[Newspoint] The ruse

For a moment there, it appeared certain that, after getting off on a technicality the first time, Sara Duterte was finally going to trial as an impeached vice president. But with her champions suddenly able to take control of the Senate, the trial court in her special case, there’s no telling again what will happen.

The coup happened on Monday, the very day the Lower House impeached her. A 13-9 vote, with two abstentions, ousted Tito Sotto as Senate president in favor of Alan Cayetano.

Cayetano is known for his fawning loyalty to Sara’s father, Rodrigo, who picked him for his vice president when he ran for president, in 2016. President Duterte consoled him for his electoral loss by appointing him foreign secretary. He distinguished himself in that position by easing, doubtless at Duterte’s bidding, the Philippine diplomatic pivot to China. In the following midterms, he was elected by his district, in Taguig City, to the House of Representatives. As senator since 2022, he has transferred what power and influence he can derive from his national office to Sara, political heir to her father, who no longer has any use for him — Duterte is in detention in The Hague, the Netherlands, awaiting trial before the International Criminal Court on charges of “crimes against humanity” for the thousands of dead in his presidency’s war on drugs.

Among Cayetano’s cohorts are senators facing charges in the graft court themselves — charges that Sara could make go away, as was the case during her father’s regime (2016–2022). Actually, on a much deeper level, the conspiracy illustrates the operation of patronage politics in a dynastic club. Three pairs of siblings in the Senate belong in the Duterte bloc, and one senator has a son in the lower house who voted against the impeachment, prefiguring his mother’s own vote. And don’t be fooled by one of two half-bothers abstaining: his vote, as was the vote of another pro-Duterte senator, was no longer needed to ensure a majority. Being superfluous conspirators for the moment, they were made to sit on the fence to play a role intended to project a sense of neutrality in the vote.

Given its perfect timing, its tight covertness despite the vastness of the conspiracy, and its swift and decisive deployment, the Senate coup could only have been well plotted and funded. Its purpose, after all, was as urgent as it was ambitious, and that was to manage Sara’s trial so as to clear the way for her presidential run a mere two years from now. 

Scrapping the trial altogether is a convenient option but, being too brazen, it could backfire. Now in control of the Senate and the impeachment process, the Duterte conspirators could just wait it out and slow things down while keeping alert to pretexts they could use to buy time for Sara. And when that shooting erupted in the Senate on Wednesday it seemed just that sort of opportune moment — that is, if it truly simply presented itself. 

In Cayetano’s dramatic narrative, Senate security forces, in self-defense, stopped agents of the National Bureau of Investigation trying to break in through a hole drilled in the wall to arrest Senator Ronald dela Rosa on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for his part in President Duterte’s drug war as his chief of the national police. But the NBI director has denied he had agents on the Senate premises at the time, saying they all cleared out on his orders, deferring Dela Rosa’s arrest after the Senate had passed a motion to put him under its “protective custody” and Cayetano had assumed personal responsibility for him.

Dela Rosa had gone into hiding last year upon learning about the warrant. He was slipped into the Senate on Monday, transported in a fellow conspirator’s car, to cast his vote for Cayetano, and remained holed up there, harbored by him. Reports have it that he slipped out again on the fourth day, in the small hours of the morning after the shooting. 

Although the supposed shootout was short-range and, by the national police chief’s own count, “no fewer than 30 shells” were collected from the scene, no one was reported to have taken a single hit, raising the question whether everything was contrived. Anyway, that should be easy to check. For one thing, nothing could have escaped the surveillance cameras all around the Senate, inside and outside — that is, so long as they were working. 

Cayetano, meantime, will surely find a way to use the Dela Rosa affair in Sara’s favor. He could, for instance, make a big fuss of it to justify a further tightening of security measures to delay her trial.

Indeed, it’s all about Sara. Dela Rosa is a mere incidental beneficiary. Still, his isn’t a bad deal at all, especially for a fugitive. He is not only protected but subsidized. He gets to continue collecting his Senate pay without having to work for it and, now as a member himself of the patron class at his own level, he gets to keep all those kamag-anak of his employed in his non-operational office. 

Of course, they are all getting paid off our toil as taxpayers. – Rappler.com