titiklabingapat
Member
I'm just back from having 6 weeks in The Philippines and not once did I feel unsafe during my trip, in fact the main differences I saw were more people walking around at night and a distinct lack of child beggars hounding you for money (the ones that get sent by their parents to do this shit).
The citizens feel happy with their choice if you ask them (even the expats who can't vote are happy), they now feel like they can walk the streets without harm coming to them, most of the people I know voted for Duterte based on his anti corruption stance instead of his drugs policy and they mostly feel like they have made the correct choice and who could blame them, they had to sit back for decades and see all this shit grow around them while previous presidents did fuck all to stop it because they too were getting their pockets lined and the people have simply had enough of the corruption.
Maybe if past presidents had actually done something about the mass corruption, things wouldn't have been so bad and Duterte would never have won.
If electing Duterte was a mistake then that is their mistake to learn on their own and then hopefully grow from that mistake but for many of them it's not a mistake because they see in the news almost every day about another corrupt official who has been arrested and that makes them happy.
For the record I do not like Duterte but I am not a Filipino citizen, I have no right to tell a citizen of a different country who they should or should not have vote for, this is something many people forget.
It's always easy for people to judge others while watching from the relative safety of their own country.
The Philippines was already like that way before Duterte won the presidency. People have this notion that the Philippines was a shithole but it wasn't: it's actually a functioning democracy with pretty established institutions despite some years of instability after Marcos fell and during the Erap years. It's a myth that crime is rampant and drug dealers rule the land. Citizens by and large live peaceful everyday lives. Most of the trouble spots you hear on international news are isolated in the extreme southern end of the country but even that is dwindling. Even the communist inspired separatists groups (NPA) are no longer as active as they once were.
The Arroyo, and then Aquino years were actually remarkably stable and economic growth was starting to accelerate, being one of the fastest in East Asia for the last decade. Arroyo laid down the foundations of fundamentally fixing the economy. Aquino then continued it, and he started putting back faith of the government in people. Only in the last years did rumblings of 'change' start happening but it was confusing because by and large, all metrics were pointing to an upward trend for Filipinos. It was politicking and machismo that killed that momentum and Duterte was this shiny and loud new thing that took advantage of the Filipino masses' collective ADD.