Former judge, police sharpshooter and now National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) director Jaime Santiago knew beforehand that inviting Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio to answer questions about her death threats to President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., Liza Cacho Araneta Marcos and Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez was easy but getting her to be present at the interrogation room was an impossible task. Interviewing her is like talking to a wall.
The first scheduled interview was scrubbed and the second was slated on the very same hour of the Christmas party that the Office of the Vice President (OVP) will hold for the journalists who have been bored by the strange soliloquies, the off-tangents and weird logic that Sara has been weaving since September 2024. Clearly, Sara had no intention to meet Santiago, who had made it clear that their investigation into Sara’s threats will continue whether she appeared on Dec. 11 or not.
Fortunately, Sara did not materialize, perhaps agonizing on what role she would play before her interrogators. Would she be a mere resource person? A witness? Or a potential suspect? To be clear, even if she were merely thinking aloud, her wish to decapitate Marcos Jr. was already a threat, and the supposed “threat from beyond the grave” that must be accomplished by her hitman on the Marcos couple and Romualdez is, ipso facto, a threat. She may quibble till kingdom come but there is no such thing as a “conditional threat.” And who is stupid enough to do her bidding once she is hopelessly dead? In short, Sara created a fairy tale that she hoped would make her victimhood credible.
Now, she is demanding an investigation into yet another fairy tale—that the threat she made was in response to the “assassination plot” hatched by Romualdez, and she even had a blotch on her neck to prove that an “attack” on her life was made but some Catwoman came to her rescue. A double death threat on Marcos Jr., a failed “assassination attempt” on Sara and a boycotted interview at the NBI are dubious stories that should be red meat to the dwindling ranks of Dutertistanis. Give her an inch and surely Sara and her handlers would grab a mile. This melodrama is getting to be nauseating and whoever is writing this script, whether it is Sara’s PR or the “eminence grise” of a previous administration, needs to rethink their enterprise.
Filipinos no longer buy the stupid claim that the Duterte administration restored the country’s good name, like the equally grotesque claim that the Marcos dictatorship was the nation’s golden years. Sara’s handlers are creating a cult around her even as the social media posts they are churning out are pathetic. She deserves the presidency because “nagmamano sa tatay niya?” Or she respects her elders? Or that she is the “Philippine eagle” soaring high in the sky before attacking her prey? Or that the presidency was hers for the taking in 2022 but didn’t take it because of “other priorities?” With her bumbling the investigations into the plunder of DepEd and OVP funds, the stupid fabrication of the names of beneficiaries of millions of pesos in “rewards” that also come in kind and “other products,” the gifting of scores of millions of pesos to her principal security escorts even if they were not special disbursing officers (SDOs) for confidential and intelligence funds (CIFs) and the allotment of nearly P1-billion from the OVP budget for the urban poor in Metro Manila in preparation for the 2028 election showed that Sara cannot be trusted with public funds.
Then, there are the billions of pesos of unliquidated cash advances at the DepEd, the P15-billion in unutilized funds of the same department and the more than P15-million listed as having been used for Youth Leadership Summits (YLS) but paid for by the Philippine Army (PA) and local government units (LGUs.) At least four military officers confirmed that the money came from the PA and nothing from the OVP. As PR men and ad practitioners admit, it is doubly hard to sell damaged goods and Sara is a prime example of it. Sara is not entitled to her alternative facts because her market does not live in an alternative universe. Filipinos understand that spending scores of millions for 34 “safehouses” in the dying days of 2022 is unthinkable, just as playing Santa Claus with CIF money for hordes of unidentified, cannot be identified and unidentifiable “informants” is just another opportunity for plunder.
The many “Mary Grace Piattoses,” “Kokoy Villamins, “Fernando Tempuras,” “Reymunda Jane Novas” and “Carlos Miguel Oishis” that Princess Sara and her team created are a monument to the severe absence of creative juices in her brain trust. The 402 other dubious names they had manufactured show that they were hurrying to beat the clock and failed to see some wisdom in the saying “haste makes waste.” Or they simply forgot the phrase “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,” as written by in Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Marmion.” It is deception in search of a better practice. So, the tangled web is there, from the time questions were raised about “Ang Kaibigan,” the children’s book in Sara’s name that bore more than fleeting similarity from the work of an American author, to the 1.5- million items stored in DepEd warehouses, including computers, that have been stowed away.
The Sandiganbayan’s dismissal of the civil cases against the Marcoses, Cojuangcos and Enrile at the instance of the Marcos-controlled Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) at a time when Sara’s impeachment is being discussed is another tragic battering for coconut farmers who subsidized the coconut levy only for others to profit from its proceeds. For those who have covered the PCGG and other quasi-judicial and judicial bodies, cases can be deliberately lost, weakened and delayed for decades, to the detriment of the people at large. By not staying neutral in the impeachment of Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, Marcos Jr. is simply telling Sara that he has the sharpest tools in the shed to settle the row, which is no longer political as all the pieces of evidence to prove graft, betrayal of public trust and culpable violations of the 1986 Constitution have been accumulated and corroborated. Funny, indeed, but this drama hasn’t aged well, particularly for a skit written and directed by Sara herself.
