Global Pandemic, Duterte’s Plague: A Dispatch from the “Belly of the Beast”

E. San Juan Jr.

The hydra-headed pandemic ravaging the planet has worsened the suffering of 110 million Filipinos inflicted by the authoritarian Duterte regime in 2016-22. Unresolved internal contradictions flared up with the crisis of U.S. imperial hegemony to heighten the racialized subjugation of Filipinos in the diaspora with its history of resistance. This in turn catalyzed opposition on various fronts. Despite the anomalous electoral victory of the Marcos-Duterte team, neocolonial-feudal exploitation persists to bedevil social-media revisionism and fascist barbarism completely anathema to the Filipino people’s long, durable history of revolutionary struggle against colonial domination and oligarchic oppression.