For years, the global narrative has been saturated with relentless propaganda targeting former Filipino President Rodrigo Roa Duterte.
He has been vilified as a monster, a tyrant and a symbol of cruelty—portrayed as a leader despised by most Filipinos. This orchestrated campaign successfully swayed the unsuspecting, idealistic voices of the Western World. The culmination of this smear campaign led to his arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on March 11, 2025, in collaboration with President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.
I want to share some facts, some facts that have, perhaps intentionally, been ignored by the Western media, some facts that have been experienced by people living in the endless fear of drugs.
The first fact is that Duterte is not hated by most of his people. According to the Social Weather Stations (SWS), the Philippines’ main public-opinion polling body, Duterte, by the end of his presidential term (2022), received his highest SWS approval rating: 88% of adult Filipinos satisfied, 7% dissatisfied, and 5% undecided with the performance of Rodrigo Duterte as president.
The resulting net satisfaction rating is 81, classified by SWS as excellent, which helped him become the Philippines’ most popular post-EDSA president. In fact, Duterte’s approval ratings throughout his six-year presidency were consistently high.
It is hard for us to imagine that this is the trust and approval rating of a leader who is hated by the majority of his people as portrayed in the Western media.
Western media often tend to explain Duterte’s high approval ratings by citing a culture of fear, but Filipinos who have witnessed first-hand the evil that drugs bring, the damage they cause, and the lives they take know that this is not true. The second fact is that his popularity stems from the fact that he delivered his promise to keep neighborhoods safe from drug addicts and criminals.
When Duterte was arrested, a Filipino victim of a drug addict spoke up on Facebook. In her post, she said: “When Duterte won, that was the first time I felt safe. Criminals feared the government. The streets were safer. For once, I didn’t have to live in constant terror. So yes, I take this personally. And to those who call us enablers—you didn’t lose your family to addicts turned murderers. You don’t wake up every day reliving the horror. You don’t have to carry this rage, this grief, this pain for a lifetime. And if you ask me if I would kill? Yes, I would. I would kill if it meant my children would grow up in a world where they are safe.”
The post has been shared more than 200,000 times on social media. While the Western media feverishly share the stories of victims of the drug war, the stories of victims of drug abuse in the Philippines have been deliberately ignored.
The third fact is that Duterte wants to face the consequences of his actions. Western media keep on saying that Duterte does not want to face a court. This is patently false. What Duterte wants is to be tried by a Filipino judge, in a Filipino court, to be jailed in a Filipino prison. In other words, to be judged by his own nation’s system and not by a legal system manipulated by the great powers.
There are a lot of facts that the world should know. But those who would like to speak them are deliberately excluded by Western media from having a platform. Western media only promote views that are aligned with their narrative of the Philippines. This is a systematic control of another country’s history by foreigners for the purpose of massaging their egos, while claiming to be serving their self-imposed version of “humanity”.
When democratic media portrayed Duterte’s arrest as the end of impunity, they seemed to forget how ICC used limited resources as an excuse to interrupt its investigation into crimes committed by American leaders.
A closer look at U.S. policy shows that the imperialist power only supports justice for victims depending on the identity of the perpetrators of alleged international crimes, and whether doing so would align with Washington’s interests.
The United States expressed support for the ICC’s arrest warrant against Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but opposes an arrest warrant for Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, even though neither country is a member of the court. The glaring double standards make it clear that U.S. intentions regarding the ICC are more political than principled.
The current Philippine President, Marcos Jr., is the “democratic leader” the United States wants and a close ally of the United States.
When Marcos Jr. came to power in 2022, Biden fully embraced him and rehabilitated him and the Marcos family on the global stage, despite the fact that his late father’s name is still a synonym for unbridled corruption and his mother, Imelda, is mostly remembered as the last word in feudal extravagance owing to her fabled 3,000 pairs of shoes.
In advance of Marcos Jr.’s first visit to the United States as president in 2022, Biden assured him that a standing order calling for his arrest for contempt of court should he step on U.S. soil would not be enforced. That contempt order had been issued by a Hawaii district court in 1995 owing to Bongbong’s refusal to pay $2 billion worth of civil damages awarded to victims whose human rights had been violated by his father, Ferdinand Marcos, Sr.
The quid pro quo came when Marcos granted Washington four more bases—in addition to the five it already had in the Philippines—and the virtual outsourcing of the country’s defense policy to the United States in the latter’s effort to make the Philippines a forward base for the containment of China.
Duterte, by contrast, had adopted a pro-Chinese policy and attempted to terminate a visiting forces agreement with the U.S. designed to facilitate the large-scale entry of U.S. troops into the Philippines.
By treating the ICC as a tool to achieve its own ends, the U.S. is undermining the credibility and independence of the court. The ICC has already become a tool of Western imperialists. They issue warrants for Putin, Netanyahu, and Duterte—but never for Biden, Bush or Blair, despite their killing millions.
The ICC’s legitimacy is on borrowed time, destined to crumble under the weight of its own internal contradictions. But let this be clear: The legacy of Rodrigo Duterte in the history of the Philippines will not be dictated by foreign judges in The Hague, far removed from the harsh realities faced by Filipinos. It will not be shaped by those who have never endured the daily terror inflicted by drug addicts and criminals on Philippine streets.
Duterte’s legacy will be written by the lived experiences of ordinary Filipinos—by the families who finally found relative peace in their neighborhoods during the time of Duterte’s presidency, by the communities that dared to hope for a future free from the grip of oligarchy, and by the people who saw in his presidency a bold challenge to the entrenched powers that have long held the nation back.
His story will be told not in courtrooms abroad, but in the hearts of those who believed in his fight for a safer, more just Philippines.
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About the Author
Rachael Gonzalez was born in the Philippines and grew up in Singapore.
She graduated from Nanyang Technological University(NTU), where she majored in public policy and global affairs. Her primary focus was on policy analysis related to the United States’ engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
She is particularly interested in Southeast Asia and South Asia issues and passionate about understanding the complexities of regional dynamics and their global implications.
Rachael can be reached at hedbanirachael@gmail.com.
Here is Duterte expressing his point of view
I am an anti drug person myself , but it is estimated that between 12,000 to 30,000 civilians were murdered during Duterte’s war on drugs. Does not seem like a humane way to handle the problem.