MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is in custody at the International Criminal Court. His daughter, Sara Duterte, who is currently the country's vice president, said her father was, quote, "forcibly taken" to The Hague, where he's set to face trial for crimes against humanity. The former president had been under investigation since 2021 for his administration's deadly drug crackdown, which left thousands of people in the Philippines dead.
Journalist Patricia Evangelista has been reporting on that crackdown for years. She wrote a book about it called "Some People Need Killing: A Memoir Of Murder In My Country." She joins us now from the capital, Manila. Patricia, hi.
PATRICIA EVANGELISTA: Hi.
KELLY: What has the reaction been like there in the Philippines to, first, Duterte being arrested and now extradited to The Hague in the Netherlands?
EVANGELISTA: Well, Duterte's supporters are framing him now as a victim. His daughter said he was kidnapped, that there was a failure of due process. But because I've spent a large part of the Philippine drug war talking to the families of victims, they phrase it as, we don't quite know how to feel. They are happy. They are weeping. They also did not expect that, in their phrasing, actual justice was possible. So it's been a mix of emotions in the Philippines. A young girl, for example, who had watched her parents be killed by alleged vigilantes, said that she hoped that her parents would be proud because she was 12 then, she's 20 now, and she wants to remind people there is a value to standing up.
KELLY: So I want you to remind us - I mentioned the drug crackdown. Just remind us in a little more detail what specifically Duterte is accused of.
EVANGELISTA: As president of the Philippines, he is accused of supporting, founding and pursuing a drug war that killed thousands of people. When he ran for the presidency, he said that the one problem of the Philippines was the scourge of illegal drugs, and he won on the promise of destroying illegal drugs. And he not only empowered the police to go after drug suspects. He also supported vigilante killings. He said, if your neighbor's child is an addict, kill them yourselves. It is a kindness to their families.
KELLY: Am I correct to think that he and his supporters deny all of these charges?
EVANGELISTA: That's an interesting question because Duterte was rather transparent about what he was doing. He said that he was doing all of this - empowering the police, supporting the deaths of drug addicts, the deaths of his own citizens - because it was an attempt to save the country from itself, to destroy its enemies from within. He doesn't deny that killings happened, but he said it was in the line of duty, or, as the police would say, it was in the performance of regularity.
KELLY: What role, Patricia, is the current president playing here? There's complex history, to put it mildly.
EVANGELISTA: It's very complex. In the '70s, the current president's father was Ferdinand Marcos, who quite a number of people in my country would call the former dictator. In 2022, Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte's daughter ran on an alliance. They called it a unity party. So in dramatic fashion, it was the dictator's son running with the autocrat's daughter.
It appeared to be a solid alliance, but in the first year, you could see the cracks. These are completely different parties with completely different interests. And I think the strongest manifestation was - of that was that at some point, Rodrigo Duterte, in usual fashion, accused Ferdinand Marcos of being a drug addict, and Ferdinand Marcos said, forgive the old man because he's high on fentanyl.
KELLY: What are you most closely watching for as these next days unfold?
EVANGELISTA: Look, Rodrigo Duterte told a story. He said every failure of the Philippines was because of illegal drugs. And he told this story again and again, and my nation believed him and said, to solve that problem, we need to kill people. But for the last nine years, since the beginning of the drug war, there's a group of people - the families, the victims of the dead - who have been telling their stories again and again to go up against Duterte's grand narrative. And these people are tired. They go through trauma all the time. They have lost their sons, their husbands. And what I am interested in is looking at how they live through this moment and see the possibilities of the future.
KELLY: Journalist and author Patricia Evangelista in Manila. Thank you.
EVANGELISTA: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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