Kawit Cavite, Philippines. Credit: Jill Encarnacion.

Ressa and Duterte have been crossing paths for over 30 years. She first interviewed him in the 1980s when he was Mayor of Davao. In 2015, during his election campaign, she conducted a now infamous interview with Duterte in which he confessed to killing three people.

A brief profile of Maria Ressa, the Philippines news site editor who’s now been arrested twice by Duterte’s government.

↩︎ The Guardian
Feb 14, 2019
At least 10 mayors in the Philippines have been killed since Duterte's rise—he may be targeting political opponents.

I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike around, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble also. I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill.

Duterte says he personally killed suspected criminals when he was mayor of a southern Philippine city to set an example for police.
↩︎ Manila Times
Dec 15, 2016

The purpose of President Duterte’s open calls for violence, rather ironically, is for peace—to end crime and corruption perceived as endemic in the Philippines. He offered a simple, horrifying solution that tens of millions of Filipinos elected him to implement through unrestricted police operations, death squads, and hired assassins.

Duterte has a 91% trust rating in the Philippines right now. To understand why, you have to understand what the Philippines have been through.
↩︎ GQ
Sep 15, 2016

Duterte Threatens to Eat Terrorists

Duterte has made waves for targeting drug users, but he also plans to go after Abu Sayyaf, a jihadist group that has pledged allegiance to ISIS. Recently they beheaded a teenage ransom, and affiliates claimed responsibility for a bombing in Duterte's hometown that killed more than a dozen. In response, the president threatened the terrorists with retaliatory cannibalism: "When the time comes, I will eat you alive in front of people. If you make me mad, in all honesty, I will eat you alive, raw." 

Sep 14, 2016

Statistics show what any visitor to the country may easily see: Filipinos are not degenerates, who need to be protected from themselves, but are mostly a nation of decent, sober, law-abiding and God-fearing people.

Opiate abuse is a hundred times greater a problem in the United States than in the Philippines, where it can get you killed today.
↩︎ TIME
Sep 14, 2016

Duterte's crackdown and its reliance on armed pseudo-governmental forces acting beyond the scope of the law recall the nearby example of Suharto, whose purges were harrowingly relived in the award-winning documentary The Act of Killing

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