Wazzup Pilipinas!?
Safety. That was the magic word, the selling point, the gospel according to Rodrigo Roa Duterte. When the former president promised it, many Filipinos clung to it like a life raft in stormy seas. For a nation battered by crime, corruption, and neglect, who wouldn’t? The promise was intoxicating: safer streets, fewer addicts, a nation scrubbed clean of menace.
And so people bought it—hook, line, and sinker. They did not ask what kind of safety it was, nor whose bodies would pay the price. It was enough that they themselves could walk home at midnight and not fear the addict in the alley. It was enough that jeepney drivers ferried passengers without glancing nervously at shirtless tambays. It was enough that mothers could tell themselves the bad men had been “taken care of.”
But “taken care of” meant a bullet to the head, a body dumped in the gutter, a grieving mother clutching her child’s photo on the six o’clock news. Safety was delivered—swift, brutal, and blood-soaked.
The Manufactured Illusion
Duterte did not bring peace; he staged a spectacle. Every corpse on the pavement, every lifeless body with a cardboard sign marked “Pusher, huwag tularan,” was part of the theater. The war on drugs was not about solving crime—it was about performing control. It was a macabre drama meant to show the strongman at work.
Yes, the streets seemed quieter. But silence is not peace, and fear is not safety. A community where neighbors lock their doors not because crime is gone but because speaking out is deadly—that is not peace. That is terror masquerading as order.
The drug trade didn’t end. It simply burrowed underground, shifted hands, adjusted routes. Addicts didn’t disappear. They hid, they ducked, they waited. Pushers didn’t stop dealing. They adapted. Crime was not eradicated, only displaced. Studies prove it, history confirms it, common sense shouts it: you cannot gun down a social problem.
Outsourcing Murder
What Duterte called governance was outsourcing violence. The police planted evidence and called it duty. Vigilantes roamed with pistols and cardboard signs. Due process was bypassed, justice reduced to a gunshot, the presumption of innocence buried with the victims.
The state abdicated its responsibility to reform and instead deputized fear. Law became synonymous with impunity, and propaganda replaced truth. Filipinos were told that the carnage was necessary, that the blood was cleansing, that order was finally being restored. But it was the “peace of the graveyard” that they inherited—streets quieter only because the voiceless were silenced forever.
A Legacy of Rot
The most chilling part of Duterte’s legacy is not just the thousands killed—it is the corrosion of institutions. Police who mistake violence for efficiency. Prosecutors who weaponize delay. Citizens who cheer as long as the killings happen “somewhere else” and to “someone else.” This is the poison that seeps into democracy: the normalization of fear as governance.
Safety built on murder cannot endure. For his illusion to last, every leader after him must kill, silence, and persecute in his image. His cult demands continuity, and therein lies the danger: a nation addicted to the adrenaline of violence, expecting executions instead of reforms.
The Hard Work of Real Safety
True safety is not delivered by bullets. It is built in classrooms, in clinics, in jobs that give people dignity, in rehabilitation centers that treat addiction as illness, not crime. It is born of justice, of functioning institutions, of a society that refuses to trample rights for convenience.
This work is slow. It does not make for sensational headlines. It does not produce the nightly drama of a kill count. But unlike Duterte’s brand of safety, it lasts.
The Cult Endures
And yet, years after Duterte stepped down, his cult persists. Ask his loyalists why they still kneel before him, and they chant the same refrain: He made the streets safe. They still cling to the illusion, blind to the blood that bought it, deaf to the truth that safety built on fear is no safety at all.
Yes, Duterte gave us safety—but only the safety of the terrified. The safety of silence. The safety of those who looked away. He washed the streets with blood and called them clean. And he proved, once again, the oldest lesson in politics:
It is easy to promise peace, if you do not mind ruling a cemetery.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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