IS JUST ARRESTED PHILIPPINES PRESIDENT DUTERTE A DRUGLORD?
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It's a steaming hot Thursday afternoon at a cemetery just north of Manila in the Philippines. If you die rich in this metropolis your family might buy you a spot in one of its gigantic skyscraper columbariums, buildings containing thousands upon thousands of shining niches ready to receive your ashes. If you're poor though and for the vast majority of Metro Manila's 27 million inhabitants that's the reality,

you'll end up somewhere like this. An outdoor complex in the district of Bagbag, piled high with trash and dirt and feral dogs, circled by cavalcades of bright painted jeepneys or hearses that belch black fumes into the air.

This is the kind of place where almost all of those killed during Rodrigo Duterte's blood-soaked drug war wound up. In cheap, concreted-over niches, or, if they were even more destitute, the corrugated steel ones that mark Bagbag's periphery. That banging you can hear? That's a claw hammer, and it's bashing open the faded white niche of Artemio Lumbre from a semi-rural suburb nearby it.

Lumbre was playing chess on the night of June 17, 2017 when two men approached and shot him at point-blank range in the liver, diaphragm and stomach. Relatives rushed Lumbre to an ambulance and for 10 days he survived. But on June 27th, he succumbed not to the shots but pneumonia picked up on his hospital ward. The poor cannot afford gleaming medical facilities.

Lumbre's death barely even made the news. The drug war had been in full swing for just over a year by this point and already Filipinos were growing numb to the nightly reports of men, women and children massacred by cops, crooks or hired assassins. Lumbre was packed into a bag and buried at Bag Bag. Cops didn't find his killers and Lumbre just became a statistic, a relic whose fate nobody bothered to question until now.

Since 2021, a lone Catholic priest and one of only two forensic pathologists in the entire Philippines have run a campaign to exhume those slain in the drug war and relitigate their deaths. Lumbre is one of around 100 cases to date. He's not even the first to date. The team have already packed up the remains of a 24-year-old man from the impoverished district of Caloocan, a couple clicks north of here.

Duterte's presidency ended in 2022. Since then, there's been a quiet reckoning on the drug war during which up to 30,000 people lost their lives all over this island nation of 115 million people. The current president, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos, looks set to hand Duterte over to the International Criminal Court and impeach his own vice president and Duterte's daughter, Sara.

long-anticipated information about Duterte's own past commanding a ragtag death spot in his home city of Davao, and even his own involvement in the trade of shabu, or meth, is finally trickling out. But overall, the nation is traumatized. And it's only this tiny ceremony, watched over by family members and a handful of reporters like myself, that's attempting to give people like Artemio Lumbre a form of post-mortem justice.

as his loved ones sob and camera shutters click lumbre's remains are hauled out of the niche placed in a body bag then on a gurney and away in a white van his story might not die just yet welcome to the underworld podcast

Hello and welcome to the weekly podcast about crime, capers, flim-flam and fishy business. I am Sean Williams, a journalist recently back in New Zealand from a assignment in Manila, which is why I've got a little nagging cold in case you can hear it. And I'm joined today by Danny Gold, who's continuing to post photos of gleaming beaches and DJs in Mexico, despite me repeatedly telling him

It's going to drive me to an early death. I don't know. Tell me it rained or something or you crashed a moped. Just cheer me up. You know, I did actually crash a moped and like haven't been able to surf for about a week and a half. Actually, I went out after a week and did it and messed up my back again. But, you know, muscle relaxers are over the counter here. And, uh,

It is what it is, dude. You know, sometimes you just got to do like real gringo type stuff, you know, get extorted by the cops for peeing on the beach, crash a moped, get sunburned. It just that that's that's how we roll.

Yeah, that sounds, I mean, that sounds even better now. You've made me feel even more miserable. But yeah, anyway, let's get to the Patreon stuff, because if you can throw us a couple of quid a month, we've got plenty going up there. I mean, I'm speaking to someone about a strange spate of organized arson attacks across Russia this week. I think you're interviewing Rafael Cara Quintero from jail, right? And yeah, we're going to do another Stash House around in a few days. There's a lot for subscribers to get their grubby hands on, including ad-free shows and the reading list. So do that.

Definitely. I mean, we've seen the complaints about the amount of ads, but we got to get paid. We'd love not to have them, but it is what it is. So we have a $3 tier for the Patreon and that means ad-free episodes. So if you're interested, go there, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast or sign up on Spotify. If you just search for the Underworld Podcast Patreons, the whole separate feed with all the ad-free stuff and the bonuses will come up.

Anyway, yeah, I think what, like four or five years worth of it now. So there's quite a lot to go through. Anyway, to the Philippines, back to the Philippines, where I just spent 10 days reporting on the remnants of Rodrigo Duterte's drug war, something I've been working on since he came to power in 2016.

And this time I was back to meet a family in a slum to write this hyper domestic piece of Harper's Magazine, all the kinds of little mini mafias and pressures and political shenanigans that go on in a poor barangay, which is a subdivision, which we'll get into a bit later on, which is one of the world's.

largest mega cities overall Metro Manila is home to almost 27 million people an absolute beast it's a tough place to like or love and most people don't but I think for that reason alone I love it

And anyway, we did this show on this topic all the way back in 2020 when we kicked the podcast off, when Duterte was still in power. He has since been replaced by Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr. It's hard to say that with a straight face, of course. And actually, as I think you know, I was going around the Philippines, like, taking pictures of the most amazing names of politicians. And it includes a Bongbong, a Bingbong, a Bong, and another Bong. So, uh...

Yeah, something going on there. Anyway, Bongbong is, of course, son of the Philippines' namesake notorious dictator. Everything in Philippine politics is dynasties, elite families, the whole thing's like a giant episode of Succession without the snappy one-liners.

Up to 30,000 people, as I said in the cold open, are reckoned to be killed during this drug war, which is technically still going on. I think Duterte sort of sent a press release around urging Marcos to continue it. It's nothing like the charnel house Manila was from 2016 to 2022. Bodies dropping by the dozen each night. Vigilantes and killer cops and rival drug lords just executing citizens. Blood running through the streets. Really insane stuff.

How many trips have you made out there over the years? Is this the third? I think it's the fourth. The story's going to be so cool. Through an anti-poverty NGO, I met this family in a slum in Quezon City, which is actually the biggest city. It's difficult to explain. And I just went back year after year as I was reporting the drug war. And I just want to like...

Show their life through a decade basically so I spent most of my week last week with them they're really lovely folks but uh yeah it was kind of my dream and actually when I was out there in New York visiting you that was the story that I was able to pitch the other so that's how I can justify a pretty fun week in New York anyway since then since 2022 in the Philippines I've

There have been attempts to claw back justice for those killed in the war, including Marcos handing Duterte over to the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which actually looks likely, and impeaching Duterte's daughter, Sarah, who is currently the vice president and who a couple of months ago threatened to assassinate Marcos in public, which has just become par for the course right now. Yeah, I haven't been keeping up with it at all. So Duterte's daughter is vice president.

And the president is planning on handing over Duterte to the ICC.

And then the vice president, who's Duterte's daughter, is threatening to kill Isabella Marcos' son, who's president. Yeah, Imelda Marcos. Imelda, sorry. Yeah, yeah. This is... Okay. I mean, I think Marcos kept Sarah Duterte as his VP to kind of bring those votes on board because the Dutertes are such a powerful family now. And then almost from the off, she and her father were just kind of shitting on him in public. So he's like, all right then. So now it's become...

a full-blown political war and it's probably not going to end very well. I mean, she's already saying she's got a backup plan to assassinate him. He's trying to impeach her so she can't run again but she probably will in a few years. It's like completely mad but also very interesting.

And of course, beyond that, with the drug war, there are also projects like the one you just heard in the cold open. And that is from a handful of Catholic officials and one of only two forensic pathologists in the entire country. And they're on this campaign to dig up the bodies of certain victims to determine whether they were killed in firefights, like the cops will vigilantly say, or actually executed in cold blood. And we're going to hear from one of the priests doing that in this show.

But what is also coming out is the pretty wild information that Rodrigo Duterte himself and his son Paolo are actually wound up in the drug trade themselves. And they use the drug war to eliminate rival kingpins.

Now that is something I first heard about in 2017 when one of the members of the inquiry that's now trying to prosecute Duterte invited me to a Manila hotel room, showed me a ton of very convincing evidence about meth shipments coming right through the port of Manila. And I'm going to go into some of that stuff on today's show.

that I don't think has been reported outside of the Philippines, really, affidavits and testimony from former Duterte associates. And they place him dead center of the country's lucrative trade in meth or shabu, as it's locally known. I remember you first telling me this, you know, way back when and thinking how insane it would be. Like it sounded conspiratorial, but not so much anymore. Yeah. I mean, I thought some of the information back then was a little conspiratorial, but it's

This is all coming out in public now. And as we'll get into later in the show, it's pretty solid stuff. And it's causing a bit of problems for the people saying it. But this is actually real life journalism. It feels good. But to understand how all this began...

I have to take you back first a few decades, right? We're going to go to the late 1990s in the southern Philippine city of Davao, which is the third most populous city in the country and on the island of Mindanao, which it's fair to say is a bit different from the rest of the Philippines.

For one, around the core of the island is Muslim, where across the rest of the Philippines, it's almost entirely Roman Catholic. And going back to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, there have been Islamist separatist movements from the so-called Moro people. I mean, the Spanish gave so few shits about these folks. They just gave them the same name as the North Africans they saw when they were in Spain. So the Moors. But by the 1990s,

This movement has crystallized into a few major groups. There's the Moro National Liberation Front, the MNLF. There's the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, rather brilliantly, the MILF. And then there's the altogether nastiest Abu Sayyaf group who, if you want an indicator of where they fit on the scale, are now officially known as Islamic State East Asia Province. There was a pretty violent war with them just a couple years ago, right? Didn't they like take over a city and hold it like a hostage pretty much?

Yeah, yeah, I was there. It was a place called Marawi. It was a couple of brothers who had studied in Egypt and Saudi, and then they kind of rode the wave of ISIS. I mean, they got effed up, but the city is a complete mess. It looks awful. I went there with a German friend, and we were getting shot at, and there was bombs flying everywhere. It's pretty crazy stuff. They had to dig out the rest of the rebels. I think they were like

They were hiding out in some like underground bunker or something. I can't remember exactly when, but it took him a few months to clean these guys out.

But there's not just Wahhabi terrorists running around Mindanao. There is also the New People's Army, Maoist rebels fond of a bomb or two, many of whose attacks are carried out in the Davao region. Oh, and you've also got random groups of madmen, such as 16 inmates who escaped from a Davao penal colony in 1989, capture members of a Protestant group leading to the deaths of all 16 captors and five of their hostages. It's...

It's a pretty wild place, Mindanao, and Davao, as its biggest city, is right in the heart of it all.

Mindanao is also an incredibly rich mineral place. It's got tons of lead, zinc, iron, copper, even profitable gold mines. And its jungles, which are beautiful, are great for agriculture. But like all over the Philippines, these are controlled by a handful of cronies, oligarchs, and most residents of Davao City are living on the breadline. Drivers, construction workers, scavengers, rice farmers...

And in the mid-1990s, Shabu really comes onto the scene. Now, we've done a ton of shows on the history of Yaba and Golden Triangle meth, which takes over Asia's drug scene around this time. And boatloads of the stuff makes it into Mindanao. And later, it's even manufactured in a string of factories on the island itself. Meth is pretty easy to produce overall.

And this isn't to say drug use on the island is any worse than anywhere in the Philippines. It's not, really. And the Philippines doesn't really have a standout drug issue compared to its Asian neighbours either. But since 1988, Davao has been governed by a rough-tongued lawyer named Rodrigo Duterte, relinquishing power to his daughter Sara when his term limits are up, and then returning, a bit like a Putin-Medvedev deal. In total, he'll be mayor for 22 years across seven terms.

The Duterte family develops a cult of personality in this city, and Rodrigo goes hard on the meth and crime issue, declaring it, and not of course corruption, to be the cause of Davao's ills. And because crime is pretty rife, and inhabitants are circled by death, be it from communists or islamists, or just bands of escaped convicts, they lean into a police force where extrajudicial killings become a fixture of the job. Cop between islamists and communists sounds like, you know, arguing with people on Twitter. Yeah.

Yeah, it does. And some other pretty wild people. Anyway. All right, guys, let's talk factor meals today.

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In fact, so crazy is Mindanao perceived to be and so distant from the Philippines traditional power hub in Manila that

that locals kind of wear this bloody version of justice with pride. You'll often hear people say things are just done differently in Mindanao. We're not like those politicians in Manila. It's similar to what you might hear in Northern England or Texas. It actually kind of reminds me a bit of El Salvador, you know, since the gangs have been dismantled. Just sort of, you know, no more patience with how things are being done and just the sort of, I think you mentioned it too, like the iron fist policies are popular. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's reasons for it. But I think I'm trying to get to the point that this is like a narrative that Duterte also spins. People aren't being terrorized like they might have been in San Salvador or something. This is kind of part of his genius, I guess, politically. So Rodrigo Duterte...

He takes this whole kind of weird, different thing to another extreme, right? His police force is co-opted into a, quote, anti-crime task force, which is better known by another name, the Davao Death Squad, or DDS.

This group comprises police officers and civilian assassins, many of whom are members of the drug trade that Duterte has pressured into working for him instead. And these guys kill or disappear over a thousand people between 1998 and 2008.

Some people think that figure is actually up around 1400, and the deaths accelerate over time as the DDS becomes a more efficient killing machine. At the top sits Duterte, aka Superman, and he has three capos below him, the mayoral security chief, the city's top cop, and an informal intelligence network commanded by so-called barangay chiefs. And this last bit, as I mentioned at the start,

it's absolutely crucial to understanding how the entire drug war functions. The barangay is the smallest municipal subdivision in the Philippines. There are over 42,000 of them across the nation and each one has a barangay chief making decisions from a barangay hall, a bit like a town hall. But it's hard to overstate the importance of barangays, not just politically, but all over Philippine culture.

They're more than just the concept of a village. They're like a microcosm, an extended family, and each one is incredibly tight-knit. Some, like the barangay I focused on for my Harper story, are just warrens of shanties housing dozens of families. Everybody knows each other, and the barangay chief has cemented his power literally for decades.

So the chief is the connection between the Banang Bai and the outside political world. It's he or she who liaises with, say, water companies, road builders, NGOs, the lot. The chief, they're the ones with the purse strings, basically. So is it basically like an extremely powerful mayor with little oversight? Yeah, it's like the top of the funnel, basically. They're the people who get the money into the neighborhood. They know everything that's going on.

But there's another way in which barangay chiefs are so incredibly powerful. There is this Filipino concept called chismis. And most English translations just say gossip. But chismis doesn't really carry any negative connotations, right? It means chit-chat, hearsay. And it is the language of the barangay. And the chief,

because they're the constant roaming force around the barangay. They're privy to all of this chismis. Who's sleeping with who? Who's taking drugs? Who had a fight last night? And what Duterte does is turn the barangay chief into a spook, a spy, feeding him information to hand to the killer cops and crooks of the DDS. He turns chismis from friendly chit-chat into something altogether more sinister, like the Gestapo or the Stasi or the Cheka.

Here is a Deval ambulance attendant speaking to Jonathan Miller, author of the book Duterte Harry. Quote,

Bodies were dumped everywhere, everywhere, all the time. You wouldn't believe it. Most of the victims wore flip-flops. They were dark-skinned, the poorest of the poor. But nobody speaks about this. They will never betray him. By him, he means Duterte, of course. And Miller goes on, quote, Many killings went unreported. Other bodies were likely dumped and never found. The dead included many children, and there were cases of mistaken identity."

But over the years, devoused residents who today number 1.6 million people mostly turned a blind eye. The elimination of undesirable elements, drug addicts, criminals and street kids was deemed acceptable collateral. The trade-off for the transformation that Mayor Duterte engineered in the city. I just want to say, you know, Duterte-Howry is an excellent name for a book about this.

It is. It is. It's a good book, actually. Yeah. Give it a read. Last week, I met a woman in Davao who told me about four of her children who were killed by vigilantes during this time.

four of them, each stabbed to death with a screwdriver. No witnesses. And this is all allegedly because she'd had an argument with a cop and he'd vowed to hunt down and kill all of her kids. Only two of them now survive. And this woman lives in a really poor slum. And as we were speaking, rats and roaches were crawling literally over our feet. She makes a few bucks a month from pineapples her son-in-law sells, and she sleeps on a tarp surrounded by

literally by filth it's abject poverty i'm not going to play you the audio of that interview because i think it's too distressing we had to stop several times for obvious reasons but her tale is just one of so many when the dds was used to settle street scores to act out quote jungle justice and even now many of her neighbors won't speak to her because they're all huge deterte fans

And like we said before, on shows about El Salvador most notably, citizens can be forgiven for turning to these kind of leaders if they're suffering incredible levels of crime and violence. But like I mentioned before, in Davao's case, it's a narrative. Crime is high, but it's not that high. But the perception of crime is. It's the same with drug use. And

And while the DDS is on its killing spree and Duterte claims to be cleaning up the city, the needle doesn't actually really shift on the level of crime or drug use in the city at all. But the important thing is, people think it's gone down.

Here's a cop I met in Davao last week. We're going to call him Antonio. I met the guy at a cafe beside a freeway outside town, and he didn't allow me to record him on my good mic because people were watching and he was crapping his pants. So the audio is not great. But Antonio joined the Davao City Police in 2007, and this is what he told me about his early years. When the robbery came rampant in Davao,

Davao City, some parts of Davao City. The robbers, this is their modus operandi. They are a group of three, four, five people and their modus operandi, they'll go to Davao City, somewhere exclusive, exclusive homes like they target no one, nobody else there. - Yeah. - Location.

and then they make a move out of it. They steal, they do their stuff. So basically when somebody's got a special need, that's your crime.

They call it "Akyat Bahay" Do you understand? No, no. It's like... It's your feeling. You rob houses. Okay. Yeah. And... If your luck runs out and we... And the... The... The people who are being advised or...

mandated to do, you're really on bad luck because we sell them. In my experience when I was still young at that time, they do not go to courts because from 10-12 if you get caught,

Dress passing? It's like when you go into a barbeque. It's like that.

Antonio had grown up in Davao throughout the years of the DDS, right? And he told me it was completely normal to see several dead reported the next morning as victims of these falls.

which are kind of known about but not spoken about. And they're just shown up as numbers. 36, 37, 38. Rarely names. Two people died today. The number is 67. Tomorrow, it's 69. So, it's really, it's facts. I saw, yeah, I experienced it.

Now Arturo Lascañas is a former Davao cop and member of the DDS who's given testimony to the ICC about his time killing for Duterte. Now he claims he was given between 10 and 20,000 Philippine pesos per killing or between 85 and 170 dollars. Some high-profile targets however could be worth millions of pesos. Gangsters or corrupt politicians Duterte wants out of the way.

As time passes, the DDS swells even to include members of the MPA's so-called Sparrow unit, its liquidation team, and some people even think Duterte is a sleeper agent of the Maoists.

In 2001, the rate of executions increases when Duterte christens something called the Henus Crime Task Force Group. Writes Lascañas, quote, Several months after, Mayor Duterte secretly ordered some select police station commanders in Davao City to create and organize their own death squads to lethally foil and neutralize the alleged growing numbers of Shabu users and pushers in Davao City.

This is when the city's police chief, a portly and balding man named Ronald Bato de la Rosa, starts a campaign called Tokang, meaning roughly knock and plead. This is cops roaming barangays, banging on doors, and if someone doesn't fully comply, or even sometimes if they do, shooting them dead. Here's Las Cañas again, quote.

At first, the group's mission was to neutralize, in police parlance it means kill, suspected illegal drug pushers, users, drug lords and other organized crime syndicates in Davao City. And our vision was to have a peaceful, orderly and prosperous Davao City under the mayorship of Rodrigo Roa Duterte, who we call Superman.

From Superman Duterte down to the last policeman handler of hitmen, the kill, kill, kill order of Mayor Rodrigo Duterte resounded, unabated and obeyed blindly to the letter. In several occasions during our operations, Mayor Duterte would always remind us, kill everyone, leave no one alive so there will be no evidence. This has become our DDS motto.

Lascañas recounts one really grim case that still haunts him when he and his boys on the personal orders of Duterte can allege criminal his pregnant wife and his four-year-old son all in the same vehicle. Says Lascañas quote I attempted to rescue the four-year-old boy but according to our team leader since the boy had seen our faces he could recognize us in years from now and identify us.

In later years, Duterte winds down his operation as he eyes up the Philippine presidency, and DDS members who know too much, they start dropping too, or fleeing town. One of them is a guy named Edgar Matabato, who is currently on the run trying to stay alive so he can testify against Duterte.

He claims he's seen Duterte kill himself eight times. Duterte is actually admitting to killing, quote, around three people in his life, which is nuts. Matabato says that a towel emblazoned with the words good morning over the shoulder of a spotter would signal where a target was and that he used packing tape to cover the victim's mouth before he murdered them, mostly with a Colt .45, but also with a butcher's blade and one time by feeding them to a crocodile.

Hundreds of bodies are taken to a quarry on the edge of town, and Matabato gets skilled at cutting up bodies into identifiable pieces before pouring engine oil onto them to stanch the smell.

I was very good at chop-chop, Matabato told the New York Times a couple months ago. As word of the DDS spreads, Matabato's list of targets expands to include not only, quote, trash, i.e. drug pushers and victims, but journalists, politicians, businessmen, and activists trying to expose the killings.

In 2013, Matabato takes part in the particularly gruesome kidnap, rape and murder of three young women they've been told are drug dealers. Although Matabato doesn't think in retrospect that they were. They were so young, he says. They weren't criminals. I don't even know their names.

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Still, this cult of personality is so strong that people will forgive these or swear blind that everybody killed by the DDS deserved it. There's a restaurant in downtown Davao that I went to last week where the walls are literally full, plastered with photos of the Duterte family, cardboard Duterte cutouts, and there's a big poster outside declaring it to be Duterte's favourite joint. Here is its owner. Boulevard is, there's a lot of gang...

uh i'm groups yeah uh the courses the users everything everything is in the area so you couldn't really go out at night or yes now compared to manila even you as foreigner you can you try to walk display your cell phone yes you can roam around yeah unlike in manila

Even you're in the car, they will try to open your door then snatch everything, bag, cell phone, wallet, everything. But during his term, it's very dangerous for them, not for us. For the hard-headed person. That's why we called Duterte as our Punisher.

US

A lot of hard-headed persons, especially drugs, rapists, mostly they will be put under six feet below the ground as punishment for them, just to learn. So this is the cult of personality that Duterte has grown. Cleaning the streets, murdering pushers and addicts, or anybody else in his path. Some call him the Punisher, others call him Superman, or even Dirty Harry, hence the book.

Here's Jonathan Miller again. Quote, as mayor, Duterte was Janus Face, capable of breathtaking doublethink. He could initiate a progressive treatment-based policy towards drug addiction and at the same time sanction death squads to kill addicts in cold blood.

He could rail against corruption and utterly deadly threats to businessmen or politicians on the make, while turning Davao City Hall into a nepotistic cooperative, using public funds to buy votes and bankroll assassinations. A man with the boorish reputation of a sex pest enacted enlightened anti-sex discrimination laws. The capricious mayor would donate generously to children with cancer, while his city police contracted hitmen to hunt down and murder street kids.

So this is the Rodrigo Duterte who surprisingly sweeps to the Philippine presidency in 2016, and he promises to scale Davao's war on crime and drugs to the entire country, especially Manila, which he and Philominden Owens have always had a problem with. Hitler massacred 3 million Jews, he says.

There's 3 million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them. I mean, a quarter bloodshed and Holocaust denial in one speech, which is quite impressive, really. Yeah. I mean, 3 million is such a weird, inaccurate number of Holocaust victims to arbitrarily use. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's not like total Holocaust denial, right? Just, uh, but why would you use like only 50%? Yeah. It's really weird. I think a lot of his speech is just meant to like piss people off just by default. I mean, this is the guy who was what called in the Pope and,

Barack Obama, sons of bitches or motherfuckers, I don't know how you translate it. So it's all supposed to sort of flood the zone, right, with outrage. It's only 24 hours after Duterte declares a national war on drugs in June 2016 that the first body of up to 30,000 shows up.

Of course, there aren't actually 3 million drug accidents in the Philippines. That is an outright lie. But to get back to the idea of chismis, loosely gossip again, think about it. If somebody in your town or in America or Europe or Australia or wherever, if they're doing drugs, who knows about it? Maybe their family, maybe the immediate neighbours. But in a barangay, everybody knows. They've all seen the dealers rolling through. They know who's getting high and who's not. They know who's stealing to fund the habits.

The thing the barangay and Shakira's hips have in common, the only thing probably, they don't lie. Jesus, I mean, you would like the 12-year-old references. Just terrible, terrible stuff. That's pretty up to date for me. And the barangay chief, he or she knows all of this. And now Chismis has turned everybody into informants. Don't like the guy next door? Maybe you want to start some gossip he's a shabu user. Next minute you'll have cops thundering through the barangay doing tokang.

If they decided he's resisted arrest, or if they just don't like the look of him, bang, he's gone. Oh, and who's in charge of Tokang across the country now? Ronald De La Rosa, Duterte's guy in Davao, who's now the chief of the national police.

We've already gone over the meat of the drug war itself in the previous show, and I go into some of the more horrific things I've seen in Metro Manila over the years. But Patricia's Evangelista's book, Some People Need Killing, that is by far the best source on this. Compiled over years of her reporting for the outlet Rappler amid the constant murders. It really is a masterpiece. Best nonfiction book I've read in a long time. Patricia, if you're listening, come on the show. Love to talk with you.

I also mentioned in that early episode a particular cop named Jovi Espinido who got super famous for basically being the drug wars poster boy, popping gangsters and pushers. I think over 50 people in all quoting the Bible and standing proudly by Duterte's side. I spent a week with him on an island in the middle of the country. It was amazing.

challenging. He's since changed his tune. He now says the Philippine National Police are the biggest criminals in the country and that he was specifically ordered to kill certain people. But when I spoke with him a couple of weeks back, he stopped short of blaming Duterte for cops' bad behavior. And he told me he didn't believe Duterte himself or his family were involved in drugs. Others, however, tell a different story.

For years, rumors have swirled that the Duterte's not only used devours, then the Philippines drug wars to kill pushers and petty criminals, but to eliminate rivals for their own meth revenue streams.

Late last year, a former customs officer named Jimmy Guban tested that Paolo Duterte, Rodrigo's son, also a former mayor of Davao and a current congressman, and Rodrigo Duterte's associate Michael Yang, were responsible for an almost $200 million shipment of Shibu, which came into the port of Cavite, just south of Manila, in 2018, hidden inside a bunch of huge magnetic lifters.

Officials haven't yet verified this information, but Michael Yang has his hands in all kinds of mad stuff. Not least the offshore gaming operations we mentioned a couple months ago in the episode about Alice Guo, supposed Chinese gangster spy.

Yang has also been at the heart of an investigation into overpriced COVID-19 PPE contracts from a Taiwan-based Chinese businessman. But it's the drugs that have plagued Yang going back ages. In 2019, a retired police colonel and anti-narcotics officer put Yang at the heart of a Chinese syndicate running multiple meth labs across Mindanao.

Yang's partner is a guy named Alan Lim, a well-known triad leader, real name, here we go, Huanli Jin. He's also closely connected with the Chinese state, Belt and Road projects, and tons of Chinese money has flowed directly into Davao in the past couple decades. You can see it everywhere on the street, it's obvious. Some even speculate that Rodrigo Duterte will seek asylum in China if the ICC case goes forward.

Paolo Duterte has previously been connected to around $100 million of shabu transported into the Philippines from China in 2017 and a 600 kilo shipment that came right through the port of Manila that very same year as head of a cartel called the Davao Group.

This stuff is being shipped via Chinese triads and it's long been claimed that Paolo has a triad dragon tattoo on his back, which he has refused to bear, as well as refusing repeated calls to undergo drugs tests.

The rumours are growing by the day, and if Jimmy Guban's testimony is verified, it's going to blow the entire case against the Dutertes wide open. Here is Antonio Trianes, a former naval officer, senator, and one of the officials who's been on Duterte's case since the start. Again, we're in the restaurant. The audio isn't perfect, but here he is. So, the...

committee hearing in the House of Representatives when it was concluded one of the chairman of the committee explicitly read out the report and definitively said that Mr. Duterte is involved in the illegal drug trade

he is protecting his own cartel and use the war to drive as a cover for his own involvement. Consolidating his power essentially. And to eliminate the competition

And at the same time, as a measure of social control. So that different watchdogs of society, like the media, society and the others, would be kept at bay. And he can do whatever he wants. So that's the whole template which

But here's the bottom line. In 2022, Filipinos replaced Duterte with Bongbong Marcos, who's made it one of his goals to revive the Marcos family name for their decades of plunder and martial law. If you've listened to the Adnan Khashoggi downfall episode from a couple weeks back, you'll know how the Marcoses looted around $10 billion from their country, and almost all of that money is yet to be recovered. Going back to the Adnan Khashoggi downfall,

going from Duterte to the dictator's son. I mean, what do you think that does for a nation's psyche? To close out this episode, I want to head back to the beginning, to that cemetery in Caloocan, where after the exhumation ceremony, I took a ride back into town with Father Flavi Villanueva, one of the strongest voices against the drug war and what it's done to the Philippine people. And I think he puts a few things better than I ever could. I say this openly, even though

nation itself needs to heal herself from the lies, from the killing of the truth, from the killing of the democratic institutions, from the wounding of history. So certainly there is a need for, if there is a culture of violence and

death, I think we have to recreate also a culture of care and healing. Tokhang became a culture. It's a culture that you show off to surprise and kill instead of... Tokhang is from two words, katok and ask. But in the case of what really happened, it's knock and shoot. So...

In a wider sense, politicians take advantage of calamities to show off and to do so-called "tokhang endeavors" to make them appear that they're part of the solution. But in reality, they're just simply playing dirty politics, if I may say. I think that this administration, for its own selfish reasons, would like to

bagged Duterte and put an end to his whatever remaining powers he still has. So that is my belief about this corridor. Yeah, I believe in that concern that this government is out to eliminate competitions.

Once the business of gambling was run by the mob, then the government decided they wanted in on the action. The result was a competition. The bureaucrats versus the bookmakers.

Scratch and Win is a new podcast from the creators of The Big Dig. It's about this competition and about the fiercest competitor of them all, the state lottery that gave the world the scratch ticket. Find Scratch and Win from GBH News wherever you listen. Everytown has a dark side. This is Andrew Fitzgerald from the Everytown podcast, where every single week we dive into insane and mysterious true crime stories, most of which you've never heard of.

Stories like the bizarre disappearance of Tyler Davis in Columbus, Ohio. A 29-year-old father trying to find his way back to his hotel when he disappeared and was never heard from again. And Elizabeth Shoff from Lugoff, South Carolina, who was abducted from her driveway by a madman and taken to his underground bunker in the woods. We give you all the details you're interested in hearing about without any fluff or fillers, because ain't nobody got time for that.

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Yeah, I mean, this was great stuff, dude. On the ground reporting, digging up bodies, and...

Yeah, I mean, pretty, pretty nuts, man. I think probably this is the first a lot of people are going to hear about the Turk to himself. Yeah. Being involved in the drug trade. I don't think that's a widely known thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's like it's been an open secret for years. It's coming out now in the Philippines. I guess it's been pushed down the list of stuff that's going up the hook over there. But yeah, it's pretty nuts. And I think it's like an ongoing story. It's going to be stuff coming out the next few months. It's going to I mean, it's going to be even wilder than this.

And you heard it first on the Underworld podcast. Thanks guys for listening. We'll see you next week. As always, patreon.com slash underworld podcast for bonuses and ad-free stuff or sign up on Spotify or even iTunes. Until next week.

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