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Trump and Biden Financed Duterte’s Crimes. They Too Should Pay for It
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Intercept
Posted: April 7th, 2025
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/19/rodrigo-duterte-icc-arre...
The countless victims of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs are celebrating his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity as a momentous first step toward justice. Many of those who financed, enforced, and even continued in his state-sponsored killing campaign have not been held accountable. That list includes U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and current Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Philippines remains one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the Indo-Pacific region. In 2018 and 2024, two international people’s tribunals in Brussels brought together families of victims of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines under both the Duterte and Marcos administrations. Both tribunals ... found the Trump and Biden administrations complicit in heavily funding state-sponsored killings in the Philippines. The killings targeted not only drug users, but also dissidents and activists as well. Duterte established, and Marcos beefed up and continued, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, or NTF-ELCAC, which immediately weaponized the Philippines civilian bureaucracy to go after government critics and activists on the grounds that they were fronts for the Communist Party of the Philippines. With no due process, activists under Duterte and Marcos continued to be systematically killed, illegally arrested, and targeted by state forces, even going as far as to be subjected to abduction, torture, and forced to sign affidavits claiming to be captured guerrillas.
Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.
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