No judge of competence

Now comes Antonio Trillanes IV lecturing Jonvic Remulla on incompetence. Funny, since the two should be on the same side, as they do have a shared adversary in the Dutertes.

Apparently, having a common enemy does not necessarily make for a shared wavelength.

Trillanes has made hounding (yes, like a dog) Rodrigo Duterte and his allies a personal crusade. On the flip side, Remulla, as Interior secretary, belongs to an administration purportedly pursuing accountability for alleged crimes in the Duterte drug war.

Yet here they are trading barbs, with Trillanes calling Remulla incompetent, compromised, or afraid over his failure to locate and arrest Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa. Perhaps Trillanes and, okay, Jonvic too, should examine their records before handing out certificates of (in)competence.

Trillanes, for one, has quite the résumé. In July 2003, he led armed soldiers in the Oakwood mutiny, occupying a Makati hotel to demand the ouster of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Four years later, he and his Magdalo companions staged a repeat at the Peninsula Manila.

Same target, same fizzle.

Okay, Trillanes won a Senate seat in 2007 and was granted amnesty by Noynoy Aquino in 2011. Not a bad reward for leading a ragtag group that couldn’t shoot straight.

Then, a year later, Aquino tapped Trillanes to be a backchannel negotiator with China during the Scarborough Shoal standoff. Philippine vessels withdrew on 15 June; China stayed and eventually took effective control of the rock.

Beijing’s leverage surely mattered, but the approach Trillanes helped carry out did not deliver. A man with that record is poorly placed to grade anyone else. Manong Johnny Enrile, one of his old targets, would have said as much, were he still around.

Remulla, meanwhile, has his own taste for theatrics. He announced a P50-million bounty for Dela Rosa, branded the senator armed and dangerous, and ordered him to surrender. The deadline came and went. Bato remains at large. Empty threats.

Still, the trouble may lie less with the men than with the system around them. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and the police leadership have had to remind officers that their duty is to enforce the law, not preserve personal loyalties.

This raises doubts about the police’s willingness to carry out the operation. Arresting a sitting senator on an ICC warrant without a counterpart arrest order issued by a local court brings legal and operational complications that no bounty can resolve.

Then there’s the politics. The Marcos-Duterte alliance that swept both families to power in 2022 has collapsed. Duterte, who allowed Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in 2016, was transported to the ICC in 2025 under the younger Marcos’s watch.

From hero’s burial to The Hague: Philippine politics certainly has a peculiar sense of irony.

With Vice President Sara Duterte facing an impeachment verdict within the year, a weakened Duterte machinery is a definite gain for the Marcos camp. Anybody but the Dutertes in 2028, as there’s hell to pay for Digong.

Consider what that means for Dela Rosa. A fugitive keeps the Duterte family’s troubles in the headlines, while a captured senator could draw sympathy and a trial the administration cannot control.

I am not claiming that is the plan. But when police loyalty is shaky, the legal path is murky, and the politics reward delay, Jonvic’s ultimatum becomes the loudest part of the operation and the actual arrest the quietest.

Meantime, Bato continues to rock and roll like a rolling stone.