Time’s Duterte cover sign of Phl’s global importance – Palace

MANILA, Philippines – The decision of Time magazine to feature another Philippine leader, this time incoming president Rodrigo Duterte, shows the publication is giving importance to the country as a member of the international community, Press Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr. said yesterday.

Coloma said the magazine, in posting the picture of Duterte on its cover, showed the elections in the Philippines are an important global event.

“As one of the leading news publications in the world, Time magazine has an interest in our country’s political development,” Coloma said.

Duterte, who will be officially taking over the reins of government on June 30, now belongs to a select few Filipinos – like the late president Corazon Aquino and her only son incumbent President Aquino – who were both placed on the magazine’s cover.

Then senator Benigno Aquino III was featured in Time’s April 2010 limited Asian edition.

Time had thrice featured Cory Aquino on its cover – first in 1986, the second in 2006 when she was named among 60 Asian heroes, and the last in August 2009, where she was declared “the saint of democracy” when she succumbed to colon cancer.  

Duterte is front and center on the May 23 issue of Time Magazine Asia. The cover story titled “The Punisher” was authored by journalist Charlie Campbell and echoes an earlier article published by the same magazine in 2002.

The cover picture was bought by Time from veteran Filipino photojournalist Edwin Tuyay, which was apparently chosen from a series of portraits for the Asian Dragon Magazine’s August 2015 issue, according to GMA News online.

As it turned out, Duterte was still deciding whether to run a campaign at the time, but Asian Dragon had rather prophetically dubbed him “the man who would be president.”

In the US edition of the magazine, Campbell also wrote “Why the Philippines Elected ‘The Punisher’ as President” and “Rodrigo Duterte: The Trump of the East?”  

The reluctant presidential candidate told Asian Dragon then: “A lot of my friends have been spending already, and I said that the thought of being a president has not sunk in yet.