Why Duterte is not being tried at home

Whether Marcos Jr. would have won if Sara Duterte weren’t his vice-presidential candidate is still unsettled. Many Filipinos attribute President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s ascent to the presidency to his partnership with Duterte in the UniTeam.

Granted, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Interpol to serve, the public expected Marcos Jr. to make good on his word not to surrender the Vice President’s father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, to the ICC. And that promise covered all agencies deputized by the ICC like Interpol.

And not just because Marcos Jr. made that statement or even that Sara Duterte could have been largely responsible for his winning the presidency, but, at the very least, he owed the elder Duterte for allowing the remains of his father, Marcos Sr., to be given the honor of a hero’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

But by “owe,” it doesn’t mean to let him off scot-free. If truly delivering justice to the families of the victims of the Duterte administration’s bloody war on drugs were the motivation for Duterte’s arrest for the alleged extrajudicial killings, the Marcos administration could have simply arrested him and tried him at home — in Philippine courts.

But it did not. Why? Because there was no telling how the public would react to Duterte being tried and convicted under the Marcos administration.

In many ways, the decision to effect the arrest of former president Duterte demonstrated a lapse in judgment and a failure to account for the strong Filipino sentiment of honoring an “utang na loob.” In Filipino culture, someone who does not know how to repay a debt of honor is not an honorable man.

Sadly, the continued popularity of Duterte became a threat because his political influence and capital overflowed to his daughter, the Vice President. And a popular vice president creates the danger of a sitting president being overthrown. So get rid of the father.

But to mitigate the public outrage and avoid political instability that could be stirred up by the die-hard Duterte supporters, they shipped him off to The Hague to be tried by a foreign court to keep their hands clean and keep up their pretense with the people.

One would think that our own judicial system would have been offended and insulted by the rendition of a former president of the Republic to a foreign jurisdiction (the validity of which is still in question) to be tried by strangers to our culture and history as if our very own justice system were incapable of rendering the same justice if indeed merited by the circumstances and evidence presented.

Perhaps, there was even some semblance of relief that they did not have to be caught between a rock and a hard place dealing with the trial and convicting a still well-loved former president for the EJK cases.

And now it’s impeachment time again. The Marcos administration hopes to put the final nail on the political coffin of the Dutertes. After all, it is now a tradition — the rule rather than the exception — for the new president to jail the former president. For the sake of the Marcos family’s political survival come 2028.