The Gathering Storm: Duterte’s Arrest and the Specter of Lawless Devotion
Manila’s humid air was thick with tension as Rodrigo Duterte, cane in hand, stepped onto Philippine soil for the first time as a captive of the law rather than its enforcer. A man who once commanded the nation with an iron fist now found his own wrists bound by the very justice he dismissed. His arrival was not greeted with the fanfare of his roaring campaign days, but by the cold indifference of police procedure.
To his supporters, however, this was no mere arrest—it was an affront to the strongman’s legacy. Many have seen him as the last bulwark against crime, a man willing to do what others wouldn’t. Their devotion runs deep, past the graveyards filled with the casualties of his war on drugs. These are not citizens merely disillusioned by politics; they are believers. And believers do not surrender easily.
Duterte himself has stoked the embers of defiance. Before stepping off the plane from a weekend trip to Hong Kong, his tone shifted. Facing officials, he said: “You will just have to kill me.” To his base, it was not an admission of guilt, nor a plea for leniency, but a rallying cry.
“What is my sin? I did everything in my time for peace and a peaceful life for the Filipino people,” he told a cheering crowd of Filipino expatriates before leaving Hong Kong.
It is this that should trouble the nation most. When a leader fashions himself as the sole protector of the people, his fall does not simply dissolve his influence—it hardens it into something more dangerous. A movement, when wounded, does not always bleed out; sometimes it mutates. And the Philippines may now be entering a dark phase where Duterte’s most ardent supporters, unshackled from political norms, abandon legal recourse entirely in favor of a righteousness beyond the reach of the courts.
Duterte’s former presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo has slammed the arrest, calling it “unlawful” as the Philippines withdrew from the ICC in 2019. The ICC, however, asserts that it retains jurisdiction over crimes committed before that withdrawal. Activists have called the arrest a “historic moment” for those who perished in his drug war and their families. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but today, it has bent towards justice,” said International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) chairman Peter Murphy.
The pages of history have seen this before. Leaders who place themselves above institutions, who cultivate loyalty not to the law but to their own unyielding authority, do not merely fade away. Their shadows linger, their words echo, and their followers grow only more emboldened when the structure of legality threatens to take them down.
Duterte’s war on drugs was always more than policy; it was a doctrine. And those who followed it—whether with a gun in hand or with a ballot cast in his name—may not be willing to let that doctrine die with his arrest. If there is to be justice, it must be complete. It cannot end with Duterte behind bars. It must extend to his entire legacy, dismantling the dangerous belief that a leader is above the law, that force is the solution to fear, and that devotion is an excuse for lawlessness.
For the Philippines, this is not merely a reckoning with Duterte’s past—it is a battle for its own future.