Rodrigo Duterte’s Talk of Killing Criminals Raises Fears in Philippines

[Napoleon]

For years, rights groups have called for an investigation into whether Davao’s mayor, Rodrigo Duterte — the tough-talking politician who next month will become president of the Philippines — was complicit in the killings of hundreds of people in Davao since the 1980s by what they describe as government-sanctioned death squads. The Davao police say they have not found evidence that such organizations exist. Investigations by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the Philippines’ own Commission on Human Rights, however, have found evidence that they do exist and that police officers and other government officials had been involved in the killings.

The victims, the investigations found, included people suspected of committing crimes or using drugs, street children and, in some cases, people who had been mistaken for someone else. While Mr. Duterte has denied any direct knowledge of death squads, he has long called for addressing the Philippines’ severe crime problem by killing suspected criminals. In 2009, he said they were “a legitimate target of assassination.” During the presidential campaign this year, he uncorked a running barrage of murderous boasts. He claimed to have personally killed armed criminals while mayor, though no evidence has emerged to support those stories. Asked to respond to a report that he killed 700 people, he replied, “No, it is not 700, but 1,700.”

Mr. Duterte promised if elected to deploy the police and the military in an all-out assault on criminal gangs. “It is going to be bloody,” he told a business group in April. “I will use the military and the police to go out and arrest them, hunt for them. And if they will offer a violent resistance, and thereby placing the lives of the law enforcers and the military whom I would task for a job to do, I will simply say, ‘Kill them all and end the problem.’” Mr. Duterte promised to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office and dump so many bodies in Manila Bay that the “fish will grow fat.”

Double or nothing the Philippines becomes a dictatorship in the next six years.

 

[Erod]

This describes over half the planet.

 

[PoS]

Ive had business meetings with some politicians in that country and I can honestly say that most if not all of them are into organized crime, so that new president of theirs is going to have his work cut out for him.