BY SHEILA CORONEL/Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
IT IS A WONDER Edgar Matobato is still alive.
A confessed assassin for the Davao Death Squad, he was the first to go public about the killings allegedly ordered by former President Rodrigo Duterte. Since 2014, when he was detained and brutally tortured by his former comrades, Matobato has been on the run. For ten years, an unlikely network kept him alive: Catholic clergy who believed in his redemption, former military mutineers who shielded him, and, at one point, the security detail of an outgoing president. Together, they helped him evade the powerful forces intent on silencing him.
Today, Matobato is out of the country, having fled in the company of two priests, a journalist, and a photographer from The New York Times. With his wife at his side, he assumed a new identity, slipped through airports under cover, and landed in an unnamed country. It is an indefinite stop on his way to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where Duterte may one day stand trial for crimes against humanity.
His journey, from a recruit into a brutal profession, to whistleblower, to fugitive, is a remarkable tale that mirrors the country’s complex relationship with violence, power—and redemption.
When I first met Matobato on a balmy Christmas morning in 2016, I couldn’t help but wonder how long an improvised, clandestine witness protection program could keep him safe. Only three months earlier, he had electrified the nation with his testimony before the Philippine Senate. On live television, Matobato confessed to serving as a hitman for the Davao Death Squad for 24 years. He detailed how, on Duterte’s orders, he had killed suspected criminals and disposed of their bodies in horrific ways—dumped on streets, fed to crocodiles, or buried in a quarry.
Those were the early days of Duterte’s presidency. Each night, bloody corpses littered the streets of Manila. Empowered by the president’s rhetoric, the police killed with impunity, while hooded gunmen executed small-time drug dealers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Until Matobato stepped forward, the shadowy world of death squads and contract killers was largely invisible to the public. His testimony ripped away that veil. He described, in chilling detail, how police and local officials organized, financed, and directed these squads. His revelations exposed a hidden ecosystem sustained by the brokenness of our country: its dysfunctional justice system, the desperation of the poor, and the unchecked hubris of powerful men who believe brute force is the cure for social ills.
How to Become a Hitman
I SPOKE WITH MATOBATO in a secluded Catholic compound, a haven of quiet far removed from the chaos of Manila. Fruit trees swayed in the breeze, birdsong filled the air, and a stream murmured softly through the grounds. Father Albert Alejo, a Jesuit priest, and an old friend, had asked if I could drive him there to say Christmas Mass for the former hitman and his wife.
The couple lived in a modest cottage tucked away in the compound. They were under the care of a religious order and watched over by two men who kept a discreet but constant vigil. These men, I was told, were from Magdalo, a political party formed by soldiers who had staged mutinies in 2003 and 2007 to protest government and military corruption.
Matobato greeted us warmly. Short, stocky, and sturdily built, he wore checkered Bermuda shorts and a gray T-shirt. His voice was soft, his manner polite, even solicitous, not at all what you would expect of a hitman.
Lunch was ready when we arrived. Matobato had prepared humba, the Visayan version of pork adobo, the night before. It was too early to eat, so we sat on benches in the open air. I turned on my recorder and asked him to tell me his story.
“My name is Edgar Matobato,” he began in Tagalog. “I was born in Calinan, Tamayong, Davao City, on June 11, 1959. I am 57. I was a farmer in our barangay.”
It was around 1977, he said, when his father, a member of the Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF), was killed by communist guerrillas. “They wanted his gun.My father told them, ‘If you need my gun, I will give it to you as long as you do not hurt my family.’”
But his father’s plea fell on deaf ears. “Four men held my father down and cut off his head,” Matobato said matter-of-factly. “Then they placed the head on a wooden stake, like a flagpole.” He watched as his father’s headless body staggered and fell to the ground.
Confirming Matobato’s account is difficult. A former communist cadre active in Davao during that time said government forces used beheadings as a form of psychological terror. The guerrillas retaliated with killings of their own, he said, but their methods were different—they typically used guns or knives to sever the jugular vein; they did not cut off heads.
Still, Matobato has told the story of his father’s beheading many times—not just to me, but to others who have sought to piece together the fragments of his life. Even when asked again through an intermediary, his account never wavered. Whether or not it can be independently verified, this is Matobato’s truth—the defining moment that, in his eyes, shaped the trajectory of his life.
Matobato was a teenager when his father was killed, the eldest of three siblings. School was a luxury he could scarcely afford. “I would go to school on Mondays, after that no more,” he said. “Because if I didn’t work, what would we eat?”
In 1982, Matobato joined the CHDF to protect his village from the same guerrillas who had killed his father. “Many of them were ‘natives,’” he said, referring to the indigenous Bagobo and Manobo people. The government paid him a small allowance of 70 pesos a month and provided him with a rifle. Later, he was assigned to an army battalion as part of a civilian auxiliary unit supporting counterinsurgency operations.
It was there that Matobato learned to kill. By 1988, when Rodrigo Duterte was elected mayor of Davao City, Matobato’s reputation as a fighter had reached the ears of a police officer close to the mayor. When they began forming a “liquidation squad” called the Lambada Boys—named after a popular Latin dance—Matobato was among the first recruits.
Why him? I asked. “They picked me because they knew I wasn’t afraid,” he said. He may have been unschooled, but he had proven his willingness to kill and his ability to follow orders without question.
Why him? I asked his wife, who had stayed by his side even after learning he was a contract killer. “I was mad at myself for falling in love with him,” she said, “He is a good man. I never thought of him as evil. They used him because he was ignorant. They took advantage of his anger that his father was beheaded and never got justice.”
The Roots of Violence
MATOBATO’S STORY is inseparable from the place he came from: Davao City, a bustling port surrounded by a vast hinterland on the foothills of Mount Apo. Beyond the city’s urban core lie rural villages where Visayan settler families lived uneasily alongside indigenous tribes, logging concessions, and banana plantations.
His is also a story of a time—starting the late 1970s, during the height of martial law. Military operations, government projects, and corporate expansion disrupted Mindanao’s rural communities, leaving many indigenous peoples and settlers displaced. Some, like Matobato’s family, scraped by on small, upland farms. Others moved to shanties in lowland slums or sought work in plantations and logging concessions. Military abuses and the loss of livelihood drew many to the communist cause.
By the start of the 1980s, Davao had become the epicenter of both rebellion and counterinsurgency. The city was the Communist Party’s laboratory for new forms of both nonviolent protest and armed struggle, including urban warfare. To the military, it was the proving ground for counterinsurgency strategies like the infiltration of rebel ranks and in the late 1980s, the deployment of civilian “vigilantes.”
Communist guerrillas recruited heavily among the city’s displaced poor, while the constabulary and paramilitary groups hunted suspected rebels. Duterte, a little-known prosecutor at the time, emerged from this chaos as a tough, pragmatic politician. With support from the police, old-time politicos, and communist insurgents, he was elected mayor.
The Business of Killing
AT FIRST, Matobato earned a few thousand pesos per hit. He and his team operated out of a safehouse in a low-income neighborhood called Exodus, in Davao’s Bankerohan district, waiting for orders. Their targets were mostly criminals—accused rapists, thieves, kidnappers. They struck in crowded places: malls, markets, busy streets. The designated hitman would approach the target, shoot, and walk calmly to a waiting vehicle.
“In one day, there were sometimes seven killings, sometimes four,” Matobato said. “We never had a day with zero. And we were never caught—we were with the police. Once a uniformed cop saw us, he’d just walk away. One of them would just signal this was ours.”
By the 1980s, Davao City had become a chaotic battleground. Communist guerrillas from the New People’s Army (NPA) ruled slums like Agdao, imposing curfews and organizing nightly patrols. Known as “sparrows,” NPA assassins gunned down policemen and other “enemies of the people” in broad daylight. They maintained order by eliminating informants, rogue cops, and thieves, earning the support of many poor Davaoeños who viewed them as protectors against an abusive state.
Meanwhile, counterinsurgency efforts ramped up. Paramilitary groups, soldiers, and local authorities targeted suspected communists. Criminality ran rampant as no one seemed in charge. The city was steeped in bloodshed, with violence begetting violence.
As mayor, Rodrigo Duterte stepped into this cauldron of fear and retribution. He consolidated power by employing methods borrowed from both military and guerrilla tactics, wielding hitmen like Matobato to impose order, much like NPA guerrillas who killed cattle rustlers, thieves, and rapists in the communities they controlled.
“In the beginning, I thought we were helping people by getting rid of the bad guys,” Matobato said. “Later, we were told to kill innocent people. You could tell because innocent people act differently from criminals. But you couldn’t refuse because the police officers would not allow it. Those officers were of a different sort. They were ruthless, men without souls.”
By the 1990s, former communist rebels had joined the liquidation squad. Alongside Matobato and other hitmen, they became part of what would be called the Davao Death Squad. Officially, Matobato and his comrades were listed on the city payroll as “Auxiliary Service Workers,” and Matobato still keeps the ID card that proves it. In reality, they carried out assassinations, now targeting not just criminals but also political rivals, suspected terrorists, and those on Duterte’s personal hit list. These hits were carried out in secret, the victims’ bodies buried or drowned in the sea.
(Matobato’s account has been corroborated by Arturo Lascañas, a former police officer and death squad member, who was also the hitman’s handler. Lascañas has given testimony to both the Senate and the ICC.)
As the killings escalated, Matobato’s conscience began to gnaw at him. “At times, I would secretly ask my victims for forgiveness, muttering to myself before killing them, ‘Please forgive me, I am just following orders.’”
His wife recalled nights after work when the hitman sat alone at home, drinking. At one point, she said, he pointed a gun at his head, saying he wanted to kill himself.
Davaoeños largely accepted Duterte’s brand of frontier justice. They saw the killings as the price of safety. Between 1998 and 2015, a human rights group documented more than 1,400 death squad murders. Duterte, for his part, proudly boasted that his city was the safest in the country. For many Davaoeños, that claim was enough. They reelected him again and again, keeping him in power for 22 years.
A Killer’s Remorse
THAT CHRISTMAS MORNING, Matobato recounted story after story of murder, his voice flat, emotionless, as though ticking off items on a grocery list. He told me about “exhibition” killings: A victim would be shot, then stabbed in the chest to make sure he was dead. His hands would be tied together and his face swaddled in packing tape before his corpse was dumped on the street, sometimes with a cardboard sign that said, “Pusher” or “ Holdupper.”
He learned to kill this way from the police, he said. The intent was to sow fear. From the cops he also learned how to dismember a victim’s corpse so that “if you killed three people, you need only dig one small grave.”
All of this was unnerving. Matobato looked far away, rarely at me. Yet when he wasn’t speaking about his crimes, he smiled, walked around to check on others, and seemed at ease.
“This man is a confessed murderer, he’s killed so many, he cannot give an exact count, he said maybe about 50,” I wrote in my notes that evening. “He said they must have buried 300 people in the Ma-a quarry since 1988. He said he had regretted his ways but because his face was inert and bereft of affect, it was hard to see whether there’s real remorse…Something has died in this man’s soul.”
Despite being a lapsed Catholic, I wondered about the state of Matobato’s soul. I thought Father Alejo might have answers. For a quarter-century, the hitman was a cog in a brutal machine that ran on fear and blood. Sure, he had stepped out of the shadows to bear witness. But are you not consorting with a serial assassin? I asked Father Alejo on our drive back to Manila. Can a man who has killed so many ever find redemption?
Exiting a Death Squad
IN 2013, MATOBATO wanted out. The killings were taking their toll, particularly one assignment involving three young women. He was told they were drug dealers, but he suspected they were innocent. Their deaths haunted him. Sleepless nights piled up, and Matobato, then in his fifties, told his superiors he was too old for the job
When he stopped reporting for work, he knew it was only a matter of time before the squad leaders would come for him. In June 2014, his fears came true. Three police officers took him to the station, where, for a week, they beat him relentlessly—sometimes with their fists, other times with a chair or the butt of a rifle.
They wanted him to confess to the killing of Richard King, a wealthy Cebuano businessman who had recently been shot in a Davao office building. Matobato believed the killing was orchestrated by the police and death squad working together, and he was to be their fall guy.
The beatings were brutal. Matobato lost hearing in his right ear and suffered a fractured chest bone. One evening, a rifle barrel was thrust into his buttocks; he was hit so hard he nearly passed out. He was released the next day on the intercession of his uncle, a retired police officer.
Fearing for his life, Matobato fled Davao with his wife. With money from relatives, they moved between Cebu, Leyte, and Samar. In desperation, he wrote to then-Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, claiming he had been tortured and wanted to file a complaint. When no response came, he traveled to Manila, hoping broadcaster Ted Failon, a fellow Waray, would hear him out. He couldn’t get an audience. Back in Tacloban, he sought help from the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), but the regional office, still reeling from the damage caused by typhoon Yolanda, said they couldn’t protect him.
CHR staff advised him to go to the justice department in Manila. He did, telling the security guard at the entrance, “Sir, I am a member of the Davao Death Squad and I want to surrender.”
He was brought to a lawyer who referred him to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). In September 2014, the NBI placed him in a government safehouse under the witness protection program.
NBI investigators corroborated Matobato’s story, and in August 2015, recommended filing arbitrary detention and torture charges against five Davao City police officers. De Lima, the justice secretary, knew about Matobato’s torture case but told me she was then unaware of the depth of his death squad involvement.
As chair of the CHR in 2009, de Lima had held hearings in Davao, vowing to end vigilante-style killings. She and her team began exhuming bodies buried in the Laud quarry but could not proceed because a Davao judge denied them a search warrant. (Years later, Matobato would testify that Duterte had ordered her assassination if she proceeded.)
Over the years, efforts to hold Duterte accountable had been derailed by bureaucratic dysfunction and disinterest. Moreover, national politicians turned a blind eye to Davao’s carnage, preferring to rely on Duterte to deliver votes from his vote-rich city. Others thought the Davao killings were localized and not a threat to the nation.
Meanwhile, although safe under witness protection, Matobato could still not go public with his truth.
Sanctuary and Salvation
DUTERTE DECLARED his candidacy for president in November 2015. Not seen as a top contender, he was rapidly gaining support and by April 2016, it looked like he was going to win. Matobato feared for his life. On his lawyer’s advice, he left witness protection on May 4, less than a week before the election.
On the same day, men in barong escorted the couple to the justice department and then a hotel in Manila. Days later, armed men spirited them away to what they believed was their execution. Instead, they were taken to a large house in Bulacan province. The men, members of the Presidential Security Guard, assured them they were safe. Matobato did not know they had been sent at the behest of President Aquino. The president kept this operation secret even from his inner circle but later shared it with then-Senator Antonio Trillanes IV.
As Duterte’s inauguration loomed, the guards escorted Matobato and his wife to the office of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines in Intramuros. The staff were stunned but the clergy hurriedly made arrangements to bring the couple to a church compound in the city. From there, they were moved from one church facility to another.
The decision to shelter them wasn’t without controversy. The Catholic Church has a long tradition of providing sanctuary, especially during martial law. But Matobato was no political dissident—he was a self-confessed assassin. Some clergy supported Duterte’s anti-drug campaign and worried they were coddling a criminal.
Priests met with Motobato to discern his sincerity. Father Alejo was convinced. Over and over, Matobato had told him, “I have sinned so many times. I have killed so many. Never mind if I go to prison, or get killed, or sent to the electric chair. Before I die, I want to be able to say what I know.”
Some clergy members supported the hitman’s desire to go public. They worried, however, that their actions would be seen as political, especially as two opposition senators, de Lima and Magdalo co-founder Trillanes, wanted Matobato to testify in a Senate hearing.
Father Alejo was certain Matobato had a mission. He recalled Paul of Tarsus, persecutor of Christians, converted on the road to Damascus. Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced Jesus’s side with a spear during his crucifixion, eventually became a monk and a martyr of the faith.
Redemption is possible, Father Alejo told me as we drove on traffic-choked streets and headed back to Manila.
Testimony at the Senate
THE NIGHT BEFORE HIS TESTIMONY, Matobato was moved to a hotel suite near the Senate. In the morning, he knelt to pray with his wife and Father Alejo, clutching an image of the Virgin Mary.
Raised without religious instruction, Matobato had avoided church most of his life. “I was afraid to go to Mass,” he said. “I would kill again afterward, so what’s the point?” His greatest fear, he said, more than death itself, was dying before speaking out.
The clergy believed there were real threats to Matobato’s life. The church alone could not protect him. The Magdalo party stepped in, providing security and safehouses. A doctor treated the internal bleeding caused by his torture. Lawyers volunteered legal advice. Others helped with safehouses and other support.
Somehow, that ragtag band of clergy, dissident soldiers, and civilians managed to keep the couple safe and alive as they were bundled from one refuge to another. They have done so for the past eight years.
Those early months, however, were the most fraught. The body count in Duterte’s drug war was escalating and the president was polling a high 80 percent approval rating. Even the renowned novelist F. Sionil Jose hailed “Mr. Duterte’s assault on the rotten status quo, which has begun with the war on drugs.” Many in the Left praised the president’s attacks on oligarchs and imperial America.
A Church activist told me that in a Mass held for drug war victims, many churchgoers had refused to light candles for the dead. In the communities hard hit by the war, he said, “some even held parties to celebrate the killing of those they considered salot, a social plague. These places have been neglected for so long, they have not been given justice, and the killings are a form of justice for them.”
Resistance in the Shadows
IN THE FACE of popular support for the killings, nuns, priests, and pastors improvised ways to respond beyond the usual blessings and condolences. They paid for funeral expenses of drug war victims, supported widowed mothers, and provided scholarships for orphans. They sheltered terrorized families in seminaries, rectories, schools, and orphanages. Some worked to convince police and local governments to spare those in the Church’s care, setting up rehabilitation programs on the fly.
In 2018, I spoke with Sister Crescencia Lucero, a gentle, soft-spoken nun who had spent decades quietly aiding victims of state violence. At the time, she was sheltering dozens of families and was part of a clandestine network of nuns who provided sanctuary. They moved the families between convents, seminaries, and schools, ensuring they were never in one place for long. At one point, they had to evacuate quickly when Duterte’s scheduled visit nearby drew heightened security and the prying eyes of his advance team.
I asked Sister Cres how long she had been doing this kind of work. “Since 1969,” she said—the year she took her vows.
Beyond the Church, resistance took many forms. Just as death squads operated through hidden networks, a parallel ecosystem of empathy and defiance emerged. Lawyers provided legal aid. Doctors treated survivors of torture and assassination attempts. Social workers, artists, and musicians counseled grieving families and preserved their stories. Academics, journalists, and photographers documented the carnage.
On a sweltering July afternoon in 2017, I watched members of a dance company conduct a workshop for drug sellers, many of whom had lost loved ones to the drug war. They had fled their neighborhoods and were sheltering in a church building.The dancers told them to hold each other, to feel the connection, the weight, the touch. There was silence, and then tears.
The University of the Philippines social work school began tracking such efforts, finding 74 groups actively countering the government’s campaign. A 2019 report noted, “Far from a picture of acceptance or helplessness, there is pushback.” These groups ranged from church ministries to human rights advocates, environmentalists, educators, and feminist organizations.
Their work seemed small compared to the state’s vast machinery of violence. But I realized that, just as a clandestine ecosystem of death squads is deeply embedded in the underbelly of society, so is a parallel world of resistance—connected, rooted, and quietly defying the brokenness that surrounds them.
Eight Years Later
When Matobato first testified, holding Duterte accountable seemed impossible. Eight years later, the ICC is investigating, and Congress is probing the carnage. Other witnesses, including police officers and former death squad members, have come forward.
Still, impunity looms. Drug-related killings continue. The Duterte family remains powerful, and large parts of the country still support them. In many ways, ours is still a broken country where the mighty enjoy impunity for corruption and human rights abuse.
Individual redemption, as in Matobato’s case, is possible. But what will it take to redeem an entire nation?
