The Peace That Came with a Body Count
- Kooks de Leon
- May 12, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: May 12, 2025
NOTE BEFORE YOU READ: YET ANOTHER POST THAT WENT VIRAL (AND PROBABLY MADE A FEW PEOPLE UNCOMFORTABLE).
What you’re about to read is yet another Facebook post of mine that blew up. It reached 2.6 million views and over 8,500 shares before the algorithm gods decided to slow it down (probably too much honesty in one place).
I’m sharing it here on the blog because platforms don’t always know what to do with nuance, especially when it doesn’t fit neatly into a headline or hashtag. This isn’t a piece that asks for applause or absolution. It’s not a debate starter. It’s a lived experience, stitched from pain, survival, fear, and brutal clarity. It’s what it feels like to be a mother inside a war people only ever talk about from the outside.
Some of you will nod. Some will wince. Some will want to throw their phones. That’s fine. I didn’t write this for comfort. I wrote it because truth (even the ugly kind) deserves to be archived somewhere.
Here it is. Again. Unfiltered. Undeleted. Unapologetic.
There’s something I probably shouldn’t say about FPRRD's arrest. But I will. Because silence is its own kind of cowardice.
I have lived (WE have lived) the kind of peace that only a war could bring. That’s the truth of it! My children and I have felt it in our bones, the way the air shifted when fear became currency again. When consequences meant something. When men who thought they were untouchable finally felt a hand, firm and unrelenting, on the scruff of their necks.
Back when Digong was just a mayor in Davao, you could already feel it. That heavy, unspoken understanding that the monsters had a leash now. A short one. And when he became president, when he went on television and told the criminals, the meth heads, the dealers, the enablers, the criminals, "Huwag mong subukan, masisira ang buhay mo!" I swear, I breathed a satisfying sigh of relief for people who had been bracing for too long. People who had been sleeping with one eye open, waiting for the next violent outburst, the next theft, the next broken jaw or broken home or broken child.
And before you get any ideas, before you pull out your ready-made outrage, I KNOW how this sounds. I KNOW. Because I also know the cost. I know the bruises I took, physically and emotionally. I know the childhood trauma my kids carry from growing up in a home where meth had more control than love.
I also know something else. I know what meth does to a man. What it TURNS him into. I know it personally, and I know it PAINFULLY. I have watched people I love disappear behind dead eyes, their bodies still moving, but their souls already gone. Some made it out. Not because they found redemption. Not because of some grand moral awakening. But because they were scared. Because sometimes, fear is the only thing standing between a man and his own destruction.
And Digong? Digong was that fear.
He didn’t give people time to make excuses. He didn’t let them bargain with their demons, didn’t let them plead for one more hit, one more fix, one more reason to sink deeper. He put the gun to their meth addiction and said, Decide. Right now. Choose. Live or die. And some of them, through sheer terror or sheer Tokhang luck, chose to live. And their families? Their children? They were better off for it.
Even the father of my children. Even him. At his peak, he was a goddamn catastrophe. A world-class piece of shit. And me? I was the undisputed champion of a willing victim. If I’m being honest. But suddenly, skipping a high for a day wasn’t the scariest thing in his life anymore. Suddenly, there was something out there that could actually end him, and for the first time in years, he chose to pull back. Just enough. Just enough that my kids got to see a version of their father that wasn’t always tweaking, wasn’t always vibrating with violence, wasn’t always spiraling.
And you know what? I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever scraps of redemption that terror wrung out of him, because my kids deserved at least that much.
And yeah, I know what you’re going to say. What about the collateral damage?
And yeah, it saddens me. Every life swallowed whole by the war. Every kid left without a father, every mother forced to bury a son. I won’t pretend that’s not its own kind of hell. But let’s not rewrite the story. Let’s not act like people don’t make choices. Like they don’t pick a road and keep walking it, ignoring every flashing red light along the way.
I could’ve chosen that road too. I could’ve followed my ex-husband into that dark road. I could’ve let myself get pulled under with the friends who got hooked. But I didn’t. And that wasn’t luck. That was a choice too.
Digong didn’t create the drug problem. He was the first to grab it by the throat and shake it until something fell loose. And the ones who ended up in the morgue? The ones who became statistics in those so-called extrajudicial killings? They weren’t just picked at random. They had their own lottery tickets too. Some cashed in early. Some kept doubling down. Some never believed the house would win.
Now I see people celebrating his ICC warrant, and I wonder if they’ve ever watched a father burn through his family like wildfire. If they’ve ever had to shield their children from the wreckage of a man who loved them but loved the high more. If they’ve ever known the kind of fear that turns your stomach into knots because you don’t know who he’ll be this time... if he’ll be the man you married or the monster who doesn’t even know your name anymore.
Maybe they’ve lost people to this war. Maybe they’re mourning. Maybe they’re blaming. Maybe they’re just exhausted from being afraid. And I get it. I do.
But if they think Digong alone is the villain in this story, then they’ve either been lying to themselves, or they’ve never had a meth addict for a father, a husband, a sibling, a child.
And look, if I can admit my own guilt, if I can admit that staying with my ex-husband for years, then finally saving myself and my children, might have shoved him even deeper into his own self-hatred, and therefore, into his addiction... then maybe some of these grieving families need to ask themselves the same grotesque, awful questions. Because addiction isn’t born in a vacuum. You don’t wake up one day and find a fully-formed monster in your living room. It grows. It festers. And sometimes, by the time you finally see it for what it is, it’s already too late.
This is why religion works. Because of fear. Fear of fire. Fear of judgment. Fear of something bigger and meaner than yourself. And that’s why Digong worked for the majority because he reminded people that consequences exist. That no, you don’t get to destroy your family and walk away unscathed. No, you don’t get to ruin lives and act like the victim. No, you don’t get to keep making the same choices and expect different results.
And so, while the world debates and argues over his alleged human rights violations, I stand by what I SAW with my own eyes. I stand by what my children LIVED through. I stand by the peace we were given at a cost too high for some, but necessary for us and millions of other families.
I stand with FPRRD. I stand with VP Inday Sara. I stand with the Philippines' Sovereignty. I stand by peace we all DESERVE.
NO F*CK!NG APOLOGIES.
On March 11, 2025, former President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested at Manila's airport and flown to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity. This piece was penned in the immediate aftermath of that historic event.
Comments