Czarina scorned

“The Vice President would be assisting the government by proving transparency in the war on drugs by revealing whatever she claimed to have learned.

The Vice President, bitter from her unceremonious ouster as anti-drugs czarina, had issued what sounded like threats to step up the vilification campaign on the war on drugs and, of course, on President Rody Duterte.

Rody, on his way to South Korea for an Association of Southeast Asian Nations event, lobbed a bombshell saying he is dismissing her as co-chair of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD), citing her incompetence and her penchant to grandstand.

“If they think I will stop here, then they don’t know me, I am just starting,” Robredo warned. “They cannot remove my determination to stop the killings and hold those responsible to account and win the fight against illegal drugs.”

“My question to you now is, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid of what I might discover? Are you afraid of what the public might discover?” Robredo said in a news briefing.

She gave notice that the public will know what she found out during her short, bungling stint as part of the anti-narcotics campaign.

The threat was shrugged off, however, as Rody’s spokesman Sal Panelo said the Vice President is free to make public and is expected to do so on whatever piece of information she obtained as ICAD co-chair.

Robredo, in doing so, would merely confirm the earlier allegation of the Palace that she can’t be trusted with sensitive information.

The first directive of the Vice President as ICAD co-chair was for enforcement agencies to produce the list of high-value drug lords that surprised officials of the body, since only the President had access to the thick list of about 11,000 drug personalities.

Shortly after her appointment, Robredo also met with officials from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the US Embassy to discuss the drug problem, which she has said must be tackled using a public health approach.

More than two weeks into her tenure, however, she failed to flesh out the alternative method.

Moreover, Panelo indicated that the Vice President would be assisting the government by proving transparency in the war on drugs by revealing whatever she claimed to have learned.

“She was precisely appointed, apart from giving her the opportunity to assist in the campaign against illegal drugs, to let her know that everything in the drug war was and is transparent,” the Palace official added.

In a speech in Camarines Sur, Robredo said she will issue a report to the nation on what she found out in the anti-narcotics campaign.

Hopefully, what she says would be the truth without the embellishment from the “Ang Totoong Narco List” adventure for which she is facing sedition raps along with coup plotter Antonio Trillanes IV and a host of yellow personalities.

The vilification video series tried to pin Rody, his family including his minor child, his close allies and aides as being mixed up in the illegal drugs network.

Peter Joemel Advincula alias ‘Bikoy,’ the narrator in the video series, later on admitted that the operation was the handiwork of the yellow mob that included Robredo in an effort to demonize Rody and in the process lift the chances of the Otso Diretso candidates in the senatorial polls last May.

The sinister effort only resulted to the opposition candidates being shut out from the Senate race.

From here on, Robredo is expected to step up her attacks on Rody and hasten her trip down the road of political perdition.