[Philippine human rights violation] Duterte Harry fire and fury in the Philippines #5/120

To Jesus’ left, in an alcove, a portrait of Duterte’s illustrious governor-father, Vicente, who’d died young of a heart attack in 1968, while serving as a member of the Marcos cabinet. To Jesus’ right, the grave of Duterte’s mother, Soledad Roa Gonzales Duterte. A large, gold-framed photograph of her, hanging on the wall.

It was at his mother’s grave that Duterte, soon-to-be president-elect, fell apart. His Filipino fans found it extremely moving. What might have been a private moment was crowded by the press, murmuring, clattering, falling over each other inside the cramped shrine. Cameras were flashing, and his daughter, Sara — now, herself, the mayor of Davao City — filmed the scene and posted it on social media.

After crying quietly for some time, her father, dressed in his favourite red-checked, short-sleeved lumberjack-style shirt, pulls a white handkerchief from his pocket and mops his eyes as camera shutters reach a crescendo. Duterte is leaning on the altar, mumbling. His words are barely distinguishable: ‘Mother, I am just a nobody,’ he sobs, in Bisaya.

In the video, someone’s mobile phone played a silly ring tone and broke the spell. The president-elect gathered himself, cracked a joke, then briefly rested his head on the marble slab covering the grave of his father, his quiet father, who never cursed but who had once taken him by the throat and called him ‘bugoy’. Hoodlum. The father for whom he was never going to be good enough.

When Duterte was ‘expelled’ from Ateneo de Davao High School he was then enrolled in Holy Cross High School in Digos, 50 miles down the road, where he lived in exile, boarding in a small, shared room, beneath the lodgings of the Canadian Brothers who ran the school. By this time, he had acquired a rebel heart. Dureza recalled the first time he had seen him — ‘a young man being dragged by his father from the governor’s car into the Brothers’ House’ — on his arrival at the school in Digos. Duterte did not excel academically. He scraped through, taking seven years to complete his secondary education. Records at the school show blank spaces in several subjects, where he was not awarded grades at all. Contemporaries from Holy Cross remember him as quiet, uninvolved in class discussions, and not interested in sports or other extra-curricular activities. The school was nothing short of a Spartan religious garrison, and the Brothers were known to be extremely strict. A young Canadian teacher was assigned to personally ‘monitor’ the teenaged Duterte, but his father ensured that his wayward son had an even more fearsome guardian, a former army officer-turned-mayor of Digos City, Nonito Liaños. He was a longstanding friend of the Duterte family, had four boys himself, and was feared locally for his authoritarian ways.

‘Military men know discipline,’ said Eleanor, ‘so my father asks him, “Can I leave him with you so that he will not monkey around?” And Mayor Liaños, knowing my father like a brother, said he would treat him like his own.’

‘Nonito Liaños was the disciplinarian of Digos,’ said Nelson Tandug, the affable alumni affairs officer at Duterte’s former school. ‘He is probably where he [Duterte] got his methods from. Liaños would personally patrol the streets at night and would break the hoodlums’ ribs if he caught them.’

‘One night,’ according to Eleanor, ‘Mayor Liaños had to call on his policemen to go after Rodrigo. He had escaped! He would jump the fence,’ she said. ‘Where would he go? God only knows.’ She said he’d told the mayor he’d gone out chasing girls.

But Duterte broke out of his Digos prison for other reasons, seemingly inspired by his no-nonsense local guardian, Nonito Liaños, to go and catch some bad guys. Dureza said there were gang wars in Digos at that time: ‘We were not involved at all, we were not part of it,’ he said, but Duterte was determined to find out what was going on. He wanted to track down the ring-leaders responsible for terrorising the neighbourhood. ‘When he got the gang leader’s name, one evening, we sneaked out, scaled the fence, and went to look for the guy who’d led the gang war.’

Dureza still seemed incredulous that he’d actually done this.

‘Seriously! When he approached him — and of course he didn’t know us — Rody just slapped him and said: “Do not do this again.” He has always been the type who wants to punish bad guys. Even when we were not involved!’

Duterte turned tail, according to Dureza, and, with his terrified friend in tow, sprinted back to Holy Cross.