The Underworld Podcast - Duterte Arrested: Was the Drug War a Cover Up?

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Sean Williams reports from the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war cost up to 30,000 lives and tore Philippine society to shreds. But was it all cover for his family’s own involvement in the drug trade? Reporting from Duterte’s stronghold of Davao, where he ran a decades-long death squad, and capital Manila, which bore the brunt of that bloody blueprint, we expose the genesis of the war — and its longtime link to Triads and other criminal groups.  Duterte's connections to the drug trade have rarely been reported on in English and are just starting to make waves. This episode, backed by exclusive sources and firsthand accounts, challenges mainstream narratives and sheds new light on one of the most controversial anti-drug campaigns in modern history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. It's a steaming hot Thursday afternoon at a cemetery just north of Manila in the Philippines. If you die rich in this metropolis, your family might buy you a spot

in one of its gigantic skyscraper columbariums, buildings containing thousands upon thousands of shining niches ready to receive your ashes. If you're poor though, and for the vast majority of Metro Manila's 27 million inhabitants, that's the reality. You'll end up somewhere like this. An outdoor complex in the district of Bagbag, piled high with trash and dirt and feral dogs, circled by cavalcades of bright-painted jeepneys or hearsees that belch black fumes into the air.

This is the kind of place where almost all of those killed during Rodrigo Duterte's blood-soaked drug war wound up, in cheap, concreted over niches, or, if they were even more destitute, the corrugated steel ones that mark Bagbag's periphery. That banging you can hear? That's a claw hammer, and it's bashing open the faded white niche of Artemio Lumbre, from a semi-rural suburb nearby. Lumbrae was playing chess on the night of June 17, 2017, when two men approached and shot him at point-blank range, in the liver, diaphragm and stomach. Relatives rushed Lumbrae to an ambulance and for 10 days he survived. But on June 27th, he succumbed not to the shots, but pneumonia picked up on his hospital ward. The poor cannot afford gleaming medical facilities.

Lumbres' death barely even made the news. The drug war had been in full swing for just over a year by this point, and already Filipinos were growing numb to the nightly reports of men, women and children massacred by cops, crooks or hired assassins. Lumbrae was packed into a bag and buried at Bagbag. Cops didn't find his killers, and Lumbra just became a statistic, a relic, whose fate nobody bothered to question. Until now.

Since 2021, a lone Catholic priest and one of only two forensic pathologists in the entire Philippines have run a campaign to exhume those slain in the drug war and relitigate their deaths. Lumbre is one of around 100 cases to date. He's not even the first today. The team have already packed up the remains of a 24-year-old man from the impoverished district of Kalaokan, a couple clicks north of here. Duterte's presidency ended in 2022. Since then, There's been a quiet reckoning on the drug war, during which up to 30,000 people lost their lives all over this island nation of 115 million people.

The current president, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos, looks set to hand Duterte over to the International Criminal Court and impeach his own vice president and Duterte's daughter, Sarah. Long anticipated information about Duterte's own past commanding a rag-tagged death squad in his home city of Davao and even his own involvement in the trade of shaboo or meth is finally trickling out. But overall, the nation is traumatised. And it's only this tiny ceremony, watched over by family members and a handful of reporters like myself,

that's attempting to give people like Artemio Lumre a form of post-morten justice. As his loved one's sob and camera shutters click, Lumbres remains are hauled out of the niche, placed in a body bag, then on a gurney, and away in a way. Van. His story might not die just yet. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hello and welcome to the weekly podcast about crime, capers, flim flam and fishy business. I am Sean Williams, a journalist recently back in New Zealand from a Simon and Manila, which is why I've got a little nagging cold in case you can hear it. And I'm joined today by Danny Gold, who's continuing to post photos of gleaming

beaches and DJs in Mexico, despite me repeatedly telling him it's going to drive me to an early death. I don't know, tell me it rained or something, or you crashed a moped, just cheer me up. You know, I did actually crash a moped and, like, haven't been able to surf for about a week and a half. Actually, I went out after a week and did it and messed up my back again. But, you know, muscle relaxers are over the counter here. And it is what it is, dude, you know?

Sometimes you just got to do, like, real gringo type stuff, you know, get extorted by the cops for peeing on the beach, crash a moped, get sunburned. It just, that's how we roll. Yeah, that sounds. I mean, that sounds even better now. You made me feel even more miserable. But yeah, anyway, let's get to the Patreon stuff.

Because if you can throw us a couple of quid a month, we've got plenty going up there. I mean, I'm speaking to someone about a strange spate of organized arson attacks on because Russia this week. I think you're interviewing Rafael Kira Kinterra from jail, right? And we're going to do another stash house around a bit a few days. There's a lot for subscribers to get their grubby hands on, including ad-free shows and the readie lists. So do that.

Definitely. I mean, we've seen the complaints about the, amount of ads. But, you know, we got to get paid. We'd love not to have them, but it is what it is. So we have a $3 tier for the Patreon, and that means ad-free episode. So if you're interested, go there, patreon.com slash an overall podcast or sign up on Spotify. If you just search for the underworld podcast patrons, the whole separate feed with all the ad-free stuff and the bonuses will come up. Anyway. Yeah, I think what, like four or five years worth of it now. So there's quite a lot to go through. Anyway, to the Philippines. Back to the Philippines.

where I just spent 10 days reporting on the remnants of Rodrigo Duterte's drug war, something I've been working on since he came to power in 2016. And this time I was back to meet a family in a slum to write this hyper-domestic piece of Harper's magazine, all the kinds of little mini-mafias and pressures and political shenanigans that go on in a poor Banangai, which is a subdivision, which we'll get into a bit later on, which is one of the world's largest megacities overall, Metro Manila. It's home to almost 27 million people, an absolute beast. It's a tough place to like or love, and most people don't, but I think for that reason alone, I love it. And anyway, we did this show on this topic all the way back in 2020 when we kicked the podcast off, when Duterte was still in power. He has since been replaced by Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr. It's hard to say that with a straight face, of course. And actually, as I think you know, I was going around the Philippines, like taking pictures of the most amazing names of politics.

and it includes a bong bong a bing bong a bong and another bong so uh yeah something going on there anyway bong bong is of course son of the philippines namesake notorious dictator everything in philippine politics is dynasties elite families the whole thing's like a giant episode of succession without the snappy one-liners uh up to 30 000 people as i said in the cold open are reckoned to be of killed during this drug war which is technically still going on i think duterte sort of sent a press release around urging Marcos to continue it. It's nothing like the charnel house Manila was from 2016 to 2022. Bodies dropping by the dozen each night. Vigilantes and killer cops and rival drug laws, just executing citizens, blood running through the streets,

really insane stuff. How many trips have you made out there over the years? Is this like, is this the third? I think it's the fourth. The story's going to be so cool. Through an anti-poverty NGO, I met this family in a slum in Kezon City, which is actually, the biggest city is difficult to explain. And I just went back year after year as I was reporting the drug war and I just want to like show their life through a decade basically. So I spent most of my week last week with them. They're really lovely folks. But yeah, it was kind of my dream. And actually when I was out there in New York visiting you, that was the story that I was able to pitch the other. So that's how I can justify a pretty fun week in New York. Anyway, since then,

since 2022 in the Philippines, there have been attempts to claw back justice for those killed in the war, including Marcos handed Duterte over to the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which actually looks likely, and impeaching Duterte's daughter, Sarah, who is currently the vice president, and who a couple of months ago threatened to assassinate Marcos in public,

which has just become par for the course right now. Yeah, I haven't been keeping up with it at all. So Duterte's daughter is vice president, and the president is planning on handing over Duterte to the ICCC. And then the vice president, who's the Terté's daughter, is threatening to kill Isabella Marcos's son, who's president. Yeah, Imelda, Marcus, yeah. Melda, sorry, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this is, okay. I mean, I think Marcos kept Sarah Duterte as his VP to kind of bring those votes on board because the Duterte's are such a powerful family now. And then almost from the off, she and her father were just kind of shitting on him in public so he's like, all right then. So now it's become a full-blown political war. And it's probably not going to end very well. I mean, she's already saying she's got a backup plan to assassinate him. He's trying to impeach her so she can't run again, but she probably will in a few years. It's like completely mad, but also very interesting. And of course,

beyond that with the drug war, there are also projects like the one you just heard in the cold open, and that is from a handful of Catholic officials and one of only two forensic pathologists in the entire country, and they're on this campaign to dig up the bodies of certain victims to determine whether they were killed in firefights, like the cops or vigilantly say, or actually executed in cold blood. And we're going to hear from one of the priests doing that in this show. But what is also coming out is the pretty wild information that Rodrigo Duterte himself and his son Paulo are actually wound up in the drug trade themselves. and they used the drug war to eliminate rival kingpins.

Now that is something I first heard about in 2017, when one of the members of the inquiry that's now trying to prosecute Duterte invited me to a Manila hotel room, showed me a ton of very convincing evidence about meth shipments coming right through the port of Manila. And I'm going to go into some of that stuff on today's show that I don't think has been reported outside of the Philippines, really, affidavits and testimony from former Duterte associates,

and they place him dead center of becoming. country's lucrative trade in meth or Shaboo, as it's locally known. I remember you first telling me this way back when and thinking how insane it would be. Like it sounded conspiratorial, but not so much anymore. Yeah, I mean, I thought some of the information back then was a little conspiratorial, but this is all coming out in public now. And as we'll get into later in the show, it's pretty solid stuff, and it's causing a bit of problems for the people saying it.

But this is actually real-life journalism. It feels good. But to understand how all this began, I have to take you back first a few decades, right? We're going to go to the late 1990s in the southern Philippine city of Davao, which is the third most popular city in the country and on the island of Mindanao, which, it's fair to say, is a bit different from the rest of the Philippines. For one, around the quarter of the island is Muslim, where across the rest of the Philippines, it's almost entirely Roman Catholic.

And going back to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, there have been Islamist separatist movements from the so-called motto people. I mean, the Spanish gave so few shits about these folks. They just gave them the same name as the North Africans they saw when they're in Spain, so the Moors. But by the 1990s, this movement has crystallized into a few major groups. There's the Moro National Liberation Front, the MNLF. There's the Morrow Islamic Liberation Front, rather brilliantly the Milf.

And then there's the altogether nastiest Abu Sayaf group who, if you want an indicator of where they fit on the scale are now officially known as Islamic State East Asia Province. There was a pretty violent war with them just a couple years ago, right? Didn't they take over a city and hold it like a hostage pretty much? Yeah, yeah, I was there. It was a place called Marawi. It was a kind of couple of brothers who had studied in Egypt and Saudi,

and then they kind of rode the wave of ISIS. And I mean, they got effed up, but the city is a complete mess. It looks awful. And I went there with a German friend and we were getting shot at. and there was bombs flying everywhere. It's pretty crazy stuff. They had to, like, dig out the rest of the rebels. I think they were, like, they were hiding out in some, like, underground bunker or something. I can't remember exactly when, but it took them a few months to clean these guys out. But there's not just Wahhabi terrorists running around Mindanao. There is also the New People's Army. Maoist rebels,

fond of a bomb or two, many of whose attacks are carried out in the Deval region. Oh, and you've also got random groups of madmen, such as 16 inmates who escaped from a Davao penal colony in 1989, capture members of a Protestant group leading to the deaths of all 16 captors and five of their hostages. It's a pretty wild place, Mindanao, and Davao, as its biggest city, is right in the heart of it all. Mindanao is also an incredibly rich mineral place. It's got tons of lead, zinc, iron, copper, even profitable gold mines, and its jungles, which are beautiful, are great for agriculture. But like all over the Philippines, these are controlled by a handful of cronies, oligarchs, and most residents of Davao City are living on the breadline, drivers, construction workers,

scavengers, rice farmers. And in the mid-1990s, Shaboo really comes onto the scene. Now, we've done a ton of shows on the history of Yaba and Golden Triangle Meth, which takes over Asia's drug scene around this time. And boat loads of the stuff makes it into Mindanao, and later it's even manufactured in a string of factories, on the island itself. Meth is really easy to produce overall. And this isn't to say drug use on the island is any worse than anywhere in the Philippines. It's not, really. And the Philippines

doesn't really have a standout drug issue compared to its Asian neighbours either. But since 1988, Davao has been governed by a rough-tongued lawyer named Rodrigo Duterte, relinquishing power to his daughter, Sarah, when his term limits are up, and then returning, a bit like a Putin Medvedev deal. In total, he'll be mayor for 22 years across seven terms. The Duterte family develops a cult of personality in this city, and Rodrigo goes hard on the meth and crime issue, declaring it and not of course corruption to be the cause of Davao's ills.

And because crime is pretty rife, and inhabitants are circled by death, be it from communists or Islamists, or just bands of escaped convicts, they lean into a police force where extradition, killings become a fixture of the job. Caught between Islamists and communists sounds like, you know, arguing with people on Twitter. Yeah, it does.

And some other pretty wild people. Anyway. The jurors sat in a dark room, hands resting on a Ouija board. They weren't guessing. They were asking the victim who killed them. Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder.

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power hub in Manila that locals kind of wear this bloody version of justice with pride. You'll often hear people say things are just done differently in Mindanao. We're not like those politicians in Manila. similar to what you might hear in northern England or Texas. It actually kind of reminds me a bit of El Salvador, you know, since the gangs have been dismantled, just sort of, you know, no more patience with how things are being done and just the sort of, I think you mentioned it too,

like the Iron Fist policies are popular. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's reasons for it. But, like, I think I'm trying to get to the point that, you know, this is like a narrative that Duterte also spins. People aren't being terrorized like they might have been in San Salvador or something. This is kind of part of his genius, I guess, politically. So Rodrigo Duterte, he takes this whole kind of weird, different thing to another extreme, right?

His police force is co-opted into a, quote, anti-crime task force, which is better known by another name, the Davao Death Squad, or DDS. This group comprises police officers and civilian assassins, many of whom are members of the drug trade that Duterte has pressured into working for him instead, and these guys kill or disappear over a thousand people between 1998 and 2008. Some people think that figure is actually up around 1,400 and the deaths accelerate over time as the DDS becomes a more efficient killing machine. At the top sits Duterte, aka Superman, and he has three capos below him, the mayoral security chief, the city's top cop, and an informal intelligence network commanded by so-called barangay chiefs. And this last bit, as I mentioned at the start, it's absolutely crucial

to understanding how the entire drug war functions. The badangai is the smallest municipal subdivision in the Philippines. There are over 42,000 of them across the nation, and each one has a barangay chief, making decisions from a barangay hall, a bit like a town hall. But it's hard to overstate the importance of barangays, not just politically, but all the way. over Philippine culture. They're more than just the concept of a village. They're like a microcosm, an extended family, and each one is incredibly tight-knit. Some, like the Banangai I focused on from my Harper's story, are just warrens of shanties housing dozens of families. Everybody knows each other, and the Batangai chief has cemented his power literally for decades. So the chief

is the connection between the Bananghai and the outside political world. It's he or who liaises with, say, water companies, road builders, NGOs, the lot. The chief, they're the ones with the purse strings, basically. So is it basically like an extremely powerful mayor with little oversight? Yeah, it's like the top of the funnel, basically. They're the people who get the money into the neighborhood. They know everything that's going on. But there's another way in which Batangai chiefs are so incredibly powerful.

There is this Filipino concept called Chishmus. And most English translations just say gossip, but Chishmas doesn't really carry any negative connotations, right? It means chit-chat, hearsay, and it is the language of the Badangai. And the chief, because they're the constant roaming force around the Batangai, they're privy to all of this Chishmus, who's sleeping with who, who's taking drugs, who had a fight last night. And what Duterte does is turn the Batangai chief into a spook, a spy, feeding him information to hand to the killer cops and crooks of the DDS. He turns Chismiss from friendly chit-chat

into something altogether more sinister, like the Gestapo or the Stasi or the Chequer. Here is a deval ambulance attendant speaking to Jonathan Miller, author of the book Duterte Harry. Quote, bodies were dumped everywhere, everywhere all the time. You wouldn't believe it.

Most of the victims wore flip-flops. They were dark-skinned, the poorest of the poor. But nobody speaks about this, they will never betray him. By him, he means Duterte, of course. And Miller goes on, quote, many killings went unreported. Other bodies were likely dumped and never found. The dead including many children, and there were cases of mistaken identity. But over the years, DeVal's residents who today, number 1.6 million people, mostly turned a blind eye. The elimination of undesirable elements,

drug addicts, criminals and street kids was deemed acceptable collateral. The trade-off for the transformation that Mayor Duterte engineered in the city. I just want to say, you know, Duterte Howie is an excellent name for a book about this. It is. It is. It's a good book, actually. Yeah, give it a read. Last week, I met a woman in DeVal who told me about four of her children who were killed by vigilantes during this time, four of them. Each stabbed to death with a screwdriver, no witnesses. And this is all allegedly because she had an argument with a cop and he'd vowed to hunt down and kill all of her kids. Only two of them now survive. And this woman lives in a really poor slum. And as we were speaking, rats and roaches were crawling literally over our feet.

She makes a few bucks a month from pineapples, her son-in-law cells, and she sleeps on a tarp surrounded literally by filth. It's abject poverty. I'm not going to play you the audio of that interview because I think it's too distressing. We had to stop several times for obvious reasons, but her tale is just one of so many when the DDS was used to settle street scores to act out, quote, jungle justice. And even now, many of her neighbours won't speak to her because they're all huge deterte fans. And like we said before on shows about El Salvador, most notably, citizens can be forgiven for turning to these kind of leaders if they're suffering incredible levels of crime and violence. But like I mentioned before, in DeVal's case, it's a narrative.

Crime is high, but it's not that high, but the perception of crime is. It's the same with drug use. And while the DDS is on its killing spree and DTerté claims to be cleaning up the city, the needle doesn't actually really shift on the level of crime or drug use in the city at all. But the important thing is people think it's gone down. Here's a cop I met in Davao last week. We're going to call him Antonio. I met the guy at a cafe beside a freeway outside town,

and he didn't allow me to record him on my good mic because, yeah, were watching and he was crap in his pants. So the audio is not great. But Antonio joined the Davao City Police in 2007. And this is what he told me about his early years. When the robbery came rampant in the Davao City, some parts of Davao City. The robbers, this is their modus apparently. They are a group of three, four, five people.

and their modus operandi they'll go to dambos somewhere exclusive homes like they target no one nobody else there yeah occasion and then they they make a move out of it they still they do their stuff so basically when when somebody's got up especially That's your crime. They call it a kid bahe. Do you understand? No, no.

It's like you're you rob houses. Okay, yeah. And if your luck runs out and we, and the the people who are being advice or mandated to you're on your you're really on a bad luck because we sell down

the in my experience when I was still young all the time they do not they don't they do not go to courts because from from from ten twelve if If you get caught, trespassing, you can shout out. What was that? It's like a, when you go into an operation, it's like, it's not spoken, unspoken, yeah. A unspoken truth or unspoken minds. The Ophi does not tell you, if you catch him, kill him.

Just like, we have, we have codes, like, I know what to do. Antonio had grown up in Deval throughout the years of the DDS, right? And he told me it was completely normal to see several dead reported the next morning as victims of these force, which are kind of known about, but not spoken about.

And they're just shown up as numbers, 36, 37, 38, rarely names. Two people date today. The number is 67. Tomorrow, it's 69. So it's really. It's facts. Oh, yeah, I experience it.

Now, Arturo Las Cagnas is a former Daval cop, a member of the DDS, who's given testimony to the ICC about his time killing for Duterte. Now, he claims he was given between 10 and 20,000 Philippine pesos per killing, or between $85 and $170. Some high-profile targets, however, could be worth millions of pesos, gangsters or corrupt politicians Duterte wants out of the way. As time passes, the DDS swells even to include members of the NPA's so-called Sparrow Unit, its liquidation team, and some people even think Duterte is a sleeper agent of the Maoists.

In 2001, the rate of executions increases when Duterte christened something called the heinous crime task force group. Right, slash Kanias, quote, Several months after, Mayor Duterte secretly ordered some select police station commanders in Davao City to create and organize their own deaf squads to leafily foil and neutralise the alleged growing numbers of Shaboo users and pushers in Davao City. This is when the city's police chief, a portly and balding man named Ronald Bato de la Rosa, starts a campaign called Tokang, meaning roughly knock and plead. This is cops roaming bandanguies. banging on doors, and if someone doesn't fully comply, or even sometimes if they do, shooting them dead.

Here's last can yes again, quote. At first, the group's mission was to neutralise in police parlance, it means kill, suspected illegal drug pushers, users, drug lords and other organized crime syndicates in Davao City. And our vision was to have a peaceful, orderly and prosperous Davao City under the mayorship of Rodrigo Rora Duterte, who we call supermen. From Superman Duterte down to the last policeman handler of hitmen, the kill, kill, kill, order of Mayor Rodrigo Duterte resounded, unabated, and obeyed blindly to the letter. In several occasions during our operations, Mayor Duterte would always remind us, kill everyone, leave no one alive, so there will be no evidence. This has become our DDS motto.

Las Cagnas recounts one really grim case that still haunts him, when he and his boy is, on the personal orders of Duterte, can allege criminal his pregnant wife and his four-year-old son, all in the same vehicle. Says Las Caneas, quote, I attempted to rescue the four-year-old boy, but according to our team leader since the boy had seen our faces, he could recognize us in years from now and identify us.

In later years, Duterte winds down his operation as he eyes up the Philippine presidency, and DDS members who know too much, they start dropping two or fleeing town. One of them is a guy named Edgar Matabato, who is currently on the run trying to stay alive so he can testify against Duterte. He claims he's seeing Duterte kill himself eight times. Duterte is actually admitting to killing, quote,

around three people in his life, which is nuts. Matabato says that a towel emblazoned with the words, Good Morning over the shoulder of a spotter, would signal where a target was, and that he used packing tape to cover the victim's mouth before he murdered them, mostly with the Colt 45, but also with a butcher's blade and one time by feeding them to a crocodile. Hundreds of bodies are taken to a quarry on the edge of town, and Matabato gets skilled at cutting up bodies into identifiable pieces,

before pouring engine oil onto them stanched the smell. I was very good at Chop Chop, Matabato told the New York Times a couple months ago. As word of the DDS spreads, Matabato's list of targets in spans to include not only quote trash, i.e. drug pushes and victims, but journalists, politicians, businessmen, and activists trying to expose the killings. In 2013, Matabato takes part in the particularly gruesome kidnap, rape and murder of three young women they've been told to drug dealers, although Matabato doesn't think in retrospect that they were. They were so young, he says. They weren't criminals. I don't even know their names.

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and there's a big poster outside declaring it to be Duterte's favorite joint. Here is its owner. Bolivar is there's a lot of gang, arm groups. dog pursers, dog users, everything is in the area. So you couldn't really go out at night or like? Yes, now compared to Manila, even you as foreigner, you can, you try to walk, display your cell phone, you can room around.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unlike in Manila, even you're in the car, they will try to open your door, then that's everything, That's everything, bags, cell phone, wallet, everything. But during his term, it's very dangerous for them, not for us. Yeah, for the hard-headed person. Yeah. That's why we called the Duterte as our Punisher.

You know the movie Punisher? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's from UK, yeah? Oh, U.S. U.S. Yeah, yeah. So during his time, A lot of hard-headed persons, especially drugs, rapists, mostly they will be put under six feet below the ground

as punishment for them just to learn. So this is the cult of personality that Duterte has grown, cleaning the streets, murdering pushes and addicts, or anybody else in his path. Some call him the punisher, others call him Superman or even Dirty Harry. hence the book. Here's Jonathan Miller again. Quote. As Mayor, Duterte was Janice face, capable of breathtaking double-think. He could initiate a progressive treatment-based policy towards drug addiction and at the same time sanctioned death squads to kill addicts in cold blood.

He could rail against corruption and utterly deadly threats to businessmen or politicians on the make while turning Davout City Hall into a nepotistic cooperative, using public funds to buy votes and bankroll assassinations. A man with the boorish reputation of a sex pest enacted enlightened anti-sex discrimination laws. The capricious mayor would donate generously to children with cancer while his city police contracted hitmen to hunt down and murder street kids.

So this is the Rodrigo Duterte who surprisingly sweeps to the Philippine presidency in 2016 and he promises to scale Davao's war on crime and drugs to the entire country, especially Manila, which he and Philomindenowans have always had a problem with. Hitler massacred 3 million Jews, he says. There's 3 million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them.

I mean, a quarter bloodshed and Holocaust denial in one speech, which is quite impressive, really. Yeah. I mean, 3 million is such a weird, inaccurate number of Holocaust victims to arbitrarily use. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's not like total Holocaust denial, right? But why would you use like only 50%? Yeah, it's really weird. I think a lot of his speech is just meant to, like, piss people off just by default.

I mean, this is the guy who was what called in the Pope and Barack Obama's sons of bitches or motherfuckers. I don't know how you translate it. So it's all supposed to sort of flood the zone, right, with outrage. It's only 24 hours after Duterte declares a national war on drugs in June 2016 that the first body of up to 30,000 shows up. Of course, there aren't actually three million drug accidents in the Philippines. is an outright lie. But to get back to the idea of Chismiss, loosely gossip again, think about it. If somebody in your town or in America or Europe or Australia or ever, if they're doing drugs, who knows about it? Maybe their family, maybe the immediate neighbours? But in a Baden Gai,

everybody knows. They've all seen the dealers rolling through. They know who's getting high and who's not. They know who's stealing to fund the habit. The thing the Badengai and Shakira's hips have in common, the only thing probably, they don't. lie. Jesus. I mean, you would like the 12 year old references, just terrible. Terrible stuff. That's pretty up to date for me. And the barangay chief, he or she knows all of this. And now Chishmas has turned everybody into informants. Don't like the guy next door. Maybe you want to start some gossip he's a Shaboo user. Next minute you'll have cops thundering through the barang guy doing Tokang. If they decided he's resisted arrest or if they just don't like the look

of him, bang. He's gone. Oh, and who's in charge? of Tokang across the country now, Ronald Del Marosa, Duterte's Guy in DeVal, who's now the chief of the national police. We've already gone over the meat of the drug war itself in the previous show, and I go into some of the more horrific things I've seen in Metro Manila over the years, but Patricia's Evangelista's book, Some People Need Killing, That is by far the best source on this, compiled over years of her reporting for the outlet, Rappler, amid the constant murders. It really is a masterpiece, best non-fiction book I've read in a long time. Fisher, if you're listening, come on the show. I'd love to talk with you. I also mentioned in that early

episode a particular cop named Jovi Esponito. We've got super famous for basically being the drug wars poster boy, popping gangsters and pushers. I think over 50 people in all, quoting the Bible and standing proudly by Duterte's side. I spent a week with him on an island in the middle of the country. It was challenging. He's since changed his tune. He now says the Philippine National Police are the biggest criminals in the country, and that he's specific thickly ordered to kill certain people. But when I spoke with him a couple weeks back, he stopped short of blaming Duterte for cops' bad behaviour. And he told me he didn't believe Duterte himself or his family were involved in drugs. Others, however, tell a different

story. For years, rumors have swirled that the Duterte's not only used devours then the Philippines drug wars to kill pushers and petty criminals, but to eliminate rivals for their own meth revenue streams. Late last year, a former customs officer named Jimmy Guban tested that Paolo Duterte, Rodrigo's son, also a former mayor of DeVal and the current congressman, and Rodrigo D' D'Uerte's associate Michael Yang, were responsible for an almost $200 million shipment of Shibu, which came into the port of Cavite just south of Manila in 2018, hidden inside a bunch of huge magnetic lifters. Officials haven't yet verified this information, but Michael Yang has his hands in all kinds

of mad stuff, not least the offshore gaming operations we mentioned a couple months ago in the episode of Alice Guo, supposed Chinese gangster spy. Yang has also been at the heart of an investigation into overpriced COVID-19 PPE contracts from a Taiwan-based Chinese businessman. But it's the drugs that have played Yang going back ages. In 2019, a retired police colonel and anti-narcotics officer put Yang at the heart of a Chinese syndicate money, multiple meth labs across Mindanao. Yang's partner is a guy named Alan Lim, a well-known triad leader, real name. Here we go, Huen Li Jin.

He's also closely connected with the Chinese state, Belt and Road projects, and tons of Chinese money has flowed directly into Davao in the past couple decades. You can see it everywhere on the street. It's obvious. Some even speculate that Rodrigo Duterte will seek asylum in China if the ICC case goes forward. Now, Paolo Duterte has previously been connected to around $100 million of Shabu transported into the Philippines from China in 2017, and a 600-kilo shipment that came right through the port of Milan that very same year, as head of a cartel called the Davao Group. This stuff is being shipped, via Chinese triads and it's long been claimed that Paolo has a triad dragon tattoo on his back, which he has refused to bear, as well as refusing repeated calls to undergo drugs tests.

The rumours are growing by the day and if Jimmy Guban's testimony is verified, it's going to blow the entire case against the Duterte's wide open. Here is Antonio Trianes, a former naval officer, senator and one of the officials who's been on Duterte's case since the start. Again, we're in the restaurant. The audio isn't perfect, but here he is. So, the committee hearing in the House of Representatives, when it was concluded, one of the chairman of the committee explicitly read out the report

and definitively said that he said that, Mr. Duterte is involved in the illegal drug trade. He is protecting his own cartel and used the war on drugs as a cover for his own involvement. Consolidating his power essentially. Yes. To eliminate the competition. And at the same time, as a measure of social control, so that different watchdogs of society, like the media's of society and the others,

would be kept a big, and he can do whatever he wants. So that's the whole template which he elevated from his double experience. But here's the bottom line. In 2022, Filipinos replaced Duterte with Bongbong Marcos, who's made it one of his goals to revive. of the Marcos family name for their decades of plunder and martial law. If you've listened to the Adnan Khashoggi Downfall episode from a couple weeks back, you'll know how the Marcos is looted around $10 billion from their country,

and almost all of that money is yet to be recovered. Going from Duterte to the dictator's son, what do you think that does for a nation's psyche? To close out this episode, I want to head back to the beginning, to that cemetery in Kalaokan, where after the exhumation, Semarmeni, I took a ride back into town with Father Flavi Villanueva, one of the strongest voices against the drug war

and what it's done to the Philippine people. And I think he puts a few things better than I ever could. I say this openly, even the nation itself needs to heal herself from the lies, from the killing of the truth, from the killing of the democratic institutions, so from the wounding of history so certainly there is a need for a if there is a culture of violence and death I think we have to recreate also a culture of care and healing well Tokhang became a culture

it's a culture that you show off to surprise and kill instead of to talk about two words, katok and ask. But in the case of what really happened, it's knock and shoot. So in a wider sense, politicians take advantage of calamities to show off and to do it. talk hang, so-called tokhang endeavors to make them appear that they're part of the solution. But in reality, they're just simply playing politics, dirty politics, if I may say. I think that this administration, for its own selfish reasons, would like to bag Duterte and put an end to a...

with whatever remaining powers is the last. So that is my belief about this, this card. Yeah, I believe in that concern that this government is out to eliminate competitions. And that's what's happening so far. The impeachment, the ICC trials, and for whatever it's worth, they should benefit the victims, but it cannot stop there.

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Yeah, I mean, this was great stuff, dude. On the ground reporting, digging up bodies, and yeah, I mean, pretty nuts, man. I think probably this is the first a lot of people are going to hear about the turtta himself being involved in the drug trade. I don't think that's a widely known thing, yeah? Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's been an open secret for years. It's coming out now in the Philippines.

I guess it's been pushed down the list of stuff. that's going out of the hook over there. But yeah, it's pretty nuts. And I think it's like an ongoing story. There's going to be stuff coming out the next few months that's going to, I mean, it's going to be even wilder than this. And you heard it first on the Underworld podcast. Thanks guys for listening.

We'll see you next week. As always, patreon.com slash aneworld podcast for bonuses and ad-free stuff or sign up on Spotify or even iTunes. Until next week. Can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car. Was she brave?

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