Rodrigo Duterte, who has just been elected president of the Philippines, comes across as Donald Trump on stilts. He talks dirtier (last week he called the outgoing president a "son of a whore"), and he can barely open his mouth without threatening to kill somebody (he recently promised to fill Manila Bay with the bodies of 100,000 criminals if he won). But the resemblance is only superficial.
For one thing, Duterte is not a fake tough guy. In Davao City, where he has been mayor for the past 22 years, a local priest estimates that death squads linked to him have killed over 1,400 people, mostly petty criminals and street kids. Sometimes "Duterte Harry" denies the death squads exist, sometimes he condones them, occasionally he hints that he does some of the killing himself.
Maybe so, maybe not, but what matters to the people who voted for him is that Davao City, once the most violent city in the Philippines and possibly all of Asia, is now so safe that naked virgins carrying bags of gold regularly pass through its streets at midnight unmolested. The man is a miracle worker, or so it seems, and now he is going to work miracles for the whole country.
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