Trump’s ‘poison partnership’ with Duterte lands on HuffPo’s front page

An opinion piece blasting US President Donald Trump's growing alliance with President Rodrigo Duterte has made the front page of the US news site Huffington Post.

The piece, "America's Indefensible Alliance With The Philippines," was written by Rhonda Ramiro of BAYAN-USA, the US arm of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, and Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of the US-based anti-poverty, anti-genocide NGO Project South and a past president of the progressive US bar association National Lawyers Guild.

Its opening passage stated that the Trump-Duterte alliance could become the 21st century version of the Reagan-Marcos "union" in the 1980s.

"Such die-hard support for a brutal dictator was immoral back then," the authors wrote.

"Knowing the legacy of trauma that the Marcos dictatorship inflicted on the Filipino people and the country as a whole makes supporting the admittedly fascist upstart dictator Duterte completely unjustifiable today," they added.

The column said that the vast majority of the Philippines' 100 million people are "dirt-poor," thanks largely to "119 years" of US policies.

It quoted Trump as saying that the Philippines was a "the most prime piece of real estate" from a military standpoint.

"No need to mince words: for the US, the Philippines remains, as it has always been, an essential cog in the US war machine," the authors wrote.

They added that Trump and the US need Duterte and the Philippines as an ally as the US continued its "brinkmanship" with North Korea and as China loomed as an economic threat.

However, said the authors, "Duterte is well on track to surpass the body count of his self-proclaimed idol [Marcos]," saying that "an estimated 13,000" have been killed in the Philippine president's bloody drug war.

"At the rate Duterte is going, this could mean the murder of 52,000 more people over the remainder of his six-year term," they said.

"[America's wealthiest] one percent may agree with Trump that it is in the best interests of their America to continue supporting Duterte. The rest of us should not be complicit in the slaughter," the piece continued.

"Can the US depart from over 100 years of colonial treatment of the Philippines and instead deploy a framework of mutual respect, mutual benefit and respect for national sovereignty? Absent this, we should expect to birth more puppet presidents and dictators in the Philippines." — BM/NB, GMA News