Tatay Digong smiling in slumber

Tatay Digong smiling in slumber | Daily Tribune

The final results of the 12 May electoral derby forecast what will happen next in the short term and how the political arena would look in the long term. His political adversaries and detractors must have been grinning from ear-to-ear seeing their main foe helpless and hopeless in jail in faraway Netherlands after he was kidnapped and handed over to foreign authorities by plotters who wanted him confined. Former President Rodrigo R. Duterte, however, could not be happier than at the time of the crucial electoral dogfight.

At age 80 and weak, he would have just covered a few miles on the campaign trail. When the plotters arrested him in full glare of national and international TV he did not resist. Duterte slept soundly on the chartered jet leased by the cabal of plotters who are now facing criminal and administrative charges before the Ombudsman.

I have known and worked with President Duterte purely on a personal basis when he was mayor of Davao City. Some of the issues hurled against him ranged from the absurd to the ridiculous. If the International Criminal Court indeed investigated the charges against him, they would have established the fact that, contrary to the allegations of then Human Rights chairman Leila de Lima and Maria Ressa of Rappler, the charge that Duterte organized the Davao Death Squad is totally false.

That the alleged extrajudicial killing of 30,000 people carried out by the DDS is also fictitious. That some of the victims were buried in a common grave in an abandoned quarry in Davao City is in fact a figment of De Lima’s imagination.

De Lima will be back as a partylist representative soon but to date she has yet to present a single piece of evidence to indict then Mayor Duterte up until he became president. True there were unfortunate victims that were caught in the crossfire during the war on drug and criminal syndicates that had proliferated all over the country. But the errant law enforcers had been brought to court and convicted.

The ICC investigators, if any, ignored these facts, including the existence of a functioning judiciary in the Philippines. All these were simply ignored giving way to the suspicion that they were wined in plush hotels instead of doing their job of investigating.

But all that is now irrelevant.

Maybe it was divine intervention that those hungry for power connived to shanghai Duterte to The Hague. The Marcos-Romualdez administration did not see it coming. A social upheaval happened all over the country and millions of Filipinos overseas staged rallies to protest the incarceration of Duterte who had made their children, parents and kin safe back home.

The midterm elections last Monday demonstrated exactly what the politically astute Duterte wanted to happen. Marcos’s Alyansa crumbled. Senator Imee (Marcos) and Camille Villar jumped the listing ship, reached out to Vice President Sara Duterte, and they made it to the Magic 12.

Bong Go, the personal protege of FPRRD, topped the Senate derby, showing that Mindanao is totally Duterte’s political domain. Sen. Bato de la Rosa and the Sagip partylist representative who single-handedly argued for VP Sara in various committee deliberations also comfortably made it to the Senate.

Elsewhere, most of the House of Representatives grand inquisitors lost their bids. VP Sara mounted the stage with Manila mayoral bet Isko Moreno in Tondo and he vanquished all his adversaries in one clean sweep. In Cebu, Gwen Garcia, who months ago appeared to be invincible, tasted a humiliating defeat despite the personal endorsement and “help” from President Marcos. Former senator Antonio Trillanes IV lost his run for mayor of Caloocan.

The results of the midterm elections have defined the colors and pathways that will lead to the 2028 presidential elections. In the immediacy, the spectre of an adverse verdict by the Senate impeachment court is now moot and a change in the Senate leadership is not farfetched.

Meanwhile, sleeping in a simple bed is not a problem for former president Duterte who is used to a spartan life. His daughter, Kitty, conveyed to him the grand spectacle of his party’s and his allies’ victory in the political battle he chose to fight from his prison cell.

I can imagine him smiling in slumber.