My Reader, "The Punisher" Duterte

I sat down twice with the president of the Philippines; it was one of the most challenging situations I've had as a journalist and I only now tell the story PART 1

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“It’s fun to kill…”

The face of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte lit up as he talked to me in his presidential palace in Manila in 2016, making him look youthful, defying the fact he was in his seventies. His boyish appearance was accompanied by a charisma that made him seem like someone I had met before, an old friend – even if he was talking about homicide.

“It’s fun to kill,” he said, “especially if it’s a legal way. Not everybody is given a chance to kill an idiot.”

I was asking about his crackdown on crystal meth dealers that critics alleged included thousands of extra-judicial killings, murders they argued that should put him before the International Criminal Court (where he now faces trial). Duterte retorted that his war on drugs was saving his people from the ravages of crime and addiction.

“At the end of the day, whether you go to jail or go to hell, you are responsible for the welfare of your country. So me, they say that you go to hell, you go to prison, so be it…You keep on trafficking drugs, one day you will get into trouble with the police, and you will die.”

As I nodded along, I felt deeply conflicted and nerves gripped my stomach. Duterte had praised my reporting on drug cartels in Latin America, and even given copies of my book Gangster Warlords to his officer corps.

“This is the way the South American countries failed and fell one by one,” he said at a ceremony as he held my book in the air.

He declared he wanted to save the Philippines from a similar fate, so my books, including interviews with cocaine traffickers and their serial-killer hit men, provided a cautionary tale. When I walked through the palace, members of his staff took selfies with me and asked me to sign copies. As a freelance journalist, suddenly having a president of a country of over 100 million people praising you is a big boost.

Talking to people on the Philippine streets it seemed everyone was singing Duterte’s praises and his approval rating hit over 80 percent amid his war on drugs. Yet, this was no Nelson Mandela I had as a reader.

Duterte’s critics, including journalists, human rights defenders and priests, said he was orchestrating mass murder and shedding blood of the innocent. And Duterte gained infamy for a series of incendiary comments. He compared himself glowingly to Hitler, joked about the gang rape of a missionary, and was reported to call the Pope and President Barack Obama “sons of whores.” (He claimed there was a misunderstanding.) His nicknames included “The Punisher” and “Duterte Harry.”

My books went deep into the terror unleashed by cartels, the mass graves, beheading, kidnapping, the way that regular people suffered so much pain, which I could see would chime with Duterte. But I concluded with calls for social work to steer poor youths away from cartels, drug policy reform to reduce the black market, and building effective police. I hadn’t called anywhere for death squads!

I met Duterte twice, in 2016 and 2017, recording a couple of hours of conversation with him and was given access to the colorful characters in his court, a muscular police chief known as The Rock, a sexy pop dancer Mocha Uson who ran his social media, and I saw his then friend, the boxer Manny Pacquiao, in the Senate. I also interviewed his fiercest critics and hit the streets to talk to meth dealers, assassins and the families of those killed. And I got to the city of Marawi to see his soldiers fighting a full blown uprising by the Islamic State.

I found a country in the cross hairs of core conflicts tugging at the world today: the rise of populism, global organized crime, and radical Islam. And in Duterte, I saw a man who exemplifies the contradictions of our era, at once charismatic and coarse, sensitive to the desires of the poor, yet unflinching in releasing violence in poor neighborhoods.

“I do not allow my country to go to the dogs,” he told me. “I will kill you if you destroy my country. And I will kill you if you deprive us of the next generation.”

I wrote a draft of this article after the interviews and had a magazine ready to publish, but I pulled out at the last moment and it is only now that I finally tell this story. Back then, I felt highly conflicted with the situation, especially when Duterte told me he had ordered thousands of copies of my books. I never verified the purchase with sales numbers but I saw boxes full of them in the palace and signed a lot of copies for officials.

How could I write about this encounter when I was so deep in the story myself? Would I be canceled for being complicit in his crackdown? Or should I denounce him? But then would I be stabbing some Filipino readers in the back after they were praising my work? And what did I actually think about it all? First of all though, how did I get into this mess?

II

It started with a tweet.

The words zapped onto my feed in August 2016, the year that populism threw the world on its head. Donald Trump was in the midst of his election campaign that had kicked off with the infamous phrase, “They are rapists,” (followed by “and some, I assume are good people”), and in my native Britain people were freaking out about, or celebrating, Brexit.

In Mexico, where I live, cartel violence raged relentlessly. And I’d just reported in Venezuela, where what began as a leftist populist government had degenerated to leaving citizens scrounging through garbage for food.

Like many, I was confused how to respond to the global upheaval. There was a specter of authoritarianism, yet I was disillusioned with the mainstream and with the left wing politics I had followed since childhood. Amid this, I met the most controversial populist of all.

The tweet came from Athens Garrote, a nurse from the Philippines living in New York, who tagged me in a post: “When was the last time a Philippine President recommended a book?” she wrote along with a photograph of my book, El Narco.

It was just over a month after Duterte had sworn in for his six year term. Previously, he had been the longtime mayor of the southern city of Davao and launched an insurgent presidential campaign that he surprisingly won, spearheaded by his call to crack down on drug dealers.

Shortly after, Garrote followed with another tweet: “@ioangrillo #PresidentDuterte recommends to read your book every time he talks about his war against drugs. Do a book tour in the Philippines.”

Immediately, I felt flattered that I had a president as a reader and the impulse to go online and boast about it. But after breathing for thirty seconds, I realized that could be a bad move. This was not a president who had won the Nobel Peace Prize but one accused of masterminding murder. Instead, I switched to private message to ask Garrote for more information.

She sent me a link to a YouTube video of Duterte talking about my book at an official ceremony. Duterte spoke in a mix of English and Filipino so she translated. I looked online and found him talking about my work in various events and flashing my books at the camera. Speaking at the Philippine Air Force anniversary, he said, “I gave everybody, every general I think of the Armed Forces of the Philippines meron silang kopya ‘yung kay [they have a copy of that] Ioan Grillo. He’s the guy who wrote about the sad state of South America and those countries who’ve fallen to narco politics.”

Narco politics describes how organized crime infiltrates political power, which is a big theme in my work. “In four to seven years, if nobody interdicts the drug business in the Philippines, we will be a narco-politic,” Duterte said in another event.

I wondered how to react. A friend of mine said I should write an op-ed decrying Duterte’s war on drugs. But if I wanted to understand what I was writing about, I figured, I would have to go the Philippines. And I was curious whether my famous (or infamous) reader would give me an interview.

As I stewed over what to do I focused on other assignments, reporting in El Salvador and Guatemala on thousands of refugees fleeing gang violence. Then in October, I received an email from the Philippine Ambassador to Mexico. He wanted to meet.

I waited in the lobby of the Philippine embassy in a swish neighborhood and studied the face of Duterte on a portrait on the wall. Ambassador Eduardo De Vega walked in, a large guy with a warm smile, and he shook my hand and glanced at the picture. “My president likes your work,” he said.

De Vega took us to a folksy restaurant round the corner and we ate spicy food and drunk a river of coffee while we chatted about the Philippines. He talked broadly about his country’s history and the sudden rise of Duterte, who he sometimes called Digong. He echoed the president’s argument that the Philippines was scarred by widespread use of crystal meth, known locally as “shabu.”

In fact, the Philippines suffered one of the world’s worst ever drug epidemics with millions hooked on the synthetic substance. Many poor families had at least one addict and this was keeping people down, De Vega said, which was why they were so responsive to Duterte’s campaign.

Then De Vega told me the cigarette butt story. It’s a tale often cited by Duterte supporters, although the details vary and are hard to prove.

It takes place when Duterte was mayor of Davao and had instituted a ban on smoking cigarettes in public. A tourist (apparently Australian) was puffing in a restaurant and refused to put out his smoke. So Duterte himself was called in. Holding a gun to the tourist’s balls, Duterte ordered the tourist to eat the cigarette butt, and the stunned smoker swallowed it whole.

I was imagining what a cigarette butt tastes like when De Vega asked if I wanted to go to the Philippines. I said I would be interested in an interview with Duterte but I insisted I pay my own travel and hotels (I didn’t want to be in their pocket). De Vega got out his cellphone and called Manila, where it was two in the morning. After talking to his contact he looked me in the eyes. “The president will meet you.”

III

In late November, as I was boarding my flight to Manila, my dad sent me a link to a story. It was about a confrontation between Duterte and British journalist Jonathan Miller at a press conference in Davao the day before. The reporter Miller claimed that more people had been killed in Duterte’s first five months in office than in nine years when Ferdinand Marcos ruled as dictator. In response, Duterte was said to call Miller putang ina mo­, which roughly translates to “son of a whore”- the same insult he was accused of slinging at Obama two months earlier.

Since the summer, the frequency Duterte mentioned my work had only increased. His speech at an anniversary of the Philippine Coast Guard was typical: he said my book Gangster Warlords was a warning of what the Philippines could become. “It is really a non-fiction and it’s all there for you to read. Exactly the same.” Rappler, a respected Philippine news outlet that was critical of the government, described my books as the ones, “Duterte mentions in almost every speech.”

I decided to keep the visit low profile, see what material I ended up with and take it from there. I was apprehensive that by meeting Duterte I’d be seen as endorsing his tactics and that I would be out of my depth in a country I didn’t understand. I told few people about my trip.

But when I arrived in Manila, my inbox was swamped with press requests. While I was in the air, Duterte had announced my visit. I responded to just one, from Pia Ranada, who covered the presidency for Rappler, saying I’d like to chat to her off the record. Over coffee, she told me stories of covering Duterte while I gave little away about what I thought. I ignored the requests from other journalists, since I had no clue what to tell them.

Ambassador De Vega had come back to the Philippines for the visit and he took me to dinner in the private room of a Japanese restaurant. Also there was his brother in law Vince Dizon, who was coordinating my visit with the presidency. Charismatic and talkative, Dizon was a graduate from a British university who worked in a senior economics role in the government and had first given my book to Duterte.

Dizon explained how Duterte hadn’t really called Obama, “a son of whore.” The phrase he had said, “putang ina mo,” literally means son of a prostitute, but it could also be used like the American phrase, “get the fuck out here.” A curse lost in translation caused a minor diplomatic spat .

Walking downstairs we were greeted by senators, several who had copies of my book to sign. I felt elated, like a star in this strange foreign country, but nervous about my link to these people.

It was December, almost six months into Duterte’s administration, and there were now thousands of killings from the war on drugs. The deaths came from two main causes. The police shot alleged drug dealers during operations, figures they released openly. They said that criminals resisted arrest although in many cases the suspects weren’t armed.

In other cases, mysterious assassins would gun down drug dealers on the street. Photographers hit the night beat showing the pictures of bullet-ridden corpses in the slums of Manila with crying families around them.

Human rights groups said they echoed murders carried out while Duterte was mayor of Davao by a group known as the Davao Death Squad. Since he had become president, they claimed, the death squads had gone national.

IV

Years earlier, after I interviewed a president of Mexico, I was ticked off by the bureau chief of the newspaper I worked for because I hadn’t worn a tie. But Duterte was often in a guayabera, and he didn’t strike me as a man who’d care how I dressed. As I got ready, I followed De Vega’s recommendation of a shirt and khakis. I was also loose on my strategy. I wanted to make sure I quizzed him solidly on the extra judicial killings, of course, but I was interested in understanding what made him tick, what drove him. And I still wasn’t sure how I would use the material. I would pitch it as a magazine story but I also decided to hire a camera crew and see if I could sell a freelance TV piece as well.

De Vega and Dizon came with me to the presidential palace, known as Malacañang. When we arrived, I noticed that my meeting was listed on the president’s schedule not as an interview with a journalist but as a “courtesy call.” When we got to the first security checkpoint, my camera crew were stopped from going on.

After passing through more checkpoints, we were told to wait at a vast table in a tranquil room. We sipped on sweet water until the presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella arrived, carrying a notepad. While I had questions for him, he also had them for me. He asked what I understood by the term “narco state” and I explained it was when a government was captured by drug traffickers. The Duterte administration was looking at the language for its messaging.

As the hour approached we went through to another section of the palace, where I signed books for some of the staff and some asked to take selfies with me. We were ushered up a grand staircase lined by men and women welcoming me, until we arrived in a wood-paneled room and sat on chintz sofas. A crew from the government press office stood against the wall, cameras pointed our way.

A hefty door opened and Duterte strolled through, wearing a loose beige shirt, flanked by several of his generals. “Good to meet you Ioan,” he said, pronouncing my rare name well, warmly shaking my hand and sitting across from me.

He sat in the matching chintz chair to my left and took from his assistant a stack of papers a foot high. He said it was a list of all the mayors and judges and police chiefs linked with drug traffickers. Targets. There were thirty-five hundred names. No Philippine journalist had seen the list this close before.

The terms of our meeting hadn’t been laid out, so I just pulled out a recorder and started taping, sprinkling him with questions. How did he know these thousands of officials were linked to drugs gangs? “This is a product, actually, of a long, long process, even before I became the president. They were already doing that,” he said.

I got into the meat, the killings. He took ownership for the police actions. “I said, ‘Destroy the apparatus.’ …This will last until the last day of my term, until the last pusher is out of the streets, until the last drug lord is killed,” he said.

However, he denied that he was behind extra judicial killings. Referring to how many bodies were found covered in plastic, he said, “Wrapping a person with plastics would indicate one thing: the person was tortured to tell the truth. Why would police do that? All they’d have to do is say, ‘Do you want to tell the truth or not? We’ll blow your brains out.’ ” Moreover, he pointed out that, “Even before I became president, if you go by the records, there were already killings.”

There is a real case that at least some of the murders were just criminal hits. But the bob-and-weave was also classic Duterte. During his campaign, he promised to throw so many corpses of drug dealers into Manila Bay that fish would get fat from feeding on them, but later said he was talking in hyperbole.

I asked Duterte about his fight with Obama and his warmer relationship with Trump. “As proven by Trump, do not believe in media,” he said. “They are not credible anymore. Look what happened to me. So I do not believe in CNN. The media, all media are against me, but, you know, I won. And…despite the media, he won. And he takes pride for that.”

This affinity with Trump was curious. Duterte told me he considered himself a socialist and expanded welfare programs, a far cry from Trump attacking “Obama Care.” But they were part of the same populist phenomenon, which theorists say is not an ideology but a political logic of claiming to represent the true people against a corrupt establishment. They both had specific enemies, whether they be drug pushers or undocumented migrants. Or their defenders would argue they both delivered on issues that the public cared about and the establishment failed on.

I quizzed Duterte on other controversies from making peace with a communist guerrilla group to moving the body of the former dictator Marcos to the Heroes Cemetery. He defended his actions with lengthy answers, sometimes rambling, struggling a little with English, but always warm and relaxed. We talked about his religious beliefs (he considers himself agnostic), and his heroes (his father and the Philippines hero of independence).

On a personal level I liked him. He was raw and open, whereas most politicians are not. We went on for over an hour, Duterte ignoring the whispered pleas from advisors that it was time to go to a dinner banquet. He was enjoying himself. He carried with him a wildness that that reminded me of my own friends in my misspent years as a teenager.

But I was also just flattered a man of his power liked my work. I was asked to sign a copy of Gangster Warlords, using a big felt pen to dedicate it, “To Rody.” Before we rose, Duterte looked me in the eye and gave me the kicker: “It’s fun to kill, especially if it’s the legal way.”

V

I followed Duterte into a vast hall filled with a hundred people in wait - senior politicians and top businessmen - and sat down to countless courses of food. Among the guests, I spoke to Zhao Jianhua, the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines, who’d grown close to Duterte, strengthening ties with Beijing. And I met Ronald dela Rosa, The Rock (like the American actor), a bald muscular cop who’d worked with Duterte for decades and now headed the Philippine National Police, at the forefront of the war on drugs. He invited me to drop by his office the next day. I also talked to an entrepreneur who had been to school in England, in the same town I went to college. He said assailants killed his friend and Duterte’s crackdown was sorely needed.

After our plates were cleared, Duterte gave a speech, mixing languages, making jokes, talking about his war on drugs. Finally, he got a copy of my book out, announced I was there and called for me to rise. I stood from my seat, my face so red I was sweating.

As I left the palace, my phone rang. It was Pia Ranada, the journalist from Rappler. She wanted to know how the meeting had gone. I ducked most her questions and fudged saying that Duterte was, “a very interesting character,” which became the headline for her story. She said I wasn’t answering, and I apologized. The truth is, I didn’t know what the hell I should say.

The next morning I headed up to the police HQ to meet The Rock. Made to wait, I sat with policemen and ate Chinese food off big plates.

“Where are you from?” asked a well-built police officer as he ploughed through some egg-fried rice.

“I’m from England but I live in Mexico,” I said.

He nodded. “In Mexico, the criminals kill policemen. Here we kill criminals.” A pair of officers chuckled.

“So what are you doing here in the Philippines?” he asked.

“I’m a journalist.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Rewind on what I just said.”

When I got into to see Dela Rosa he was in the midst of planning operations, and behaved as if I were an inconvenience. He gave curt answers, elaborating only when required. I asked why most dealers who’d been killed were small-time; he responded that his forces had dismantled four super-labs for meth production. He denied that a death squad ever existed when Duterte was mayor, and gave me the latest figures on the number of drug dealers killed by police since Duterte took office six months prior: 2,047.

He lit up when I asked about his relationship with his boss. “We share... a lot of things in common,” Dela Rosa said. “We love guns, we love shooting, we love action, and we love our country very much. And we really care for the poor people.”

He went on that the crackdown liberated people who had long been intimidated by meth dealers and addicts.

“I’m getting the feedback from the people on the ground, especially the poor people in the streets,” he told me. “They will directly tell you, ‘Sir, a lot of things has changed already. Before the war on drugs, we could hardly get out on the streets because we were afraid. A lot of drug pushers, drug addicts are in the streets, you might get hurt, you might get raped, you might get mugged or whatever. But right now, after the war on drugs was launched, we can now go out on the streets freely, anytime of the day....’ The criminals are the ones confined in their homes.”

This statement struck me. It’s hard for politicians to offer concrete gains in this globalized world, but the Duterte government, through a violent crackdown, had changed people’s immediate reality.

These thoughts swirled through my head as I crawled through the disaster of Manila traffic to my hotel when I got a call from Dizon. President Duterte wanted to see me at the palace again, he said, so I should head over. It was already past nine pm so I wondered what on earth I might encounter in Malacañang at that time.

Arriving at an almost empty palace I waited with some staff who had more copies of my books to sign. A secretary said her daughter was also reading it. I saw boxes of my books piled up and had a dark feeling.

Finally, the head of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Administration arrived and I got more information about shabu and labs and precursors late into the night. He also asked me about Mexican cartels and what I knew about their operations in the Philippines, thinking I might have inside intel. I didn’t have much for him. When the Punisher himself didn’t show up, I was relieved.

Flying back from the Philippines, I was torn by mixed feelings. On the one hand, I had a scoop, an interview with a leader who was in the news but talked to few foreign journalists. On the other, I felt seriously compromised, with the president a customer and marketer of my books.

And I wasn’t sure what to write. I of course didn’t want to justify extra judicial killings and photographers were documenting a bloody toll of bullet-ridden corpses and weeping families on the streets of Manila. But shabu dealers had gone underground, the prices rocketed and the president’s approval rating was stratospheric. Many Filipinos I spoke to supported him and said he gave them something to believe in.

I’d become weary of the failed drug wars in Latin America, the endless violence, the empty promises of presidents, the corruption. I’d bore witness to a humanitarian catastrophe on a vast scale. It seemed that much of the region was destined to teeter toward chaos. Here in the Philippines was a leader who told the international community to go to hell, used violence and garnered massive support. Was it tyranny by the majority? I questioned whether the liberal ideas promoted by the West were doomed to failure in much of the world, whether anti-crime populists like Duterte would emerge in Latin America – and then felt uncomfortable in my own dark thoughts.

But I hadn’t talked yet to victims of the crackdown or Duterte’s opponents. And I wondered if my access to Duterte was only beginning and I could really get behind the scenes. I needed more.

Read Part Two of My Reader, “The Punisher” Duterte here.

Photo 1 and 2 by KING RODRIGUEZ from the Presidential Communications Office of the Office of the President of the Philippines, 2016. Photo 3 by Ioan Grillo.

Text copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2025