Cacique clichés: Duterte, despotism and liberal orientalist journalism

By the time Rodrigo Duterte stepped down as President of the Philippines on June 30, 2022, his regime stood accused of undermining the nation’s constitution and destroying press freedom, as well as the arbitrary detention, persecution, and murder of tens of thousands of political adversaries and petty criminals. In their coverage of these events, journalists working for the Western legacy media have often reached for the clichés of orientalism and Western mass-culture. As Ileto (2017) asserts, “Images of the Filipino elite (oppressive caciques, bosses, and patrons) and masses (blindly loyal and manipulated táo, clients of the bosses […] reappear in modern journalistic garb” (p. 270). Ileto (2017) argues that liberal American historians of the late 20^th century like Stanley Karnow have been unduly focused on “cacique democracy.” These scholars overstate and/or obsess over the problems of “repressive, manipulative” governance, election-rigging, graft, “clientilism” and clannish “factionalism” to imply that “the tragedies and problems of the present are the consequence not so much of American intervention as of the tenacity of Philippine traditions” (Ileto, 2017, p. 268). At the heart of this pathological politics, so the narrative goes, is the cacique tyrant who at once embodies Western skepticism about Philippine self-government and vindicates Western neo-colonial intervention in the country.

According to these paradigms, Duterte is the ultimate cacique—narcissistic, impetuous, unremorsefully violent. Uncannily, he also meets Grosrichard’s (1998) criteria for “oriental despotism” (p. 1), as expressed in a very different time and place by French Enlightenment intellectuals mesmerized by the Middle East. Contemporary journalists including Jonathan Miller and James Fenton are guilty of the same hypocrisy and double standards that Ileto (2017) levels at the historians above, for they denounce the chaos and carnage of Duterte’s Philippines while remaining oblivious to Western complicity in the crisis. These journalists’ tacit ethnocentrism is also reflected in their dependence on narrative tropes and structures borrowed from Western cinema and pulp fiction.

It is worth spending a moment to define cacique as a term that has been marshalled at different historical moments for different ideological purposes. The oldest written reference in English letters to the term is in Richard Eden’s 1555 English translation of The Decades of the Newe World of West India, a justificatory account of the Spanish conquest of Haiti by the Italian historian Peter Martyr of Angleria. In the book’s glossary, “Caciqui” are defined as native “kynges or governours” (Fadul, 2020, para. 3), though this and many other words gleaned from Spain’s colonial encounters with the “New World” were subjected to processes of “linguistic projection” (Fadul, 2020, para. 12) in which Spanish intellectuals redefined cacique to suit their objectives of imperial control. The Spanish brought to bear the cacique discourse on the Philippines but very much later, in the second half of 19^th century, according to Ileto (2017, p. 249). It was applied to non-Christian native leaders, either of Moro Muslim groups in the south or “pagan” mountain communities in the north of the archipelago (Ileto, 2017, p. 249). However, cacique was quickly recuperated by ilustrado nationalist revolutionaries like Jose Rizal and Marcelo del Pilar, who used it as a deprecatory designation of members of the Spanish elite themselves—corrupt friars, authoritarian bureaucrats, and the like (Ileto, 2017, p. 250). While they did not invoke the cacique nomenclature, mid-19^th century British and American travel writers Charles Wilkes, James MacMicking, and Nicholas Loney castigated the same elite for mismanaging Philippine affairs—the assumption often being that an “Anglo-Saxon” empire should take control of the archipelago (Sykes, 2021a, pp. 21–23). During the Philippine-American War, American foreign correspondents switched their sights to allegedly dictatorial rebel leaders such as Aguinaldo, accusing them of atrocities from crucifixion to “burial alive” and assailing them with adjectives like “savage,” “treacherous,” “cruel,” and “brutal” (Sykes, 2021a, p. 56). The “caciquizing” tendency that Ileto (2017) identifies in the work of American historians can also be found in journalism in the Marcos era. In the 1970s and 1980s, P.J. O’Rourke, Maslyn Williams, and Ian Buruma construct Manila as a textual space permeated by “strongmen” (Buruma, 1988, p. 75) and “corrupt and egomanical” (O’Rourke, 1989) bosses worshipped by indoctrinated subjects.

This repertoire of cacique clichés survived into the Duterte period. Jonathan Miller’s Duterte Harry (2018), a fusion of investigative journalism and biography, is structured like a British or American crime novel and makes many allusions to Hollywood film, although not in ironic, postmodernist mode. The book’s name is a wordplay on Dirty Harry (1971), and a précis of Duterte’s sexual indiscretions is titled “Duterte Harvey,” presumably after Harvey Weinstein. Other chapters end on cliffhangers assuring more gossip and gunplay to follow. Other cinematic motifs include the “mobster moustache” (Miller, 2018, p. 55) of then San Juan Mayor Joseph Estrada to the climax in which Miller watches Duterte, “his Dirty Harry face on,” confessing to ordering assassinations at a Philippine police event (Miller, 2018, p. 331). Miller’s (2018) probe into Duterte’s son’s drug involvement flounders due to the bestseller atmospherics of “[opaque] allegations, key evidence missing, witnesses not forthcoming” (p. 93) Although not as potboiling as Miller, James Fenton’s reportage has an allied tone. In the opening scene of his narrative, Fenton (2017) is, like Philip Marlowe, “standing in heavy rain, under an umbrella, in a dark Manila alleyway, outside a house known to be a drug den” (para. 4). Meanwhile, the features of Miller’s (2018) textual topography of Manila include the “liquid grime” and “claustrophobic, muddy passageways strewn with rubbish” (p. 82) of squatters’ slums. In one of these communities Miller (2018) hears a Queen song playing and “Freddie [Mercury] crooningly asks whether this is real life or just fantasy” (p. 84). While this cannot be taken as a metatextual comment on Miller’s (2018) own representations of Manila, it nonetheless prompts the reader to wonder about the problematic relationship between Miller’s (2018) factual source material and the literary conventions he frames it with. The same is true of his statement that a “special report” on extrajudicial killings “read[s] like something from a convoluted thriller.” (Miller, 2018, p. 275) Furthermore, there is no metatextual self-awareness to his claim that Duterte has become the “pastiche of a Hollywood tough-guy” since Miller does not acknowledge that Western reporters like him ceaselessly characterizing Duterte as a Hollywood tough-guy may have helped construct that very image.

In addition, Miller (2018) adopts orientalist tropes that predate Clint Eastwood by a century. Ever since American elites construed the Philippine-American War as “a time not of continued resistance to foreign occupation, but as one of banditry, religious fanaticism, disorder and dislocation,” Western knowledge-power interests have emphasized the Philippines’ “pre-political” nature. (Ileto, 2017, p. 283) A polity bereft of functional civic institutions, so this discourse has it, will produce autocratic leaders. Thus Miller (2018) condemns Duterte’s affrontery of human rights and his mobilization of “fake news” (pp. 23–24). Ileto’s (2017) labels of clientilism and factionalism can also be pinned on Miller’s (2018) Duterte Harry, given his preferential treatment of drug lords once he befriends them (pp. 265–66) and the “cronyism” that fueled his provincial ascendance (pp. 289–91). These traits accord with the older European invention of oriental despotism. According to Grosrichard (1998), Rousseau and other Frenchmen of letters portray Asian rulers who “upon a whim […] elevate this or that subject, who for a moment before was nothing, to the highest office.” (p. 72) Had these critics been reincarnated in our time they may have written like Miller (2018) about Duterte. Just as, so Grosrichard (1998) puts it, “the despotic economy […] leads to the widespread impoverishment of all and the exclusive enrichment of a single man” (p. 71), Duterte’s “personal slush fund” of $260 million constitutes epic corruption, writes Miller (2018, p. 67). “It is in his [the despot’s] power to watch anyone anywhere,” writes Grosrichard (1998, p. 57). Miller (2018) claims that Duterte lurks incognito around his home turf of Davao, warning panoptically, “I have this city covered. Even if you fart, I will know you’ve farted” (p. 187). As with other compendia of cultural stereotypes, Grosrichard (1998) claims, Oriental despotism often “appears in two opposing—not to say contradictory—guises.” The sultan or vizier is simultaneously all-powerful and a mere “manikin, and usually the most cowardly and womanish in the nation […] he is a totally spent force” (Grosrichard, 1998, p. 70). Intriguingly, Miller (2018) uses that exact same phrase to describe Duterte: for all his machismo, he is a “spent force” whose homicidal efficiency is inversely proportional to his poor statesmanship (p. 77). Grosrichard’s (1998) French thinkers “observed [the] effectiveness” of unfree Eastern polities, “an effectiveness all the more surprising for its apparent dependence upon extremely fragile—not to say non-existent foundations.” (p. 85) In Miller’s (2018) view, there are bizarre absences and anomalies at the heart of Duterte’s rule: he himself “has had very little to do with Dutertenomics [his administration”s fiscal programme] personally”; (p. 296) he is capable of both “murderous threats on live TV” and “Mafiosi subtlety” (p. 112) and his “populist knack of making everybody feel he is ‘their guy’” succeeds precisely because he “remains beholden to absolutely no one” (p. 297). These depictions conform to what Hall (1997) dubs “having-it-both-ways,” where “other” people are “represented [in discourses] through sharply opposed, polarized, binary extremes […] and they are often required to be both things at the same time!” (pp. 227–46).

This representation of incompatible opposites is rooted in the timeworn assumption that Western modes of logical thought cannot be transposed to the East. As Grosrichard’s (1998) Gallic writers contend, orientals act on raw emotion rather than on reason due to racial, social and climactic factors. The question, then, of how, as Grosrichard (1998) puts it, “a people bends to the absolute authority of one man” can be answered by a phenomenon that “might well be something stronger than strength, more seductive than ideology, more enticing than gain—the very source of political power: love” (p. 5). Thus for Miller (2018), Duterte’s electioneering “inflamed fierce loyalty” (p. 15) and, after a year in power, he “could do no wrong” (p. 294) for 78 percent of Filipinos, despite his miscalculations and controversies. As the newspaper editor Stella Estremera tells Miller (2018), “You don’t talk with that man—you listen to him” (p. 113), which further infers that the bedrock of Duterte’s success is blind devotion to a domineering father figure. “That such a monster [despotism] should be a viable one in Asia,” writes Grosrichard (1998), “assumes the monstrousness of men themselves in their love of servitude in that part of the world” (p. 46). Miller’s (2018) title “Slaves and Tyrants” for his book’s final chapter is telling, as is his view that Filipinos are passive actors vulnerable to snake-oil rhetoric. Before the 2016 elections, a homogenous “disappointed country” was “ready for another strong man,” and when Duterte “assured” the people that drugs “threatened national security,” they “believed him” (Miller, 2018, pp. 13–14). Just as Grosrichard’s (1998) Arab slaves were interpellated through emotional manipulation, so Filipinos are prone to Duterte’s evidence-free scare-mongering about crime, online “cyber-babble” and an esoteric thesis that Duterte is a new “messiah” peddled by an “evangelical cult” (Miller, 2018, pp. 287–88).

However, according to Grosrichard (1998), oriental despotism requires from its subjects something more than love, obedience and fear. As Grosrichard (1998) observes in the belittling gazes of Ricaut and Montesquieu, “among the peoples of Asia the fear of death is replaced by a kind of joy in, or even frenzied passion for, suffering or dying” (p. 43). Somewhat subtler than that, Duterte-preoccupied writers substitute a Filipino’s passion for their own suffering and death with a passion for other people—drug users and pushers—to suffer and die. Peel (2016) quotes a “a Duterte loyalist” as exclaiming, “Whenever you feel that your life’s threatened, fight it out and kill your enemy” (para. 5). In addition to the voting public projecting a bloody “revenge fantasy” on to Duterte, Miller (2018) asserts that, during the election campaign, “crime-infested shanties” were seduced by his “take-no-prisoners” style (p. 15). The more vicious his rhetoric the “more media attention he won, and the more his growing army of supporters laughed and loved him” (Miller, 2018, p. 14).

Alternatively, in Fenton’s (2017) Manila there has been such an excess of death that passionate frenzy is an inappropriate response; a film noir fatalism is preferable. Fenton (2017) recounts an extra-judicial killing in the world-weary voice of a veteran reporter who, having grown used to man’s inhumanity to man, is almost bored by it now. “There wasn’t much to it,” he writes of a quadruple murder. One can almost hear the sigh as he summarizes the procedure: “Now the police were examining the upstairs room […]. There was an established routine in these matters” (Fenton, 2017, para. 7). Whether it exhibits itself in a morbid bloodlust as per Miller (2018) or in an apathy about wickedness as per Fenton (2017), the corruption of fear is a dysfunctional phenomenon that, for the orientalist, is typical of—or at least acceptable in—the Philippines, but would be decidedly out of place in the more enlightened West.

There is an international dimension to these journalists’ hypocritical dissonance. Though Miller (2018) lambasts China for supporting Duterte economically and militarily (p. 296), he omits the surge in British, American, and European Union arms sales to the Philippines since 2016 (Sykes, 2021b, para. 1) and the United Kingdom government’s boast that it is “one of the largest foreign investors in the Philippines” (Gov.uk, 2021, para. 6). While Peel (2016) asserts that Duterte scored votes by “mining a seam of anti-US sentiment,” he glosses over American imperial crimes (para. 10). Similarly, Miller (2018) remarks on a “rich vein of unresolved colonial angst” in the Philippines but is quiet on the rationales for this angst. In a mention elsewhere of the “troubled colonial past,” he somehow exonerates the Americans from such trouble, but not the Spanish, even though they were ousted from the Philippines in 1898. “The Philippines was the Americans’ first overseas colony, acquired from the Spanish after a short war in 1898 for US$20 million,” he writes (Miller, 2018, p. 133). The euphemism “acquired” is as telling as his failure to discuss the racist genocide that was the Philippine-American War. Indeed, his only reference to that war is trivial: it introduced the word “bundok” into the English language (Miller, 2018, p. 134). San Juan Jr. (2007) has identified continuities between these late Victorian outrages and the US’ current “maneuvers” against Islamist and Maoist rebels. “US troops are “recolonizing” the Philippines” to “preserve its eroded world hegemony” (San Juan, 2007, p. xxiv). Miller (2018) is as ignorant of these latest abuses as he is of 1898–1903. “US forces were operating […] in Mindanao,” he writes nonchalantly and neutrally, “in support of Philippine army operations against the jihadists” (Miller, 2018, p. 308). He is typical of commentators bedazzled by the rhetoric of the “romantic” relationship between the US and the Philippines. American military “support” for the Philippine state against a common enemy implies “Equal, democratic partnership,” Tadiar (2004) puts it (p. 72), but San Juan (2007) description is more accurate: the Philippines is yet another “sovereign nation” that the US is exploiting as a “battlefront” in the so-called “War on Terror” (pp. xiii-xiv).

Indifference to the historical record prompts Miller (2018) to reduce Filipino anti-American sentiment to either vanity or conspiracy theorism. He psychologizes Duterte’s hatred of the US away by proposing it is motivated by his “perceived rejection” when he failed to obtain a visa to travel there. When interviewed, Duterte’s “increasingly irate” sister Eleanor rants about Western plots against the Philippines while “jabbing her finger at me” (Miller, 2018, p. 311). Miller (2018) shares the cloak-and-dagger tale of Michael Meiring, an alleged CIA agent who blew himself up in Davao in 2002, while Duterte was mayor of the city. Miller (2018) avers that Duterte pounced upon “conspiracy theories surrounding this not-so-quiet American” to provoke public ire against US operatives acting “as if they own the place [Davao City]” (p. 309). Miller (2018) could have cited sources who are more articulate or principled critics of US imperialism such as Tadiar (2004), San Juan, (2007) and Rodriguez (2010) who are persuasive about how a century of American “global white supremacy” (Rodriguez, 2010, p. p. 99) has shaped modern Philippine attitudes. But his failure to do so amounts to insinuating that only rage could account for antipathy towards a binational connection held in “high regard” by Filipinos (Miller, 2018, p. 305).

But, neither this assertion about “high regard” nor Miller’s (2018) claim that “millions of Filipinos […] love America more than many Americans themselves” are on evidential terra firma because they rely on opinion polls showing that most Filipinos are “pro-American” (p. 303). Miller (2018) does not consider that these responses may have been conditioned by decades of indoctrination through ideological state apparatuses controlled by domestic elites whose hegemony depends upon a “fraternal” illusion of Philippine-American ties. Miller (2018) also references the legions of Filipinos who have migrated to the US as proof of their Americophilia (p. 304). This is, however, a dubiously monocausal analysis that excises the plurality of reasons why Filipinos relocate abroad. Madianou (2012) states that these include “fulfilling one’s family obligations,” better education and escape from “domestic violence” (pp. 285–86).

When Duterte scolds Western interventions in Libya, Panama and Iraq, and US police brutality (Romero, 2018, para. 2), Western journalists have rightly called Duterte out for “whataboutism,” or tu quoque in which “An argument […] consists in retorting a charge upon one’s accuser” (Butterfield, 2015, p. 422). Duterte’s cynical strategy is to deflect scrutiny of his own atrocities by appealing to vulgar nationalism and anti-Americanism. However, the “whataboutism” charge can, as it were, be reversed due to Western liberals’ unwillingness to accept that Western states have longer and more egregious records of slaughter. As Spear (2017) avers, “tu quoque can be used legitimately to question whether a particular moral principle is in fact one we endorse and, if so, whether everyone is consistently following it” (para. 5).

Duterte has also mobilized tu quoque against the International Criminal Court (ICC). While his complaint is again insincere, it does nonetheless speak to a practical problem: how can Duterte be brought to justice when UN delegates, (United Nations, 2016, para. 9) lawyers, and commentators (Turner, 2003, pp. 524–554) have repeatedly excoriated the ICC’s erratic treatment of Global Northern and Global Southern state crimes? The President of the African Union Commission has said, “[the] ICC always targets […] Africans. Does it mean that you have nothing on Gaza? […] There is nothing on Iraq? We are raising this type of question because we don’t want a double standard” (cited in Kimani, 2009, para. 20). After examining the West’s lack of liability for its “colonial wars” such as Vietnam, Kaleck (2015) concludes that “The practice of double standards will have to be addressed to protect this project [the ICC] against erosion of legitimacy and global endorsement” (p. 4). Naturally, there is no engagement with the uneven moral landscape of international law in Miller’s half-page disquisition on the ICC, nor in any of the reports on the topic by fellow Westerners. To countenance the subject would mean admitting that the case against Duterte is in part driven by a conception of human rights as, so Rafael (2016) holds, “a form of imperialism: the West dictating to the non-West the norms of proper conduct.” The “UN rapporteurs,” Rafael (2016) continues “[are] lecturing […] from a location that is historically responsible for their daily violation in its complicity with the ‘war on terror’, neoliberalism, and drone warfare” (para. 4).

On the Philippine domestic front, Western reporters gloss over the illiberal misdemeanors of Duterte’s predecessors—just as long as they were nominally economically and politically liberal—as in Smith’s (2016) baffling proposition that ex-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is a “good role model” for the progressive resistance to Duterte (para. 4). In reality, Arroyo imposed a limited form of martial law and was responsible for “1,093 victims of extrajudicial killings” (Remollino, 2009, para. 11). Furthermore, Smith’s (2016) inclusion of Arroyo, along with former Vice President Leni Robredo, in a clique of “strong” elite Filipina politicians who could “combat the macho autocrat” (para. 9) Duterte smacks of a problematic identity politics that is another symptom of the (neo)liberal malaise. Societies so broken by the historical forces explained above cannot be fixed by promoting certain female politicians, especially if their political assumptions are no different to the men currently in power. But to labor under the illusion that such reforms will save the day excuses Smith et al. from, once again, acknowledging that the crisis has any causal relation to their own ideological dictates.

Modern-day Western journalists have tried so hard to disavow the role of (neo)liberalism in Dutertismo that they can only retreat to orientalist platitudes: Filipinos are easily led, illogical and so forth. Ironically, though, some of these writers’ reliance on narrative forms (police procedural, Hollywood picture) that are quintessential products of the Western globalized culture industry is the nearest they get to admitting any kind of Western collusion in causing the dire straits that the Philippines is in today.

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Tom Sykes

Tom Sykes is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Journalism at the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom and author of Imagining Manila: Literature, Empire and Orientalism which explores Western literary and media misrepresentations of Philippine culture and society since the 19th century. He has also reported on Philippine affairs for various media across the world.