Puppet on a string

Puppet on a string | Daily Tribune

Malacañang’s script promised swift coordination, a high-level delegation and the return of the alleged mastermind of the multibillion-peso flood control corruption scandal.

Barely two weeks later, the Department of Justice conceded that Co was no longer in Czech custody. He was somewhere in the Schengen area. Perhaps seeking asylum in France. Perhaps already sipping espresso in Lisbon. The hunt, officials proclaimed, continues.

Co’s Philippine passports, both regular and diplomatic, were canceled by court order in December 2025 and Interpol was promptly flagged.

Yet Co surfaced in Europe carrying, by the government’s own account, an expired Philippine passport, while credible reports indicated he was using a Portuguese passport obtained under that country’s golden visa investment program — a cool 500,000 euros buys not just residency but a passport that would elude Manila’s feeble reach.

The timing was exquisite. The revocation of his Filipino documents came only after he had every assurance that an alternative identity awaited him abroad. Such an arrangement is not stumbled into but is well-laid out beforehand.

The broader scandal involved layers of public works anomalies and kickbacks, with Co as a key operator.

He in turn pointed to the involvement of others, going all the way to the very top. Whether his claim holds water is for the Sandiganbayan to test in open court, that is, if Co ever stands in one.

What matters now is the optics engineered by Malacañang: A dramatic presidential announcement of his capture, followed by bureaucratic shrugs, contradictory clarifications about whether he was ever truly “arrested,” and an evaporating paper trail that conveniently severs the link between the fugitive and the evidence.

Co’s episode in the classic Philippine political theater under Marcos involves the promise of accountability. Stage the raid, allow the exit, then lecture the public about the complexities of international law and Schengen mobility.

Ordinary Filipinos, whose taxes funded the very flood control projects that were looted, watch their government expend more energy managing the narrative than grabbing the man at its center.

The same administration that moves with glacial caution when confronting powerful allies suddenly discovers bureaucratic agility when a damaging witness needs to fade from view.

President Marcos is not a peripheral figure but the principal in this production. His personal announcement set the tempo while his mouthpieces have spent the ensuing days walking back language, massaging timelines and offering to the public the familiar Filipino consoling refrain:

“We are coordinating.”

Coordination, in this context, appears to mean ensuring that Co’s Portuguese safety net functions as designed while due diligence is performed for the cameras.

The rule of law does not fail by accident in such matters. It fails through intention dressed in procedural robes. A congressman implicated in grand corruption does not glide through European borders on an expired passport unless the system, here and abroad, has been primed to look the other way at assigned junctures.

The€€500,000 golden passport was not an afterthought — it was insurance purchased with foreknowledge.

Philippine democracy has seen this script before involving the high-profile fugitive, the assurances of imminent justice, the quiet dissipation into foreign comforts.

Each repetition erodes what little remains of public faith. If Zaldy Co is never returned to face the Sandiganbayan, it will not be because Europe proved too formidable.

It will be because Malacañang never truly intended the curtain to fall on anything but another empty performance.

The flood victims still waiting for functional dikes deserve more than theater. So does a citizenry weary of watching its leaders direct the very scandals they claim to abhor.

The disappearance of Co is not a mystery. It is policy, executed with the cunning reserved for protecting the powerful from their own system.