A2 · Elementary
13 min
culturepoliticsjusticehistory
El Hombre de Hierro: Duterte y la Cultura de la Impunidad
The Iron Man: Duterte and the Culture of Impunity
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Elementary level — perfect for beginners building confidence.
So something happened at the International Criminal Court this week that I don't think got nearly enough attention.
A former president, a man who ran one of the most violent anti-drug campaigns in modern Asian history, just lost a major legal battle.
And it matters well beyond the Philippines.
Bueno, mira.
Right, look.
Rodrigo Duterte está en la corte internacional.
Rodrigo Duterte is before the international court.
Es una noticia muy importante.
It's very important news.
Right.
So for listeners who need a quick recap: Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022.
He launched this infamous drug war, and somewhere between twelve thousand and thirty thousand people were killed, depending on whose numbers you use.
Most of them were poor.
Sí.
Yes.
La policía mata a mucha gente.
The police killed many people.
En la calle, en las casas.
In the street, in their homes.
Es muy terrible.
It was terrible.
And Duterte's argument to the ICC was essentially: you don't have jurisdiction over me, because the Philippines withdrew from the court in 2019.
His lawyers said, once you leave the club, the club can't touch you for things that happened while you were still a member.
The judges just rejected that argument completely.
Es que Filipinas sale de la corte en 2019.
The thing is, the Philippines left the court in 2019.
Pero los crímenes son de 2016 y 2017.
But the crimes are from 2016 and 2017.
La corte dice: no, nosotros tenemos poder.
The court says: no, we still have authority.
Exactly.
And here's what gets me about this legally: it's a landmark decision for international justice.
If you could simply resign your membership and retroactively escape accountability, the entire ICC framework would collapse.
Every leader facing charges would just...
leave.
Claro.
Exactly.
La corte necesita ser fuerte.
The court needs to be strong.
Si no, no hay justicia para nadie.
If not, there is no justice for anyone.
But look, I want to get into the cultural dimension here, because this story is as much about culture as it is about law.
Duterte wasn't some fringe figure.
He won the presidency with almost forty percent of the vote.
He was enormously popular.
Why?
That's the question I keep coming back to.
Mira, la gente en Filipinas tiene miedo.
Look, people in the Philippines are afraid.
Las drogas son un problema real en muchos barrios pobres.
Drugs are a real problem in many poor neighborhoods.
Sure.
And I spent time in Manila years ago, reporting on something else entirely, and I remember the fear people talked about.
Shabu, which is crystal meth, was genuinely destroying communities.
That fear was real.
Duterte understood it and used it.
Sí, pero la solución de Duterte es matar.
Yes, but Duterte's solution is to kill.
No es un programa.
There is no program.
No hay hospitales, no hay ayuda.
No hospitals, no support.
Solo violencia.
Just violence.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
And this is where the cultural story gets genuinely complicated.
Because there's a long tradition in Filipino political culture, going back centuries actually, of the strongman as protector.
The Philippines has this concept, I mean historians write about this, of the leader who delivers order through force, and who is forgiven a great deal in exchange.
Bueno, este tipo de líder existe en muchos países.
Well, this type of leader exists in many countries.
En España también, claro.
In Spain too, of course.
Franco es un ejemplo muy obvio.
Franco is a very obvious example.
Right.
And I was going to say: you've lived through a society processing that legacy.
Spain spent decades arguing about what Franco meant, what he built, whether the economy excused the repression.
The Philippines is going through something similar, in real time, right now.
Es que en España el debate sobre Franco es muy difícil todavía.
The thing is, in Spain the debate about Franco is still very difficult.
La gente no está de acuerdo.
People don't agree.
Es un tema muy serio.
It's a very serious topic.
And that tension, between justice and cultural memory, is exactly what's playing out with Duterte at the ICC.
His supporters in the Philippines still call him a hero.
His daughter, Sara Duterte, was until recently the vice president.
This family has deep roots in Davao, the southern city where Rodrigo ran as mayor for years before the presidency.
A ver, Davao es importante.
Look, Davao is important.
Duterte trabaja allí muchos años.
Duterte worked there for many years.
La gente de Davao dice: la ciudad es más segura con él.
The people of Davao say: the city is safer with him.
And that's the pitch, right?
I make things safe, and you don't ask how.
It's a bargain that populations have made with leaders throughout history.
What's different now, what makes this ICC ruling significant culturally, is that for the first time there's a formal international mechanism saying: that bargain doesn't protect you from us.
La verdad es que la corte internacional es muy nueva.
The truth is, the international court is very new.
No tiene mucho poder todavía.
It doesn't have much power yet.
Muchos países no participan.
Many countries don't participate.
That's a fair point.
The United States isn't a member.
Russia isn't.
China isn't.
India isn't.
So there's a legitimate critique that the ICC mostly ends up prosecuting leaders from smaller or weaker states.
That's a genuine problem.
But I'm not sure that critique helps Duterte's case specifically.
No, claro.
No, of course.
Duterte mata a personas pobres.
Duterte kills poor people.
No a criminales ricos.
Not rich criminals.
Eso es un problema cultural muy grande.
That is a very big cultural problem.
The extraordinary thing is how consistent that pattern is, globally.
The people who die in these wars on drugs are almost always from the same demographic: young, poor, brown or black, urban.
In the Philippines, in Brazil, in Mexico, in the United States.
The drug war as a cultural project lands hardest on people with the least protection.
Mira, en España también tenemos este problema con las drogas.
Look, in Spain we also have problems with drugs.
Pero no matamos a la gente en la calle.
But we don't kill people in the street.
Right, and that difference in approach, treatment versus execution, is itself a cultural statement.
It reflects something about how a society values individual lives, how it thinks about addiction, whether it sees a drug user as a sick person or a dangerous one.
These aren't just policy choices.
They're expressions of cultural values.
Es que la cultura cambia despacio.
The thing is, culture changes slowly.
En España, en los años ochenta, la heroína destruye muchos barrios.
In Spain, in the eighties, heroin destroyed many neighborhoods.
Ahora tenemos más comprensión.
Now we have more understanding.
That's a really important point, actually.
Spain in the eighties was brutal.
The heroin epidemic hit cities like Madrid and Barcelona incredibly hard.
And the social and political response there was complicated too, there were calls for tough measures.
But Spain moved toward harm reduction over time.
The Philippines under Duterte moved in the opposite direction.
Bueno, y también hay un factor religioso.
Well, there is also a religious factor.
Filipinas es un país muy católico.
The Philippines is a very Catholic country.
Pero la Iglesia no para a Duterte.
But the Church does not stop Duterte.
That's fascinating, right?
Because you'd expect the Catholic Church to be an enormous moral brake on state-sanctioned killing.
And there were bishops who spoke out, some very bravely.
But Duterte was openly contemptuous of the Church, called the Pope a son of a...
well, he was explicit.
And his base loved it.
They found it refreshing.
A ver, eso es muy interesante.
Look, that's very interesting.
En España Duterte es imposible.
In Spain a Duterte is impossible.
El respeto a la Iglesia todavía existe, incluso para las personas que no van a misa.
Respect for the Church still exists, even for people who don't go to mass.
I mean, the cultural texture is so different.
The Philippines has this layered colonial history, Spanish colonialism for three hundred and fifty years, then American colonialism for fifty more.
And that history shaped the culture in deep ways, including how authority is conceived, how the Church is positioned, how leaders are expected to perform masculinity.
Sí, España está en Filipinas trescientos cincuenta años.
Yes, Spain is in the Philippines for three hundred and fifty years.
El idioma, la religión, la comida, todo cambia.
The language, the religion, the food, everything changes.
Three hundred and fifty years.
That's longer than the United States has existed as a country.
And the cultural imprint of that is immense.
Filipino Spanish died out largely in the twentieth century, but Tagalog and other Filipino languages are full of Spanish loanwords.
The legal culture, the family structure, the religious architecture, all of it bears that mark.
La verdad es que para mí es muy extraño.
Honestly, for me it's very strange.
Filipinas está muy lejos, pero hay muchas palabras españolas.
The Philippines is very far away, but there are so many Spanish words.
Es una conexión histórica muy especial.
It's a very special historical connection.
It is.
And then the Americans came in 1898, after the Spanish-American War, and they brought English, they brought a different model of governance, a different legal system, a different kind of relationship with the state.
Filipino culture today is this extraordinary layered thing, and Duterte played on certain layers of it very deliberately.
Bueno, Duterte habla como un hombre del pueblo.
Well, Duterte speaks like a man of the people.
No habla como un político normal.
He doesn't speak like a normal politician.
La gente dice: este hombre es como nosotros.
People say: this man is like us.
The everyman strongman.
It's a political archetype that shows up in cultures all over the world, in very different wrappings.
And part of what the ICC case is now testing is whether that cultural logic, the idea that the people legitimized the violence, can function as a legal defense.
The judges have said, so far: no.
Mira, eso es importante.
Look, that is important.
La democracia no justifica matar a personas inocentes.
Democracy does not justify killing innocent people.
Eso está claro.
That is clear.
Clear in principle.
Murky in practice.
Because what happens now?
Duterte is in detention in the Netherlands, which is where the ICC sits.
The current Philippine president, Marcos, allowed his transfer.
But Marcos and Duterte had a political falling-out, so that was partly convenient.
The question is whether any Filipino government will fully cooperate with the prosecution long-term.
Es que la política en Filipinas es muy complicada.
The thing is, politics in the Philippines is very complicated.
Marcos, Duterte, estas familias tienen mucho poder histórico.
Marcos, Duterte, these families have a lot of historical power.
And there's the other layer of cultural history that I think is essential here.
Ferdinand Marcos, the current president's father, was one of the most brutal and corrupt leaders of the twentieth century.
He ruled as a dictator for years.
His family was forced out in 1986, in the famous People Power revolution.
And then, decades later, his son wins the presidency.
That tells you something about cultural memory and political accountability in the Philippines.
La verdad es que en muchos países la gente olvida muy rápido.
The truth is that in many countries people forget very quickly.
O no olvida, pero perdona.
Or they don't forget, but they forgive.
Eso es también una forma de cultura.
That too is a form of culture.
Or they rewrite.
There's a documented phenomenon in the Philippines of Marcos revisionism, his supporters literally built a social media apparatus to rehabilitate his memory, especially on TikTok and YouTube, targeting young people who have no personal memory of the dictatorship.
It worked.
That's chilling in a way that I find hard to overstate.
Mira, las redes sociales cambian la memoria colectiva.
Look, social media changes collective memory.
Es un problema muy serio ahora en todo el mundo.
It is a very serious problem now everywhere in the world.
And that's why the ICC ruling matters beyond the courtroom.
It's also a form of documentation.
A formal, international, legal record that says: these things happened, they were crimes, and this person is accountable.
Whatever the sentence, whatever happens in the trial, that record exists.
It's harder to erase than a TikTok video.
Sí, la historia oficial importa mucho.
Yes, the official record matters a great deal.
Los libros, los documentos, los juicios.
Books, documents, trials.
Eso es parte de la cultura también.
That is part of culture too.
Look, I'll end on this.
When I was a correspondent, I covered a lot of places where impunity was the norm, where powerful people did terrible things and nothing happened.
And the corrosive effect of that on a society's culture, on how ordinary people relate to institutions, to justice, to the idea that rules apply to everyone, is profound.
The ICC case against Duterte is one small push in the other direction.
Whether it lands is still an open question.
Bueno, es un proceso lento.
Well, it is a slow process.
Pero es importante empezar.
But it is important to begin.
Las víctimas necesitan una respuesta.
The victims need a response.
Eso no cambia.
That does not change.