by Diego Morra
Given the continuing feverish negotiations among senators and the Marcos Jr. administration to secure the conviction of Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio before the impeachment court, as well as the rearguard action of the Duterte warlord dynasty to prevent such political doom, the country will not be a pretty picture of peace and quiet during the Christmas season.
With a mountain of evidence proving the allegations of illicit, ill-gotten wealth and even foreign funding of Sara, she probably needs more than the 473 bodyguards she has to date and the more than 670 firearms secreted away by his father and the 59 guns owned conjugally by her and her hubby to wage an internecine war with former ally and now bitter foe at Malacanang. She needs more than an Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun and some Roman Legions to shore up her position. No hoplite as good as Socrates stands with her shoulder-to-shoulder. The sundalong kanin would not fight to the death to protect her.
As the roundtable discussion at the University of the Philippines College of Media and Communication (UP-CMC), originally the UP Institute of Mass Communication showed, Sara failed to clean up her crap-splattered blanket, with the Cale88 Foods of Mans Carpio earning P150-million from banana chips manufactured by two workers, and she herself collecting P81,000 from the Davao City government in 2023 and listing it in a Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) form, and again cadging a million each in 2024 and 2025. Ang tawag diyan self-dealing. Her GenCorp., which is managed by Jaime T. Cruz of JTC Corp., a firm with 55 Jollibee and Chowking franchises, listed her as a director while she moonlighted as vice president of the republic.
If we were to be truthful about the whole Sara shebang, the Duterte political dynasty actually routed itself. For Article 2 alone, the prosecution has been scoring better, and all the objections raised, the legal trapeze performed and the vacuous arguments advanced only strengthened the case against Sara. It appears that Sara, despite planning the break with Marcos Jr. as early as 2023, never prepared to protect her flanks, indicating that she never contemplated being hit with a slew of cases. When she attacked former Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, she rang the Marcos Jr. alarm bells.
This is really vintage Rodrigo Duterte, whom a US lawmaker tagged as “punching above his weight” as he sought international recognition that was promptly denied him. Similarly, Sara punched above her weight, assuming wrongly that her “anti-corruption” campaign against Romualdez was doing Marcos Jr. a favor. In short, she thought in the deepest recesses of her skull, that her attacks would snowball, first against, and then later against Marcos Jr. himself. She was wrong on both counts.
As one political thinker said, the less one thinks, the more she or he talks. Sara miscalculated everything because she overrated herself. The fine china of Davao City is damaged goods in Manila and the rest of the effing country. She thought she was not vulnerable, she believed the population truly love her despite her hodomania and playing truant while acting as a spare tire to Marcos Jr. As a lawyer, she did not study her law, the 1987 Constitution, Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Law, the Plunder Law and even Administrative Law.
For his part, Renato Reyes, president of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), said that in the light of the impeachment proceedings and as Duterte senators are jumping ship, like Sen. Mark Villar, “definitely, Sara Duterte will be convicted, but it took us a political crisis for the impeachment to move forward. It’s a reflection of how the system is broken.” Human rights lawyer and former Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Zarate said the trial has provided clear evidence to convict Sara. Nonetheless, these pieces of evidence must survive examination, assessment and logical scrutiny. Will the truth shackle the senators? Will they hold Sara accountable?
Lawyer Christian Monsod, who chaired the panel that framed the impeachment provision of the 1987 Constitution, argued that a prime consideration at the trial is to hold Sara’s feet to the fire. “Has she lived up to her oath of office?” he asked. Monsod explained that Sara’s threats “violated her oath to do justice to every man.” Reyes said the Senate that serves as the impeachment court is not insulated from the Marcos-Duterte conflict, as well as widespread graft, and warned that the corruption cases against lawmakers may become a factor in how senator-judges render a decision. The people, he and Zarate explained, should push accountability as the objective in the trial. “Our voices could be the decisive factor in securing a Duterte conviction,” Reyes concluded.#
