[Newspoint] The Duterte legacy of corruption

Despite its causal connection to the flood control corruption scandal now gripping the nation, the Duterte legacy is obscured by it. 

To be sure, that scandal has no comparison in magnitude and scope: the plunder was first estimated to approach a trillion pesos, from 2023 alone, and the plunderers were officials from strategic state institutions working in conspiracy with private contractors. 

But further investigations have determined the conspiracy to have actually begun to flourish in the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, 2016-2022. One estimate from that time puts the loss at more than P8 trillion, and a Duterte son, Paolo, a member of the House of Representatives since 2018, is himself accused as a beneficiary of those kickbacks. Yet, those telltale aspects of the scandal have escaped scrutiny. 

Indeed, systematic plunder is part of the Duterte legacy. If flood control corruption had gone unnoticed in his time, it could only have been overshadowed by more flagrant cases, like those ridiculously overpriced medical supplies imported during the pandemic — vaccines, all from China, Duterte’s favorite source, were the priciest, yet the least efficacious.

Other cases may not have been motivated primarily by such one-off, easy-money corruption, but they all led to corruption all the same. One was Duterte’s cession of the West Philippine Sea to China. It gave rise to all sorts of criminal operations that raised kickbacks for officials, mostly local ones complicit with Chinese principals — drugs, prostitution, gaming, loan sharking, human trafficking. 

Of course, the biggest distraction was the killing of thousands in Duterte’s war on drugs. He is now in detention in The Hague (the Netherlands), awaiting trial for “crimes against humanity” before the International Criminal Court — the case has been taken off our hands because we could not be relied upon to do justice to it. Duterte’s heirs, in the meantime, carry on to preserve his notorious legacy and the family’s hold on power, for self-protection, no doubt. 

Oh, and don’t they need it! Paolo’s sister Sara, the vice president, is herself facing corruption charges. In fact, she was impeached last year, found, after six months of exhaustive joint hearings by four Lower House committees, to have misused hundreds of millions of pesos from her office budget. For the most part, she snubbed the hearings and, even in her rare appearances, she refused to answer questions.

Anyway, she was never tried. Commanded by law to get to it “forthwith,” the Senate dragged its heels, and when it finally got around to forming itself as an impeachment court, the Supreme Court stepped in, with soiled feet — impeachment was intended as purely congressional business, and one reason it is off-limits to the Supreme Court is that its own justices are impeachable officials. In any case, it voided the impeachment for not having been done properly, technically — too soon after the archiving of the last ones. 

As happened, the Supreme Court was packed with Duterte appointees. And the Senate itself had retained its Duterte majority, until a new one took over after the midterm vote. The new majority could itself have ignored the Supreme Court decision and gone on to try Sara Duterte, if only to reassert its constitutional power usurped by the court and, more essentially, to restore the separation of powers distorted in the process. But not so inclined, evidently, the Senate chose instead to mount its own inquiry into flood control.

A typical impeachment trial lasts a mere few months; it is, after all, intended to deal with an emergency — the continuation in power of an official indicted as a betrayer of public trust. In Sara Duterte’s case, that official is the very one standing first in line to succeed to the presidency. Her impeachment case now apparently dead in the floodwaters, another route, one necessarily longer and more tedious, needed to be taken. 

And sure enough, former senator Antonio Trillanes IV took it. Just this week, along with a group called Silent Majority Movement, Trillanes — himself not one to keep silent about the Dutertes — took Sara to the Ombudsman for plunder, a non-bailable crime. 

He does not limit his case to the findings that formed the basis for her impeachment. Hounding her back to her days as mayor of her native Davao City, he now offers evidence of misappropriation in what seems her typical easy, blatant fashion — plundering confidential funds that simply lay there — but in far greater sums — totaling P2.7 billion. Where Trillanes’s route takes the case may well give a good indication of Sara Duterte’s chances going to the presidential election of 2028, possibly the existential political test for her and her family.

So far, Sara Duterte has led all prospective comers in the surveys. Doubtless, the diversion of attention from her corruption cases has been a great help: it has not only kept her out of the negative spotlight but allowed her to bombard audiences, via social media, with dubious claims to virtue that escape dispute from critics too preoccupied with the flood control scandal and its host of fallout issues.

Which raises the prospect of such default as Trillanes has constantly warned about: If any of the Dutertes continued in office, it could well be the nation’s ultimate undoing. – Rappler.com