Word: davao
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...Duterte suffers from none of the charges that dog most Philippine politicians: that he is beholden to vested interests, obsessed with retaining power, or bent on accumulating its spoils. He is accepted and welcomed because he has delivered Davao from the bloody days of the 1970s and 1980s when the city was known as the murder capital of the Philippines. During the 21-year rule of strongman Ferdinand Marcos, the military spared neither the rod nor the gun to battle a spate of insurgencies, including one by the communist New People's Army (NPA). By the end of Marcos' reign...
...first term, Duterte's challenge was to rehabilitate Davao's reviled police department, which was running scared after years of NPA attacks. Shortly after Duterte took office, he heard that some kidnappers were trying to skip town with their just-collected ransom. Duterte led the pursuit, beating the cops to the scene and stationing his car on a bridge at the city line. When the kidnappers arrived, they started shooting. Duterte and his security detail returned fire, killing three of the four suspects. It was like a scene from the Philippine movies, which are replete with Dirty Harry loner-heroes...
...early 1990s, the threat within Davao from communist rebels and Muslim guerrillas had faded. Duterte's vigilance had not. Urchins caught picking pockets have got beatings with a belt or a cow's tail from the mayor himself, often in City Hall. Rich kids who hot-rodded down the city streets were warned that they'd be paraded naked around town. And throughout, he let it be known that he would never relent in his fight against rapists, petty thieves and particularly drug pushers. "If you sell drugs to destroy other people's lives," he threatened, "I can be brutal...
...Sept. 20, Ryan Martinito, 18, and P.J. Taporco, 19, were walking down Ponciano Reyes Street, one of Davao's main thoroughfares. Both were known cell- phone thieves who had been arrested several times and were out on bail. As several witnesses looked on, two men riding a motorcycle drove up, killed Martinito and Taporco with bullets to the head, then sped away. It was 2:30 in the afternoon...
...Suspicions immediately focused on the so-called Davao Death Squad, a vigilante outfit the city has come to know well over the past decade. According to press and police reports, more than 100 thieves and drug pushers?some convicted, some charged, others not even formally arrested?have been killed in the city during that time, almost always with the same modus operandi: two men on a motorcycle with a .45 or a 9-mm firing at close range. Such killings were heavy in 1996 and 1997, then sporadic during Duterte's time in Congress. The pace picked up during...