Duterte Arrested: Was the Drug War a Cover Up?

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sean Williams reports from the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war cost up to 30,000 lives and tore Philippine society to shreds. But was it all cover for his family’s own involvement in the drug trade? Reporting from Duterte’s stronghold of Davao, where he ran a decades-long death squad, and capital Manila, which bore the brunt of that bloody blueprint, we expose the genesis of the war — and its longtime link to Triads and other criminal groups. Duterte's connections to the drug trade have rarely been reported on in English and are just starting to make waves. This episode, backed by exclusive sources and firsthand accounts, challenges mainstream narratives and sheds new light on one of the most controversial anti-drug campaigns in modern history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:29.8	Once the business of gambling was run by the mob, then the government decided they wanted
0:35.3	in on the action. The result was a competition, the bureaucrats versus the bookmakers.
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1:00.0	It's a steaming hot Thursday afternoon at a cemetery just north of Manila in the Philippines.
1:06.5	If you die rich in this metropolis, your family might buy you a spot in one of its gigantic skyscraper columbariums,
1:13.6	buildings containing thousands upon thousands of shining niches ready to receive your ashes.
1:19.6	If you're poor though, and for the vast majority of Metro Manila's 27 million inhabitants, that's the reality.
1:26.6	You'll end up somewhere like this. An outdoor
1:30.6	complex in the district of Bagbag, piled high with trash and dirt and feral dogs, circled
1:37.4	by cavalcades of bright painted jeepneys or hearsees that belch black fumes into the air.
1:44.0	This is the kind of place where almost all of those killed during Rodrigo de Jatjoumere. purses that belch black fumes into the air.
1:44.4	This is the kind of place where almost all of those killed during Rodrigo Duterte's blood-soaked
1:49.8	drug war wound up in cheap, concreted over niches, or if they were even more destitute, the
1:57.1	corrugated steel ones that marked Bagbag's periphery.
2:04.1	That banging you can hear, that's a claw hammer,
2:07.7	and it's bashing open the faded white niche of Artemio Lumbre from a semi-rural suburb nearby.
2:11.5	Lumbre was playing chess on the night of June 17, 2017,
	...

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