DUTERTE’S HITMAN: Edgar Matobato’s History of Violence
In this video interview (in Cebuano) shot a decade ago, self-confessed Davao Death Squad member Edgar Matobato recounts a grisly life of violence and carnage unleashed, he said, by Rodrigo Duterte.
By Carlos H. Conde
Rights Report Philippines
One day in June 2016, a trusted friend – a priest – contacted me and asked me for a favor. We need to put on video, he said, the story of Edgar Matobato, the self-confessed member of the Lambada Boys (which later become the Davao Death Squad) responsible for hundreds of grisly murders in Davao City on orders, allegedly, of Rodrigo Duterte, the city’s mayor. It was his way of preserving the testimony, he said, especially because of the incendiary nature of what Matobato was about to tell me.
“I leave it to you to decide whether you want to publish it,” the priest told me. That’s fine, Father, I told him. “I’ll probably just hold on to this for now.” I was no longer a journalist at the time and I saw no reason to rush it for publication.
Three months later, in September, Matobato was called to testify at the Senate about the Davao Death Squad and the extrajudicial killings in Davao City that were part of Duterte’s anti-crime campaign. That explosive testimony, and also by another self-confessed member of the DDS, Arturo Lascañas, occurred at the time the “drug war” killings under the newly elected president Duterte was in full swing.
In his testimony at the Senate and in various interviews with journalists, Matobato claimed he was a member of the Davao Death Squad from 1988, working as a hitman under Duterte’s command, with the help of Lascanas and several other trusted lieutenants. Matobato said he was officially listed as a city hall worker but his actual job was killing people — drug suspects, criminals, and others — on orders from above. He estimated he killed at least 50 people. Bodies were disposed of in a quarry called Laud, thrown into the Davao River, cut into pieces, or dumped at sea. He said one corpse was fed to a crocodile.
He told senators the DDS had around 300 members and operated with Duterte’s knowledge and direction. He said the targets included not just petty criminals but also businessmen, journalists, and political opponents. Among his specific allegations: Duterte ordered an attack on a mosque in retaliation for a 1993 bombing of a Catholic Church in Davao City, and personally shot and killed a National Bureau of Investigation agent following a traffic dispute, firing two full Uzi magazines into him. He also implicated Duterte’s son Paolo in the killing of businessman Richard King.
Duterte’s office denied the allegations. Presidential son Paolo Duterte, who is now a congressman, called Matobato a liar. The Senate hearings were eventually shut down after the Duterte administration stripped Senator Leila de Lima of the chairmanship of the Senate Justice Committee, which convened the hearing. De Lima was later subjected to a vicious misogynistic campaign by the Duterte government, arrested on fabricated drug charges, and spent almost seven years in police detention. She was subsequently acquitted and released and is now a member of Congress.
Matobato went into hiding after the hearings, moving between safe houses for years. In early 2025, The New York Times reported that he had fled the Philippines with his wife and stepchildren on a false passport, accompanied by two Catholic priests and two Times journalists. He was taken to an undisclosed location.
It is believed, although I could not confirm this, that he had given testimony to the International Criminal Court, where Duterte is currently detained and is expected to be tried for crimes against humanity related to the atrocities Matobato exposed both in the Senate and, previously, in my interview with him.
For nearly a decade since that interview – shot inside a Catholic church compound, soundtracked by the sounds and prayers of a Holy Mass – I kept those video files hidden, tucked away among the many hard drives in my office, almost forgotten. But as the ICC started this week to conduct pretrial hearings on the charges against Duterte, I decided to publish the interview, in full, for the first time.
In this video, Matobato made claims that he later repeated during the hearings and in subsequent media interviews. Among them that:
Duterte ordered the killing of a dance instructor who was the lover of Duterte’s sister Jocelyn
Duterte was behind the murder of broadcast journalist Jun Pala
Duterte ordered killing of an ex-Army member
He was present when Duterte gave orders to others for some of these killings
On his first day as one of Duterte’s hitmen, he killed three or four people. “They were small-time snatchers,” he said, adding that the murders were his “baptism” into the DDS
Duterte would go to the Laud quarry, where bodies were buried, to check if the killings he had ordered had actually been carried out
DDS members sent team members to help the Tagum Death Squad in Tagum City
Police routinely planted evidence on suspects to justify claims they fought back – the same nanlaban modus operandi used during the “drug war” murders across the Philippines
Some police officers in Davao were themselves selling drugs
He turned against Duterte because he had been severely tortured by fellow DDS members when he refused to be the fall guy for the Richard King murder
(Rights Report Philippines)
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