The arrest warrant was delivered to President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines in Manila at 3 a.m. Monday. The person named on it: his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, the firebrand whose war on drugs left thousands of people dead.
But acting on the warrant from the International Criminal Court was not straightforward, since the Philippines is not a member of the court. So at 6:30 a.m., Mr. Marcos’s government received another warrant for Mr. Duterte, this time from Interpol, which was acting on the court’s behalf and of which the Philippines is a member.
Mr. Marcos recalled his next step in an address to the nation on Tuesday. “OK, we’ll put all our plans into place, and let’s proceed as we had discussed,” he relayed having told the head of his justice department.
Just over 24 hours later, Mr. Duterte — who long seemed above the law — was arrested in Manila. By the end of Tuesday, he had been put on a plane bound for The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.
It was a swift coda to a long chapter of impunity in the Philippines. Only a handful of people have been convicted in connection with the killings in Mr. Duterte’s drug war, in which as many as 30,000 are estimated to have died. Now, the man who publicly took credit for the carnage was being sent to a court of law to face justice, in part because of a shift in political winds.
Mr. Marcos, the son of the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, rose to power after forming an alliance with Sara Duterte, a daughter of Mr. Duterte’s. Running on a platform of national unity, they won the presidency and vice presidency in 2022. But their marriage of convenience started unraveling quickly, driven by mistrust.
Ms. Duterte, who is leading in the polls to succeed Mr. Marcos, has railed against him, saying that she wanted to cut his head off and threatening to dig up his father’s body and throw it into the ocean. Her own father called the younger Mr. Marcos a “drug addict” and a “weak leader.”
Mr. Marcos mostly brushed off the comments and said little in public. But his allies impeached Ms. Duterte last month, imperiling her political career.
Then came the arrest of her father, which she and her allies denounced as political oppression, although Mr. Marcos said he had simply been following international convention in complying with the Interpol warrant.
“This was justice, regardless of how we got here,” said Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize-winning journalist who has long been a target of Mr. Duterte because her news website, Rappler, has investigated the drug war.
“Now, is there politics involved? There is always politics involved,” she added. “But it’s a reminder to the rest of the world that accountability comes for you sooner or later and that impunity doesn’t last forever.”
It was still hard for some Filipinos to believe that such a moment had arrived.
Florecita Perez and Joemarie Claverio’s son, Jenel Claverio, 27, was killed by masked men in Navotas in December 2019. This week, Ms. Perez said in an interview, she pumped her first in the air when she heard about Mr. Duterte’s arrest, but waited until nighttime to tell her partner, because she thought the news would make him cry.
As they were about to sleep, she hugged him from behind. “I said, ‘Hon, Duterte has been arrested.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Oh? Won’t he be able to get away?’”
Mr. Duterte was expected to land in the Netherlands on Wednesday evening and be taken to The Hague, where both the I.C.C. and its detention facilities are based. A court official said that Mr. Duterte would not be expected to appear in court on Wednesday, but he would likely be arraigned before a three-judge panel in the next few days.
The I.C.C. typically has lengthy pretrial proceedings, and a planned trial is not expected to start for months.
Ms. Duterte was also on her way to The Hague, to help organize her father’s legal team. Another daughter of the former leader’s, Veronica Duterte, posted screen grabs of video calls with their father while he was on the plane. In one Instagram post, she wrote: “A flight lasting more than eight hours but left with just a sandwich to eat???”
But thousands of people rejoiced when the chartered flight carrying Mr. Duterte took off from an air base in Manila. To some, it was reminiscent of when Mr. Marcos’s father was ousted nearly four decades ago and fled to the United States.
“It’s not quite what it must have been like for my parents on Feb. 25 with those headlines in the newspaper, saying: ‘It’s all over, Marcos leaves,’ but it felt pretty close,” said Sol Iglesias, an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Philippines. (Critics accuse the younger Mr. Marcos of trying to whitewash history by not properly recognizing the significance of that day in 1986.)
Ms. Iglesias said it was clear that the current president had given clearance for the broad campaign to curtail the Dutertes’ power in recent months.
“None of these would have been possible without his assent,” she said.
Despite having once pledged not to cooperate with the I.C.C., Mr. Marcos told reporters in November that he would not block the court and that it had obligations with Interpol.
Mr. Duterte left office with one of the highest approval ratings in Philippine history, and Ms. Duterte is still leading polls for the presidency in 2028, but the arrest now leaves her in an highly vulnerable position. And in recent months, the Dutertes have not been able to galvanize large crowds for their protests.
In approving Mr. Duterte’s arrest, Mr. Marcos is gambling that he can eliminate the Dutertes as a political force without any major backlash. The issue is now likely to be front and center during the midterm elections, seen as a proxy battle between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, in May.
Two Duterte allies — his former aide, Christopher “Bong” Go; and a former police chief, Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, the architect of Mr. Duterte’s drug war — are seeking re-election to the Senate. Later this year, Philippine senators will decide whether to convict Ms. Duterte over her impeachment. A ruling against her would all but put her out of the running for the top job.
So far, public sentiment seems to be behind Mr. Marcos. A March 2024 survey of more than 1,700 Filipinos showed that nearly three in five approved of the I.C.C. investigation.
On Wednesday night, in the city of Cotobato, a stronghold of Mr. Duterte, residents held banners and lit-up cellphones in protest of his arrest. A few hundred people turned up, but the demonstration soon petered out.
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