Duterte’s Choice: The Tyrant Emerged
TURNING 2017 INTO A YEAR OF STATE TERROR
In what can only be described as a decaying ego desperate for power, President Rodrigo R. Duterte, with his US-backed regime, has persisted with savage viciousness in continuing the government’s gross human rights violations against the Filipino masses.
Employing the resources of the State to attack, criminalize, and target individuals and entire communities, Duterte’s brand of militarism and fascism has risen to the surface with guns and bombs directed at anyone who dares to question and find solutions to the policy environment that keep this country in its miserable and dismal state. Amid the alternatives given to this new leadership at the start of his term, Duterte has chosen to make State terrorism his irreversible and grim response to the public clamor for systemic, substantial change.
The year 2017 unfolded Duterte’s true nature, a greedy and cruel war-mongering president who uses his power to perpetrate a killing rampage against the people – his war on drugs, his own brand of war-on-terror, and his military’s all-out-war. His imposition and extension of martial law in Mindanao and his continuing implementation of government’s counterinsurgency program, presently Oplan Kapayapaan, have exposed Duterte as a fascist instrument beholden to the whims of his imperialist master, the United States. Duterte has further consolidated his US-loyal security cluster and the neoliberal fanatics in his cabinet, resulting in intensifying attacks against people’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. His government has taken the form of a paper tiger – desperately fronting a fierce strongman façade yet ultimately revealing a cowering and subservient running dog to its profit-hungry and fascist masters.