Why I take the ICC probe personally

I’ve spent years documenting former President Rodrigo Duterte’s killing machine—first in Davao City in the 1990s, then nationwide during his drug war. What’s happening at the International Criminal Court (ICC) isn’t just a story I’m covering. It’s the reckoning I wasn’t sure I’d live to see.

In the late 1990s, I lived in Davao City. Violence was a fact of life, but mostly only for the poor. Street children, drug users, suspected petty criminals: they absorbed the full force of Duterte’s anticrime campaign. The middle and upper classes inhabited a different city entirely.

I bought into the narrative then. Davao was safe, I’d tell people. The only city where I felt comfortable drinking late, walking home at 2 a.m. I didn’t yet understand–or perhaps I did but chose to look the other way–that my comfort was purchased with other people’s blood.

In the early 2000s, I started documenting what the mayor’s campaign actually meant, pitching stories about dead street children. The atrocities defied comprehension.

One case still haunts me in quiet moments: Clarita Alia, a vegetable vendor at Bankerohan Public Market. Between 2001 and 2007, the Davao Death Squad (DDS) killed four of her children. One after another. Four funerals for one mother.

Her sons’ murders aren’t among the ICC cases–they happened when the Philippines had not yet ratified the Rome Statute that created the ICC–but these atrocities practically provided the template for the impunity that later on consumed the country.

Her son Fernando was killed with an ice pick, which was left lodged in his body, as if it was deliberately left there as evidence of contempt. Others were butchered with a market knife known as kolonyal, allegedly by men who worked steps away from where Clarita sold vegetables each morning. The violence was intimate, calculated, merciless.

There were many others. Young men gunned down or stabbed in daylight, in public, as if the killers wanted witnesses. In Matina, a young man was shot at a busy intersection. His brother rushed to him, cradled him as the life drained out, tried desperately to call him back. Someone photographed that moment. Days later, the brother was dead too.

This was the machinery behind Davao’s reputation for order.

Street children told me of being hunted by men on motorcycles linked to barangay officials. Whipped with latigo just because they were walking the streets at night, or drinking out with friends. Punished for existing in public spaces they weren’t meant to occupy. Yet the narrative held: Davao was the Philippines’ Singapore—disciplined, safe, efficient. A model of what strong leadership could achieve.

I was freelancing then for The New York Times, shuttling between Manila and Davao. I reported on the many conflicts and upheavals my country is known for but also the DDS. In 2011, Human Rights Watch (HRW) hired me largely, I suspect, because of that reporting. I stayed nearly 14 years, documenting abuses across the country, watching the pattern spread, convincing myself that this new role will be more impactful, more meaningful.

When Duterte launched his nationwide drug war in 2016, everything I’d documented exploded across the archipelago. Thousands of mostly poor Filipinos were killed in weeks. Documenting those cases—interviewing mothers who’d lost sons, children who’d lost parents, verifying the facts, demanding accountability from indifferent officials—exacted a price I hadn’t anticipated.

Unlike journalism, advocacy was part of my job at HRW. Recounting the murders again and again—the same patterns, the same cruelty, the same indifference—hollowed me out. The secondary trauma was real. I developed post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, I’m certain of it. I told myself it was just work, that I could compartmentalize. But the brutality accumulates. The sordidness of it all settles in.

Leaving Human Rights Watch brought relief but also some guilt, because the dying hasn’t stopped, the anguish hasn’t eased. That’s why this is personal.

To be sure, Duterte didn’t personally pull the trigger in most cases. He didn’t need to. Others did the killing for him. That’s why identifying those who enabled, ordered, or carried out the violence matters. It maps this machinery of mass murder.

The ICC will very likely confirm the charges next week. I hope it does. Whether every Duterte and every named individual is tried and convicted remains uncertain. The process will take a while, but it matters.

And it matters most for the victims. It matters for mothers like Clarita Alia, who endured years of grief compounded by powerlessness, who buried her children knowing their killers walked free, who lived with fear that never fully lifted.

When we last spoke, Nanay Clarita told me revenge was not what she was after. What mattered was seeing Duterte and others brought to justice. What mattered was for the world to acknowledge what was done to her and her boys.

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Carlos Conde now edits Rights Report Philippines, a nonprofit journalism project that focuses on human rights.