Page 34 - SEPTEMBER 2017 B ISSUE

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ALL THE PRESIDENT’S WOMEN: DUTERTE’S
FIERCEST CRITICS AND A SURLY POLITICAL HEIR
DAVAO/MANILA – Philippines
President Rodrigo Duterte has a
problem with women, says the woman
who has known him longer than
perhaps any other: his sister Jocellyn.
“He’s a chauvinist,” she told Reuters
in a recent interview. “When he sees a
woman who fights him, it really gets his Australian missionary who was killed
ire.”
Then Jocellyn ran through a list of
Duterte’s female critics that included
his vice president, a prominent senator
who is now in jail and the head of the
Philippines Supreme Court.
All three have sparred with Duterte
after denouncing his brutal war on
drugs, which has killed thousands of
people in the Asian nation since he took
office in June 2016.
Duterte has joked about rape,
insulted the Pope and baffled friends
and foes with often contradictory
public statements. Neither this, nor his
profanity-laden reactions to women
critics, seem to have dented his
popularity among Filipinos.
Decaying body of male teen
from Caloocan found in Bulacan
File photo of Michael
Angelo Remecio
MANILA – The decaying body
of a 16-year-old boy identified as
Michael Angelo Remecio was found in
Brgy. Gaya-Gaya, San Jose del Monte,
Bulacan.
A report signed by Police Supt.
Fitz A. Macariola stated that last Sept.
13, a village watchman reported to
authorities that the “decomposing”
body of a male person was discovered
in a stream in the barangay’s Evergreen
Subdivision, whose “hands were tied in
front with nylon.”
Investigators said it was “possible”
that the cadaver of Remecio, who was
residing in Bagong Silang, Caloocan
City, was “carried away by the small
stream due to heavy rains.”
Remecio’s family said the teenager
left their home last August 26 and no
The 72-year-old president is a self-
confessed womanizer who once told a
large gathering of local officials, “I can’t
imagine life without Viagra.”
On the campaign trail last year,
he joked about the gang rape of an
in a prison riot. Speaking to Philippine
troops in May, he said he would take
responsibility for any rape they might
commit.
But women’s rights advocates
also praise him for handing out free
longer returned.
Before he went missing, Remecio
chatted with his friend, “Mak,” on
social media and told the latter that
he would visit his girlfriend in Phase
10 in Caloocan.
His parents Dionisio and Genivie
were able to positively identify the
body inside a sack as Remecio’s
cadaver because of the clothes he
was wearing and the scar on his back.
The body will undergo autopsy
and DNA testing before the funeral
parlor releases the remains of the
victim to his family.
Remecio wanted to become
policeman but decided to quit school
after he became a victim of bullying,
according to his reatives. n Ryan Ang,
News5 | InterAksyon | September 15, 2017, 12:03 AM
NEWS
Some of the women in Duterte’s
life (from L), top critic and detained Chinese expansionism. He has courted
senator Leila de Lima; daughter and
political heir Sara; sister Jocelyn.
contraceptives in his hometown, Davao
City, where he was mayor for 22 years,
and for championing a reproductive
health bill opposed by the country’s
influential Catholic Church.
In a recent statement, even Human
Rights Watch – a fervent critic of the
drug war – acknowledged Duterte’s
“strong support” for legislation aimed at
protecting and promoting women.
After nearly 15 months in power, he
remains highly popular with men and
women alike, according to the latest
survey by Manila-based pollster Social
Weather Stations.
While foreigners frown at Duterte’s
rape jokes, says Gina Lopez, a former
environment secretary in Duterte’s
male-dominated cabinet, Filipinos
judge him by his actions not his words.
“When I see him dealing with
women in the cabinet or whatever,
he has been very above-board, very
decent,” she told Reuters.
She said this decency also once
extended to Vice-President Leni
Robredo, who has publicly fallen out
with Duterte. She is from an opposition
party and was elected separately.
“He really liked Leni. They got along
and he was always flirting,” said Lopez.
“That’s what men do, right?”
In a statement to Reuters, the
president’s office called Duterte “an
advocate of women’s rights” who had
launched a “massive campaign against
gender bias” while mayor of Davao.
As president, it added, he had “hand-
picked the best and brightest women”
for his cabinet. Three of the country’s
25 cabinet secretaries or ministers are
women.
Reluctant daughter. Duterte spends
up to four days a week in his far-flung
hometown Davao, ruling a nation of 100
million people not from the presidential
palace in the capital, Manila, but from
a modest house shaded by a jackfruit
tree. Duterte was mayor of Davao for
22 years.
He sleeps until lunchtime, holds
cabinet meetings infrequently and
sometimes announces major policies
without forewarning senior officials,
leaving them scrambling to catch up.
Duterte’s volatility has baffled
September 2017 / Fortnightly – No. 18 • UK & Europe Edition
Washington, which has long seen
the Philippines as a bulwark against
Beijing and publicly berated the United
States in rambling speeches.
Much of Duterte’s venom is reserved
for women who oppose him.
In August, he called Agnes
Callamard, a UN special rapporteur on
extrajudicial killings, a “daughter of a
whore” after she condemned the police
shooting of a teenage drug suspect.
“He’s a misogynist,” said Senator
Leila de Lima, who spoke to Reuters at
a police detention facility in Manila.
De Lima was arrested in February on
drugs charges she says were trumped
up as part of a presidential vendetta. “To but only because she was “pressured”
him, women are inferior,” she said. “It’s
totally insulting to him that a woman
would be fighting him.”
According to Jocellyn Duterte,
Duterte is also fighting with the woman
he hopes will cement his political
legacy: his daughter Sara.
Sara Duterte reluctantly replaced
her father as mayor of Davao City in the
southern Philippines when he became
president. Father and daughter barely
speak, said Jocellyn.
“I know in his quiet moments
he considers himself a failure
as a father because of Sara
fighting with him,” she said.
Jocellyn said she had her own problems
with her older brother but they now get
along. They have two other brothers.
Anything but submissive. Jocellyn,
who refers to the president as “the
mayor,” said Duterte still eats the same
simple food their mother Soledad once
cooked: cheap fish simmered in vinegar.
She also traces Duterte’s
authoritarianism to Soledad, who
punished her children with a horsewhip
or made them kneel at an altar for
hours.
“You can see that in the mayor,” says
Agnes Callamard, U.N. Special
Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial summary
or arbitrary Executions, speaks with
reporters in Bangkok February 8, 2017.
REUTERS/Andrew Marshall
Jocellyn. “Sometimes people perceive
it as arrogance or call it close to being
a dictator. But we grew up in that
atmosphere.”
Their father Vicente, also a politician,
was often absent, and the young
Duterte saw the bodyguards, police and
soldiers around him as role models,
his sister said. He grew up in a macho
culture where wives and daughters
were expected to be submissive,
Jocellyn said.
His daughter Sara is anything but. In
2011, during her first term as Davao’s
mayor, she was caught on camera
punching a local official who angered
her.
In 2016, Sara ran as mayor again,
by her father’s supporters, she told
Reuters. “If it were up to me, I would
not have run,” she said.
She said she now only saw her
father on special occasions, such as
birthdays and Christmas, but denied
they had differences. “He’s very busy,”
she said.
Duterte and his daughter have
“a normal Filipino parent-child
relationship which has its own share
of ups and downs,” said the president’s
office in its statement.
Like her father, Sara is blunt, down-
to-earth and thronged by admirers at
public appearances in Davao.
She told Reuters she wanted to
practice law and, once her three-year
term as mayor was up, had no wish or
intention to continue in politics.
But in a country famous for political
dynasties spanning many generations,
Duterte wants his daughter to “preserve
what the family has done for the city,”
said Jocellyn.
“He is trying to instill in Sara that it is
our legacy,” she said. “Maybe she needs
more time.” n Clare Baldwin and Andrew
R.C. Marshall | September 14, 2017, 5:43 PM
President Rodrigo Duterte and VP Leni Robredo are seen in
file photo at the closing ceremony of the 50th ASEAN Foreign
Ministers Meeting at the PICC. Photo from Pool/Russell Palma
Mayor Sara Duterte, seen with supporters
seeking to have pictures taken with her, is
“anything but submissive,” says her aunt Jocellyn.