[Newspoint] Intertwined fates

On Tuesday, June 30, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will have completed the fourth year of his six-year term as president, and so will Sara Duterte as vice president, but it’s no occasion for them to congratulate each other. 

The two ran on the same ticket, but have gone their separate ways over mutual suspicions of betrayal and in a manner so acrimonious no one is betting, even at the most generous odds, on a reconciliation. But still, they can’t escape each other. Their fates remain intertwined, and that’s because they simply cannot help undermining each other.

In fact, the animosity is seriously working itself up to its explosive resolution, taking malign energy from three judicial cases: 

• the first case, brought against Sara’s father, Rodrigo, for the thousands of extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs during his presidency, will come to trial in November before the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, the Netherlands; 
• the second is a case of conspiratorial corruption in flood-control works on a scale never seen before, its beginnings also traced to Duterte’s presidency; 
• and the third is the impeachment case against Sara herself, set to begin to be heard by the Senate impeachment court, the assigned court for the purpose, on July 6.

Since these cases were initiated and are being adjudicated under Marcos’s presidency, the Dutertes are convinced he is using the power and influence of his office to squeeze them. The truth is, as heirs to the most repressive presidents in the history of the Republic — Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Rodrigo Duterte both ruled as brutal and corrupt autocrats — Ferdinand Jr. and Sara make for unpalatable alternatives, such that the independent-minded are beginning to feel they may have to make a tactical choice — for the moment anyway.

Coming to the presidency more than half a century after his father did, in 1965, Ferdinand Jr. would seem the more favored of the two — favored by generational shifts, not to mention favored by a nation with a short memory. I don’t know, though, how it can be easy at all to forget that a specific law against the ultimate form of corruption — plunder — went into the books only in 1991, five years after Ferdinand Sr., who inspired that law, had been booted out of power. In any case, presumably conscious not to cause anyone to be reminded, Ferdinand Jr. has tried to project a benign presidency and keep his nose clean, and may have somewhat succeeded on both counts.

Moreover, if those three defining cases are working against the Dutertes, they are working not necessarily under his influence but, rather, by the normal operation of the legal processes. Rodrigo Duterte, for instance, was arrested and flown from Manila to The Hague on an international court warrant served by the Interpol in an arrangement that committed the Philippines by treaty.

But, perhaps, it’s in the flood-control case that President Marcos could credibly claim evenhandedness. Not a few of his own officials and political allies have been themselves indicted or sued or are under investigation. In fact, the last category lists first-cousin Martin Romualdez, who resigned as Speaker under public pressure arising from his alleged involvement in the conspiracy. 

Doubtless, though, it’s Sara’s impeachment trial that will be the immediate center of contention. She faces two specific allegations: hiring an assassin to kill President Marcos and embezzling taxpayer pesos in the hundreds of millions.

Impeachment being intended as a political emergency, a quick way of determining whether an official deserves to continue discharging functions and powers critical to the nation’s well-being, her trial should be finished within months. It will be even quicker if she resigns in the middle of it, for she’ll be stopping the trial in its tracks. 

But if she does that, it won’t be to preempt a guilty verdict; after all, it is conceded that the political makeup of the senate will make it next to impossible to get the two-thirds vote needed to convict. She will do it looking to the longer term: to suppress revelations so damaging as to render a verdict of not guilty a joke and greatly hurt her chances in the election for president in 2028.

Which is where everything leads and gets resolved for everyone — for Sara Duterte, for Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and for the nation itself. If Sara survives impeachment and remains qualified to run and wins, Marcos becomes the first target of the regime of vengeance the Dutertes are known for. As for the nation, it only has to revisit the first Duterte regime to have an idea of what might be coming — cronyism, wholesale corruption, militarization, weaponization of the law and the judicial processes, and, yes, treason. 

Confined more or less to sitting sentinel and occasional harassment of territorial challengers in the West Philippine Sea after Rodrigo Duterte ceded jurisdiction over it four years ago, China could take Sara’s election as a signal not only for the exploitation of its untouched seabed for gas and oil, but for a full-blown neocolonialist advance inland.

It’s against this backdrop of great foreboding that President Marcos goes to Congress for his State of the Nation Address on July 27,  and one cannot but feel anxious how he meets the challenge, if he takes it up at all. – Rappler.com