OVER the past couple of months, the House of Representatives and the Senate here have conducted several series of hearings on salacious topics. They started with hearings on the POGOs – Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations – which are, or were (they’ve since been banned) Chinese-owned and operated internet gambling enterprises that allowed Chinese citizens to circumvent the strict gambling bans in their own country. Most of the POGOs diversified into online scams, human trafficking, and money laundering, which is why President Marcos issued an executive order to kick them out of the country. The state-owned gaming operator and regulator PAGCOR whined about it, but the ejection is proceeding quickly, with very little public dissent. Most Filipinos, who are otherwise energetic gamblers, view POGOs as a scourge and are happy to see them go.
The legislative hearings have morphed from the topic of POGOs to the drug war under former president Rodrigo Duterte. The only real connection between the two is Duterte himself; he encouraged the explosive growth of POGOs between 2016 and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It is likely that some POGO operations were also fronts for drug trafficking, although that has not really come out in the various hearings.
The driving force behind Congress’ sudden interest in the massacre carried out by police and vigilantes on Duterte’s orders is pure politics. Duterte’s daughter Sara, who was the ersatz running mate of Marcos and elected Vice President, started running for president (the election is in 2028) the instant she took office, and the Marcos faction is not okay with that. Sara Duterte hooked herself to Marcos for the purposes of winning the election in 2022; the Vice President is elected independently, which often leads to the two top elected officials in the country being political opponents, as has happened in this case. It’s a weird system. The Marcos supporters want to bury her so that current Speaker of the House (and cousin of the president) Martin Romualdez can win the presidency in 2028, so they went after her, and in the last two weeks, her still very popular father.
The thing is, the Duterte clan – former president father, vice president daughter, one son as mayor of their hometown of Davao, another in Congress – are a bunch of trailer trash hoodlums, and make it easy for their opponents to rake them over the coals. Sara Duterte, who has no apparent qualifications other than being a political nepo baby, is accused of massive embezzlement of government funds from the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education, where she served a brief and thoroughly unimpressive term as Secretary. Evidence and testimony presented so far, largely through budget hearings, seem to indicate that the allegations are at least partly true, and so she is probably done.
Rodrigo Duterte, who surprisingly agreed to testify before committees in both the Senate and the House, is an ill-tempered sociopath, a man of middling intelligence and talents who made a name for himself by formally organizing a “death squad” when he was mayor of Davao to solve the crime problem by just killing anyone suspected of a crime. When he was elected president, he applied the same model to the whole country, which resulted in something on the order of 6,500 people killed – some claim the number is much higher, but evidence for that is scant. The “drug war” took a toll on the police as well; about 170 were killed in action, almost a thousand injured, and about 200 were charged with various criminal offenses ranging from murder to kidnapping to extortion.
In 2017, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it intended to act on complaints that it had received, and investigate Duterte for crimes related to state-sponsored killing. Duterte responded by promptly withdrawing the Philippines from the Rome Statute and announcing that any ICC investigators who showed up in the Philippines would be very unwelcome.
Fast forward to November 2024, and Duterte has been called on the carpet by his own country’s Congress. His performance in both the Senate and the House hearings has been dramatically childish (the man is 78 years old), but essentially he has admitted that, yes, in fact he did have an organized murder system to try to rid the country of the drug scourge (it didn’t work; in fact, drugs seemed to become a bigger problem), and that anyone who didn’t like it could kiss his ass, even if that meant he spent the hopefully few remaining years of his life in prison.
For its part, the current government has said that it would not stop Duterte from turning himself over to the ICC (something he threatened to do at one point in his testimony, which was dramatic emoting that no one took seriously anyway), but would not otherwise cooperate with the international court. However, the government also pointed out that should Interpol get involved and issue a warrant for Duterte, it would be bound to assist in his arrest.
Duterte’s fanatic supporters, of which there are not a few, including one of our own columnists at The Manila Times, who just sounds stupid every time he writes about Duterte, have tried to spin the circus in the legislative hearings as some sort of triumph for Duterte, but it’s been a real comeuppance for him. Instead of coming across as the tough “man of the people” he imagines himself to be, he has been exposed for what he really is, a cranky old sociopath with the temper and problem-solving skills of a concussed badger, a hillbilly from the provinces whose ascension to the national stage was probably an accident.
It's encouraging that, whatever the ulterior motives behind the effort, the country may soon rid itself of this bunch of trolls. Duterte was at best a mediocre president who tried to govern the entire country as a mayor, because that’s all he knows how to do. While there were some advances, such as an expansion of infrastructure development (a trope of would-be authoritarians), most of his term is utterly forgettable, save for the murder spree, the unusual number of complete clowns he appointed to Cabinet posts, and the ham-fisted way in which his administration handled the pandemic. His kids have all demonstrated that they are equally unsuited for any sort of leadership positions; while the elder Duterte is apparently not personally corrupt – apart from the whole murder thing – the kids seem to be, which is something this corruption-riddled country could do without. The Philippines does not often do the right thing when it comes to making choices about its leaders, but flushing the Duterte clan is a rare exception.
(Image: Duterte in Congress on November 13. The Manila Times/John Orven Verdote)
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