Caught flatfooted

Caught flatfooted | Daily Tribune

That kind of footprint should have turned up. In the intelligence network. In the AFP’s insider-threat apparatus. In the PNP’s community-level networks. Room bookings and transport arrangements were locked in three days out — the kind of paper trail effective intelligence work exists to catch.

It didn’t. And that failure says more than the rally itself.

National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) Director Maj. Gen. Anthony Aberin said the plan was known only at around 12 a.m. and the force was prepared to deploy by 3 a.m., but by then the cops were overwhelmed by the quickly swelling crowd. Twelve hours’ notice for a mobilization that took a week to build isn’t intelligence work. It’s a confession.

The “monitoring but didn’t know the exact day” line is worse than it sounds. Aberin called this vague awareness a partial success as his district units had been watching the situation, but obviously not closely enough to know when it would move, even as reports came in before the crowd did.

That’s the classic failure mode of security-sector intelligence everywhere: a generalized awareness of grievances, with no specific, actionable warning to back it up. Functionally, that’s the same as not knowing at all.

It’s the difference between knowing a storm is forming and knowing when it makes landfall — only here, the “storm” was a religious bloc with a documented history of disciplined, centrally directed mobilization.

INC doesn’t do spontaneous. If anyone should have had eyes on this, it’s the agencies that watch organized blocs precisely because they move as blocs.

Palace Press Officer and Communications Undersecretary Claire Castro’s denial actually concedes the failure.

Saying she “cannot confirm lapses” because officials only found out overnight is not a defense — it’s a confession dressed as a non-answer. Another giveaway on authorities being caught unawares was President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordering the Department of the Interior and Local Government and the Philippine National Police to explain how the rally popped up right under their collective noses.

This was also the same level of poor snooping that led to the Zaldy Co fiasco — where a group led by Justice Secretary Fredderick Vida missed the fugitive congressman when they went to fetch him in Prague, the same pattern of agencies moving too slowly or too incompletely on someone the government publicly says it wants.

Co left the Philippines in July 2025, citing medical treatment, even as scrutiny of the flood control scandal was mounting. He later surfaced in reports placing him in Portugal, where he’d allegedly secured a passport and a golden visa.

He evaded Philippine authorities for roughly nine months before he was caught almost by accident: stopped at the German border while crossing from the Czech Republic over a documentation issue, not because Philippine or international law enforcement tracked him down.

Then came the second failure, worse than the first, as reports surfaced that Co could be released within days of his Prague arrest because Local Government Secretary Jonvic Remulla’s office had reportedly failed to secure a red notice from Interpol in time.

NBI director Melvin Matibag confirmed Co’s detention was based on an immigration violation, unrelated to any active Interpol notice, because the DoJ’s November request for a red notice still hadn’t been granted months later, even after he had canceled his passport in December.

The two distinct slip-ups, stacked on top of each other, occurred after months of failing to locate or extradite a high-profile fugitive everyone knew had fled, followed by a paperwork lapse that nearly let him walk free once he was finally caught by pure chance abroad.

These are intelligence flops on a monumental scale. The same security apparatus that, under Marcos, can build elaborate insider-threat programs and trace Anti-Money Laundering Council financial trails for politically convenient targets, somehow missed 12,000 INC members and a week of hotel bookings.

Was the shocker willful blindness, the product of uniformed personnel who are themselves INC members looking away? If so, that’s not an intelligence failure. That’s collusion.

And collusion is a far bigger problem for those in power than incompetence ever was.