Made delusional by their phenomenal political successes — they have never lost an election, for one thing — the Dutertes must have been going through a shocking awakening: They are not untouchable, after all.
Indeed, it’s been a meteoric rise for them as a political dynasty. But we all know about the price to pay for going too fast and too high.
It was only 36 years ago when the first Duterte, Rodrigo, became mayor of their native Davao and began his family’s domination of that southern city. Rodrigo’s father, Vicente, had been elected governor of the province of Davao in 1959-1965, before the province was split into north and south, and might have himself set the family on a political run, but he died early and it was not until 20 years later that Rodrigo decided to pick up where his father left off.
Twenty-eight years later he became the nation’s president, knowing no other way of running a political constituency than by death-squad autocracy. Twenty-two years as Davao mayor made for all that notorious experience.
By the time his presidency ended, in 2022, a daughter had been elected vice-president, a son was in Congress, representing one of the three districts of their city, and another son was its mayor, a position the Dutertes always kept in the family. No wonder they had felt untouchable — until they ran into the Marcoses.
The Marcoses may well be the ultimate in dynasties. Their patriarch, Ferdinand Marcos, ran the country as a plundering dictator for 14 years. A mere five years after he had been chased out into exile with his family, his heirs were back. In no time, they managed to establish themselves in high society and high-stakes politics, and within their generation they had their second president in the family.
Ferdinand II had Duterte’s daughter Sara for his vice-president, as such presumed to be the alliance’s next presidential candidate. But, in another validation of the truism, in politics particularly, that there are no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests, the alliance was short-lived.
The breakup appears to strike a popular chord, if not necessarily in favor of the Marcoses, against the Dutertes. If anything, that may have to do plainly with the way memory works: the more recent the occurrence, the easier to recall it. The two strongman regimes were separated by longer than a generation — Ferdinand Marcos’s (1972-1986) and Rodrigo Duterte’s (2016-2022).
In any case, their junking from the ruling coalition must have given the Dutertes the initial shock that jolted them out of their delusion — they are supposed to be the rejector, not the rejected. The shock itself works like one continuous earthquake, and the epicenter is the Lower House of Congress, which is now administering the shock jolt-by-jolt at an inquiry whose primary “resource persons” — as they are deferentially referred to — are Rodrigo and Sara Duterte.
In Rodrigo’s case, the hearings center around his presidency’s war on drugs, which left tens of thousands dead by summary execution. Self-confessed assassins for Duterte have given some of the most explosive testimonies, saying, for instance, that the war was a mere ruse, that it was actually a strategy by the Duterte family and its partners, chiefly Chinese, to eliminate rivals in the drug trade.
Sara Duterte, for her part, has attracted suspicions of anomalous payments from her confidential funds, whose very existence was outrageous enough, not to mention their size. For the two positions she concurrently held — she has since been removed as education secretary — these came to P612 million. No one before had been favored with such virtual blank-check entitlements, no vice-president, not remotely anyway, and definitely no education secretary.
But Sara Duterte felt not only entitled to them but entitled to do as she pleased with them. After all, as Davao mayor, she already had had her own confidential fund to spend freely, and, at PhP460 million, it was not much less than what she got in totality for her two national positions. She also managed to escape a proper audit, and it had looked as if she might escape again until the House stepped in and began to take her and her staffs to task, along with the Commission on Audit and other watchdog agencies that had given her a pass.
Left with arrogance without power, father and daughter begin to unravel. Sara announces she has
contracted someone to kill President Marcos and his wife and his cousin the Speaker, Martin Romualdez, the assassinations to be carried out upon her death, presuming it occurring at their hands.
Her father, on his part, calls out to the armed forces, urging them to mount a coup for what he calls “fractured governance.” Not to raise any fractured hopes myself, I must say I feel somewhat pleased that, for once where it truly counts, the Lower House is actually rising to the occasion — while the Senate remains flaccid; also, that the military leadership itself, taking no chances with the quality of Duterte’s bravado — fractured or not — sets him straight promptly: no breakaway from the chain of command, which comes down from President Marcos as commander in chief.
The Dutertes try next to appropriate the memory of the million-strong street vigil that brought down the Marcos dictatorship, in 1986; they deploy a crowd at the EDSA Shrine, the monument to the revolt. Nothing is more fraudulent, more convenient, more ridiculous, more pathetic: Rodrigo Duterte is a self-proclaimed idolater of Ferdinand I, if not of Ferdinand II. In fact, in an extravagant expression of that false idolatry, he sponsored the dictator’s burial at the cemetery for the nation’s heroes early in his presidency.
To be sure, but for the first act — The Awakening — the Duterte drama is far from done. The Unraveling has only begun, and The Madness that is unfolding progressively along is yet to run its full, unpredictable course. – Rappler.com
