Although, in February of 2017, Arturo Lascáñez confessed to having been a leading member of the Davao Death Squad and claimed under oath that he'd been paid $20,000 to murder this guy. So... Well, he's making jobs. He's making jobs! He's a job creator. Exactly. Lascáñez is able to feed his family off of the money he got murdering the radio personality for making fun of the fact that Rodrigo's son beat up a guy at a hotel.

Amazing. Amazing. Jesus. He's quite the man. Yeah. So, in Rodrigo's last year as mayor, he was nominated for the World Mayor Award, something that apparently exists. Which is the opposite of local government, which is what a mayor is, the executive of the World Mayor Award, the worst award show. What is the best mayor in the world?

Yeah, I'm the best mayor in the world. What are you talking about? I don't even... I maybe, like, twice in my life have known the mayor of wherever it is I happen to live. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, I mean, the only reason I knew it for a while in LA is because in the fucking elevators, you've got the mayor's name on, like, the little, like, the thing. And so I was like, oh, okay. It's the worst when it's the previous mayor, and it's like, good God.

I'm in a death box. Good God. The Schwarzenegger. How old is this shit? Ring the bell, it doesn't work. Oh, boy. Yeah. So, he was nominated for the World Mayor Award.

He turned down the nomination, saying of his time in office, I did it not for my own glory, but because that was what the people expected me to do. So that's some humility right there. But the World Murder Award, he happily accepted and won. I mean, he earned that World Murder Award. Yes, right. And it's an objective thing. Yeah, of course. It was all but a foreground conclusion that Rodrigo Duterte would run for president of the Philippines in 2016.

Eight months before he announced his candidacy, he did an interview with Esquire Philippines. In a minute, he claimed to have first killed a man when he was 17 by maybe stabbing him to death in a drunken beach brawl. But, yeah. Maybe not. Maybe not. Yeah. Because he was drunk. Right.

Yeah, who knows, I don't remember. He self admitted he was drunk when he probably stabbed a guy to death. Right. Yeah. He did add, I have never in my life killed an innocent person. So, he was just saying, anyone I get into a drunken beach brawl with has a fucking coming. I'll tell you that much. Who fights at the beach?

You know? The mayor of the city. And now president. So, from 1998 to 2015, the devout death squad killed more than 1,400 people by some estimates, including roughly 130 children. Other estimates will say just like 1,1100. It's unclear the exact number, but somewhere between 1,000 and 1,400 is probably pretty fair for 1998 to 2015. Also, a pat on the back to us for stopping the children age bit that we've been doing throughout the year. The amount of self-discipline I've had to exercise to not keep that going is a lot.

It is one of those things when you read old books that give you a real insight into how different things were. It was like what they included a child. Because in Germany in the 1800s, it was like, you're 12, you're old enough to work. Get a job. Yeah. Or they were talking about a woman from back in that time. And she was eventually married at the age of 13. Oh, it's sad when it takes that long.

Yeah. She was out to pasture, but then. Spenster. 14 years old. Real Spenster. She's got another what, four? Yeah, at most. Oh boy.

History's just a pile of nightmares wrapped up in a... Pile of shit. Yeah. Yeah. Las Cañas, the hitman who later confessed to being one of the devout Death Squad's leaders, says that his extra murdering money came from the combined wages of 10 to 12 ghost employees, which are fake government employees who existed just as money funnels for the mayor's murder team. The salaries for countless ghost workers had been pooled into the mayor's intelligence

fund, which had paid for all of the murders. So, in case you were wondering, fiscally, how does this Death Squad work out? There's a lot of data on fiscally. It was a very fiscally responsible Death Squad. Right. They've got receipts. They do. Which is critical with a Death Squad.

Which is rare. This is what people got onto the Nazis for, not enough receipts. And now the Nazis were great at receipts. I'm sure they were diligent. They were really, really good at receipts. So, Las Cañas claimed to have been paid between $402,000 per execution, depending on the status of the target. It's got to be a bummer if you and your friend get hit and he's at 2,000.

It's like, oh, come on. I know. I know. That would hurt more than the death. I don't think my ego could take that. No, no. You just don't want to even ask. Right.

Las Cañas also received a $2,000 monthly allowance that went on top of his police salary. The money was paid by Sonny Buenaventura, the mayor's bodyguard. Las Cañas claims, quote, Duterte's office supplied everything. Cars, guns, ammo, food, and money. His hitmen were a mix of former Communist Party, NPA assassins, along with, well, no, actually Duterte's kind of a leftist. Oh, I'm sorry. I confused him with for the other guy at the previous.

Never mind. Yeah. No, it is a little bit. It's not even fair to call him a leftist. He's come to power as a socialist, but he's also more of a Duterte's than anything else. Yes, yes. Tough to classify other than who he is. Right.

But yeah, his hitmen were a mix of former Communist Party assassins, along with police officers, and of course, run-of-the-mill contract killers. Here's another quote from Fire and Fury in the Philippines. The former NPA killers targeted glue sniffers and alleged petty thieves, while the police and their contractors went after bigger fish, kidnappers, and drug lords. Las Cañas also confirmed the use of the Laud quarry as an execution ground, and when questioned, said he could point to burial sites. These included those of an entire family killed with a silenced 22-caliber pistol, a suspected

kidnapper, his Muslim convert wife, who was seven months pregnant, their four-year-old son, her 70-year-old father, and elderly male relative and the family maid. Having abducted them from a neighboring town, the Davao death squad held them for hours in the building inside the quarry before their executions. The personal belongings were removed and burned, including their wife's Koran, he said, adding that the bodies were then stripped and buried. Their boy was spared. They kept in their house.

No, because they fucking killed the maid and the four-year-old. They're not going to spare the boy. They would kill the boy, which is a shame. It's a double tragedy, because that means this family didn't have a boy. Yes, that's what we should take away from this. That's what we should take away from this. A classic double tragedy situation. Oh, boy.

Gotcha. You got yourself. I didn't expect this to be so focused on the boy, but... Well, you booked the wrong person. That was... So, Las Canas testified about all of this in 2017 when Duterte was actually president. It didn't have a huge impact on his popularity as president, and it's possible that it wouldn't have made any difference at all if it had come out during the election itself. Part of Rodrigo's appeal was that he's Duterte Harry.

He's the violent son of a bitch who doesn't play by the rules but gets results. His detractors could point to an enormous pile of corpses, but all Duterte had to say is, look at Davao. I cleaned up one of the biggest cities in the Philippines. And this is where it gets kind of tricky, because it is true that overall crime has plummeted in Davao City and across the island of Mandano. This may not be due to Duterte. The crime rate rose by 248% from 1999 to 2008.

Most of that was during his second term as mayor. And while Davao City has seen massive drops in crime in the last couple of years, it remains the murder capital of the Philippines. Its overall murder rate is fourth in the nation, so Davao is by no means the most dangerous city in the country, but it certainly is not an oasis of peace. So, basically, they've traded in less other crime, way more murder. That's what you get with Rodrigo Duterte. Yes.

Less stolen cell phones, more people gunned down on the street. Right. Right. More people there are, the less crime there is. Yeah, crime. Exactly. Whether they're committing crime, they can't be climbed upon because they're dead. Exactly.

Sweet and innocent people. It's a double victory there. Right. That's efficient. Yeah. So, on November 21st, 2015, Rodrigo Duterte announced that he was running to be president of the Philippines. He called himself a socialist, but ideology was not really his focus.

Duterte ran as a populist who promised to take out the bad guys and be a tough guy, bad ass president. Tough ass. I like that. Tough ass president. A tough ass son of a bitch. I am your last card. He told a group of supporters at a rally.

I promise you I will get down and dirty just to get things done. All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you. I have no patience. I have no middle ground. Either you kill me or I will kill you idiots. So, one thing you can say for Rodrigo Duterte is that he was always remarkably honest with what his reign would bring to the Philippines. He does sound like a drunk person at a bar about to get in a fight.

Like, I'll fucking kill you. I'll fucking kill you. Yeah, you kill me first. You idiots. You know, because you don't come up with the most intelligent insult when you're in the moment like about to be in a fight. I'd imagine. He's like a drunk guy in a fight with you, but trying to get you to vote for him.

Yeah. Right. Right. Right. But also, he's handing the ballot over to you. I'm gonna fucking kill some people. Yeah. Vote for me.

Just right there if you mark right there. Yeah. While campaigning, he would regularly lament the drug dealing sons of whores who are destroying our children. He promised to make the fish in Manila Bay fat with their flesh. While most politicians in a democratic country run on promises of how they can improve lives and protect people, Duterte offered something else. He may be the only politician to ever say, God will weep if I become president.

Amazing. Yeah. He is not a liar. Not a liar. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, not a liar. He promised to make God cry with the amount of Corb.

He promised to fill the morgues. Yeah. Like, that's bold. Just to make us a presidential candidate. There will be so many more corpses. Right. And I become president. And by sons of whores, he meant popes, by the way, when he said that.

That's just a word for pope. Yeah. That's just his word for pope. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's part one. Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Murdertown.

Part two will of course be Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Kilopines, which I'm proud of. Yes. That really all came together. Of course, seamlessly. So, you want to plug your plugables? Oh, yeah, please. Stuffed Boy, actually, which is my newest album on iTunes.

My first album's up there to the Blake album. And then there's another album that I released with a comedian, Todd Glass, where I saved voicemails from him for 12 years. And we released it as an album. It's called 12 Years of Voicemails from Todd Glass to Blake Wexler. Speaking of honesty. I know. I know.

And then at BlakeWexler.com. Cool. BlakeWexler.com. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at AtBastardsPod. And we sell T-shirts on a T-public.

So look up T-public behind the Bastards. A lot of great T-shirts, including a lot of great Doritos themed T-shirts. Doritos not dictators, nachos not Nazis. Buy them. You support the show. Money goes to me. And also, you get a pretty cool shirt out of the deal. It's great.

Yeah. All right. Well, that'll do it for us for now. We're going to get into part two about Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday. So please tune back in then, although you don't have to tune anything because this is not old time radio. You just do whatever you want. Just download us, listen to us when you're at the kickboxing gym, boxing and kicking

and whatever it is. I'm going to... It's over. The episode's over now. And I... Yeah. Bye. And now it's about 40% of you.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we look like a lot of guns. Are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you

get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole? My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.