[Vantage Point] Duterte incriminates self in Senate probe

As expected by many people, former president Rodrigo Duterte came out of the October 28 Senate blue ribbon subcommittee hearing on illegal drugs ignorant, uncouth, incoherent, defiant, unrepentant, and most important of all, guilty of the charges leveled against him.

Duterte’s appearance in the Senate was engineered by Senators Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa and Christopher “Bong” Go, no doubt to give him a forum to dispute the damning testimonies against his deadly war on drugs that killed thousands of Filipinos.

In the quad committee hearing conducted separately by the House, Colonel Royina Garma and other high-ranking police officers testified that the execution of suspected criminals in Davao City served as a template for the war on drugs when the former president launched it on a national scale immediately after he took his oath of office in June 2016.

It was the two senators’ attempt to help clean up Duterte’s act. Unfortunately for them, what they accomplished was the opposite because their former boss was unable to control his urge to brag.

The way Mr. Duterte talked during the committee hearing was the exact way he talked to his base who shared his predilection for violence. He thought he was projecting strength by breaking the norms of civilized behavior, cursing people out loud or under his breath. But when he was called to explain inconsistencies in his statements, he gagged on his words.

Both Senators Dela Rosa and Go were co-conspirators in the extermination campaign, more popularly known as Duterte’s war on drugs. Two other allies, Senators Francis Tolentino and Robinhood Padilla, threw him softball questions and sang him praises.

The former president must have felt he was in friendly territory. The only representative of the opposition in the committee was a woman, Senator Risa Hontiveros, and therefore easily intimidated — or so he thought.

Senator Jose “Jinggoy” Estrada, who was jailed twice for plunder, tried to draw blood by going after former Senator Leila de Lima. Instead of seeking clarifications from Mr. Duterte, he turned to Senator De Lima and needled her why she, who was the human rights chair, justice secretary, and a senator at the time, failed to file a single case against Mr. Duterte.

Of course, the subtext of Mr. Estrada’s line of questioning was that there was no actionable evidence discovered that would show that Mr. Duterte was, in any way, responsible for the killings in Davao City when he was mayor.

The other senators reveled in Mr. Duterte’s irreverence and profanity, chuckling like a bevy of schoolgirls when he peppered his testimony with “putang ina” and “gago” as he ran out of words to express his thoughts, which was often.

Just when Mr. Duterte was starting to believe he was in control of the situation, Senator Hontiveros put him in his place, but not before calling out Senator Estrada for cracking a joke earlier, telling him that the death of thousands was no laughing matter. That effectively shut him up, along with the other obsequious senators.

Mr. Duterte tried to project machismo, equating bluster and braggadocio with nobility of character.

“I alone am responsible, legally, for the war on drugs, not the policemen [who are now under investigation for extrajudicial killings],” he grandly proclaimed.

As it turned out, however, he did not have the courage of his conviction. When he was asked by Senator Hontiveros if he felt responsible for the death of children and teens like Kian delos Santos and other innocent victims of the drug war, the old man walked back his statement.

Trying to sound like a professorial speaker on a lecture circuit, he declared that the commission of a crime was a personal act by the police and that he had nothing to do with it.

“We write our own history in this planet,” Mr. Duterte said. “If a policeman chooses to go to hell [for killing], that is his problem.:

He added that he, too, was going to hell and told his interrogator to join him there.

“Unfortunately, the Senate has no jurisdiction in hell,” Senator Hontiveros snapped back. “And, for the record, I have no intention of joining the former president there.”

That left the old fox speechless, but only for a while. He admitted having told the police to provoke drug suspects to fight back so that they could justify the use of lethal force.

It was, Senator Hontiveros observed, a damning confession, adding that she hoped the justice department was taking note.

The former president also said, with inordinate pride, that he maintained a death squad while he was Davao City mayor. In an effort to normalize violence and make murder acceptable as a solution to the problem of criminality, he gestured toward Senator Dela Rosa and the other top-ranking police officials present at the hearing, saying that each of them ran their own death squads.

Mr. Duterte attempted to portray himself as a macho man who would stop at nothing to rid Davao City and the whole country of drug dealers and criminals, and due process be damned. Alas, he only succeeded in showing that he was weak and easily manipulated.

He walked into the trap that Senator Hontiveros laid for him.

The former president was at the Senate as a resource person, invited to provide enlightenment to the war on drugs that killed, according to the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), up to 30,000 men, women, and children, including babies in their mothers’ arms.

In heavily accented Tagalog, Mr. Duterte expressed sympathy for policemen who have to face charges for using excessive force when they were, according to him, merely performing their duty to keep the country safe from criminal elements.

He spoke of policemen suspended and confined to quarters, their salary withheld, forcing their children to stop their schooling and leaving their whole family without food.

It would have been a heart-wrenching scenario, if it were true. The fact is that very few policemen had suffered such fate. Despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, they were routinely exonerated, if they had ever been charged in court.

The prosecution of Colonel Marvin Marcos and 18 other policemen who killed former Albuera, Leyte, mayor Rolando Espinosa was a sham. The cops entered the prison cell of the mayor supposedly to serve a warrant of arrest. They ended up killing the mayor because, according to them, he had a gun and tried to fight back.

All were acquitted for alleged lack of evidence.

Maybe Mr. Duterte would have felt some of that compassion for the families of those killed in the war on drugs, if compassion had not been a sentiment alien to his nature.

The old man was merely cottoning up to the armed services in an effort to get them to protect him from possible and imminent arrest for his crimes. Other government workers like teachers, who receive a salary less than that of a patrolman, are conveniently forgotten, perhaps because they don’t carry guns.

The war on drugs was a turkey shoot. Mr. Duterte justified the killings by saying the quarries fought back, but the lady senator was skeptical. If the defense of “nanlaban” [the suspects who allegedly fought back] were true, the police must have submitted in evidence guns equal in number to those killed — whether it was 30,000 or 6,000, as claimed respectively, by the CHR and the Philippine National Police (PNP).

That stumped Mr. Duterte. He gagged on his words, barely managing to say he was not in the business of keeping track of the evidence.

It was a masterful performance by Senator Hontiveros. She prodded, goaded, and baited Mr. Duterte, who, feeling his authority challenged, blurted out that, yes, he told the police to force suspects to fight back, which would then justify the use of violence.

When Senator Hontiveros chided him for issuing what was patently an illegal order, he complained that she was trying to pin him down with semantics (whatever that meant).

“You are pinned down by your own words,” she triumphantly told him.

All throughout his testimony, Mr. Duterte was defiant, but his sense of self-importance — reminding everyone that he was a prosecutor, mayor, and president — was his undoing.

Senator Hontiveros was respectful, although it became clear from the very start that she regarded him with cold disdain. She concluded her interpellation with a flourish, saying, “I have no more questions for the resource person, Mr. Chair.”

In the 1992 blockbuster A Few Good Men, Lieutenant (JG) Daniel Alistair Kaffee, USN, JAG, succeeded in making Colonel Nathan Jessep admit having issued Code Red, a form of punishment for slackers, that led to the death of another Marine, by playing on the latter’s machismo and sense of self-importance.

The scene, according to some film critics, is implausible. It lacks verisimilitude, a crucial element in a work of fiction to attain its primary objective of making viewers accept the narrative as realistic and believable.

Senator Hontiveros proved that the storyline could happen in real life, if the circumstances and the characters were similar.

As a Filipino proverb says, “Ang isda ay sa bibig nahuhuli,” which in English means, “A fish is caught by its mouth.” – Rappler.com