Taking a U-turn on Duterte

Few days ago, precisely between Thursday and Saturday, three major earthquakes, of magnitudes 6.2, 6.0 and 7.0, hit Kyushu Island in Japan. The tremors were within short distances of one another and geologists claimed the quakes were unusual in the sense that they hit practically the same locality and in rapid succession. Nothing of that sort had taken place anywhere in the world.

Still, the initial footages, broadcast on international television, showed the remarkable poise of the Japanese. Old folks, assisted by younger ones, walked out of severely damaged buildings in disciplined fashion. While fear clearly was etched on their faces, they were not panicking. They remained calm and followed instructions quite orderly.

Before the first morning business hour last Thursday struck, I received a phone call. The caller said he found my number in the phone book. After he introduced his name, he made it clear that we were not acquaintances. And I was jolted as the Japanese were by the first earthquake also on that day. My jarring experience was not the result of a tremor, but it came from the fact that an unfamiliar person took time out to call me apparently to fathom more of my thoughts on the article I wrote and which appeared in this column that day.

With the introduction and some opening pleasantries done, my caller asked me if I had personal knowledge of the negative reports on presidential candidate Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte that constituted the topic of my write-up.  I wanted to be as honest as possible with him being a total stranger, and so I had to be organized in words. Without waiting for my reply, though, he mentioned that he had wilder, more disturbing and graphically vicious tales about the Davao City leader that were fed to him from various sources. He surmised that I got the information I wrote in my column from similar sources.

It was easy to believe his claim that he was one of the first waves of supporters of Duterte who came out in the open simply because that was what precisely happened here in Cebu. The Davao City mayor clicked with his bold, passionate and unconventional pronouncements. That he would rid our country of criminals in three to six months of his presidency sounded like it should be as quick as preparing 3-1 instant coffee. Certainly, it got the imagination of my caller as it did many of our countrymen. No one among the presidential candidates made such a daring proposition. And so, our people, maybe because we are fed up with usual motherhood statements of politicians, felt that the mayor was something else and he was worth our gamble.

Then, the second shock came. It was like the second earthquake in Japan at the lesser intensity of 6.0 compared to the first jolt. My caller said that he was sad to make a quick U-turn. He threw me off with a declaration that his admiration for the Mindanao candidate for Malacañang came to a stunning halt. That was why he called me. He shared in the fear that I wrote about. According to him, when he reviewed all the bits and pieces of gruesome information about the candidate, he realized that indeed, the Malacañang aspirant was a dangerous proposition. Claiming to be a patriotic citizen of this country, he said he would not, (make that never!), be a party in giving the reins of government to a person whose aura is soaked in blood and whose vision is not anchored on time-tested due process of law.

There was a third shock. Like the major 7.0 magnitude to hit Japan yesterday dawn, it came to me with greater impact. That caller of mine wanted to atone for his earlier flawed endorsement of the Mindanaoan presidential bet. He is on the reverse mode. He will use henceforth all his resources to warn our people of the impending political disaster. If he campaigned hard for Duterte in the previous few weeks, he is accordingly going to triple his efforts to dissuade the voters from giving a mandate to an admittedly dangerous leader.

This third shock is more revealing because I have heard of this not just from my caller but from some other quarters. And they are beginning to be heard too. Is it because the groups of Binay, Poe-Llamanzares  and Roxas have found time to expose the campaign of Duterte as flawed or is it because people have realized that the claims of the bet from Mindanao are outrageously impossible? Hard to tell.