Epilogue

2017–2018 . . . Justice for Catherine Lee . . . Le Roux spills all . . . Scattered to the winds

On my first trip to the Philippines, in late 2015, I happened to arrive in the middle of a presidential campaign. An outsider candidate named Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao, a city of 1.5 million people on the volatile southern island of Mindanao, was running on a pledge to institute a massive crackdown on drugs and crime. “All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you,” he said in the course of campaigning. If elected, he pledged to kill one hundred thousand drug dealers, dumping so many bodies into Manila Bay, as he put it, “the fish will grow fat.” He was running behind several other candi- dates at the time, and as with then-candidate Donald Trump in the United States, nobody I talked to seemed to take him seriously. An establishment candidate and close ally of Benigno Aquino, the president at the time, was widely expected to win.

By my last trip to Manila in mid-2017, Duterte had been presi- dent for a year, and had wasted no time making good on his prom- ise. Police and unidentified gunmen had killed more than seven thousand suspected drug users, drug dealers, and seemingly ran-