To the brink
FORMER president Rodrigo Duterte has a reputation of being a strong man and a strong mouth, although no one could tell which one preceded the other.
At a “prayer” rally in Davao City held on Jan. 28, 2024, he was his usual blabbering self as he denounced attempts to change the Constitution through people’s initiative.
He addressed the troublemakers and prepped a junta-like takeover by the military:
“Wala kayong prinsipyo, mukhang pera kayong lahat. ‘Yan ang totoo. Kaya ang gusto ko ‘pag nagka-letse-letse na, pumasok ang military … palitan ninyo lahat, arestuhin ninyo kasi nagsasayang ng pera at ‘yung ginagastos nila is a fraud. Swindling ang ginawa nila. You must account for the wasted money or the money that you bought the signature of the Filipino … bribery.”
Reminiscent of his saying Richard Gordon as being “a fart away from disaster,” he asked: “Bakit pumasok sa utak ninyo ‘yang people’s initiative? Anong nakain ninyo? There’s nothing wrong with the Constitution right now.” He charged that the true agenda of people behind the people’s initiative was to perpetuate themselves in power.
In his diatribe against Gordon, who was a sitting senator at the time and had criticized him for the series of appointments of retired military officials to key civilian positions in government, Duterte was referencing brain cells that dripped toward the visceral parts, ready to bomb out as the dreaded smelly air. Gordon also chaired the Senate committee that probed anomalies in the procurement of Covid 19 supplies involving Pharmally Corp., eventually drafting a report that recommended the filing of plunder charges against Duterte, among others, as soon as he stepped out of office.
In keeping with the grain of the metaphor, the two separate public rallies two Sundays ago had the flair of two camps trying to out-fart each other. Another serving of that kind could well drive either of them to the brink of aborting a partisan union if a divorce has not yet happened, flirting with disaster for a political marriage that has been arranged for convenience in the first place.
One wonders why these shows of force — one organized by Malacañang in Manila and the other by a Malacañanglike overlord in Davao — needed to be mounted on the same day when both camps had at least 700 days left in the calendar to square off for the next midterm elections. The innuendo is that neither event was a prayer rally nor a kick-off blast, but one to sieve which freeloading minions were friend or foe. The likes of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and other prominent politicians who joined Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Manila rally have been known to aim for the best of both worlds, but the required logistics kept them from wielding the perfect art and practice of traditional politics.
The opposition to Charter change is best left in the hands of anyone other than Duterte. While in power, he tried but failed to revise the Constitution. In a 2019 media interview, he called the 1987 Constitution provision on the country’s exclusive economic zone “senseless and thoughtless,” further defaming it as a piece of “toilet paper.”
The use of what his spokesman described as yet another metaphor came out in the context of a 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruling that “China’s claim — including its nine-dash line, recent land reclamation activities and other activities in Philippine waters — were unlawful.” China trashed the ruling and, consistent with its snub of the proceedings that led to the decision, did not recognize PCA’s jurisdiction on the issue, a position that China has since defended by taking bullying and aggressive actions to the detriment of the Philippine government’s exercise of sovereignty.
The treacherous bent of the man showed throughout the whole time he represented the country. But no one in Congress dared to impeach him, probably out of fear of losing either physical or financial well-being or both.
Two days after his expletive-littered rant, he called for the secession of Mindanao from a sovereign country whose Constitution provides that its territorial integrity is inviolable.
When he was president, he bombed Marawi City to the ground to kill rebels who espoused the same cause. What makes Duterte and the Maute group different is that the latter employed arms to achieve their ends, although he reportedly got licenses for more than 300 firearms two weeks before he stepped down from office.
Duterte warned that President Marcos Jr. risked being ousted from power unless the latter stopped the Charter change drive, perhaps suggesting that public opposition to it constitutes the magnitude of the 1986 People Power Revolution that toppled the government of his father, Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. Despite the obscene manner by which the people’s initiative has been undertaken, I would think that the warning seems presumptuous at this point. The Joseph Estrada parallel is closer to this case — he who fell from power on account of greed and betrayal among friends.
I would also attribute to friendship as the force that allowed the burial of the late President Marcos Sr. at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, as well as the avoidance of jail time for convicts like his wife Imelda Marcos and those charged with plunder like Jinggoy Estrada, Juan Ponce Enrile and Macapagal, among others.
The charge that Marcos Jr. is a drug addict, debunked promptly by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), was probably meant to mount a compelling call to action.
Duterte would know if he has been lying all his life; otherwise, he discriminates if his drug war killed thousands of drug suspects while the one he believes is a user beyond doubt lives another day to, in fact, rise to succeed him. In the end, whether he or PDEA is a liar is of lesser consequence than the troubled mind his blabbering strong mouth has exposed.