This is what all this Duterte arrest quiz at the Senate called by Sen. Imee Marcos amounts to. There is no sense debating about the conduct of Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest on Mar. 11, 2025, since the subject of the warrant himself was quoted on video footage that “there was a warrant” and asked his partner Honeylet Avancena to just go home with daughter Veronica or Kitty.
With Duterte aware that a legitimate warrant against him was issued by the International Police (Interpol), the Imee investigation relitigates something that has been mooted. If Imee were keen on earning brownie points for her “probe,” she must return to her abacus. Better yet, investigate how many warrants of arrests or death warrants were issued against the 30,000 victims of the drug war. She is dead wrong if she were intent on raising her favorability rating for the Senate race. She is pandering to two choirs, and both are not convinced she has the cachet to be pro-Sara and yet be pro-Bongbong, and she would lose both.
An accomplished actress Imee is not and no matter how she plays her game, it is impossible to gain an enormous number of voters on both sides of the stinking aisle. “Sumasalok sa dalawang balong tuyot ang ale,” one pundit said, “at hindi mapupuno ang imbudo. There is no confluence for the Marcos Creek and the Duterte rivulet. Yet, the Punch and Judy Show must continue, but the comical fight must entertain and bore kids in attendance. The entire trouble with this motu proprio quiz when the Senate is not in session is its bad conscience. Whoever told Senate President Chiz Escudero that it would “unite the nation” or “clear up the mess” should restudy his politics. The case against Rodrigo Duterte has been punishable under Republic Act No. 9851, which was enacted in 2009, and known as “An Act Defining and Penalizing Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity.” The law doesn’t exempt anyone from criminal responsibility and in Sec. 17, the Philippines may surrender or extradite accused persons in the Philippines to international courts or another state.
Both customary and conventional law consider crimes against humanity and genocide as non-derogable since human rights cannot be limited, suspended, infringed upon or watered down. All states are expected to respect such rights as “opinio juris” or legally obligatory. Yet, Imee Marcos would not dwell on such legal intricacies as she wants her “friend,” Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio to have the floor from The Hague and quibble about the “warrantless” arrest of her father, just as Bong Go tagged the entire caper as a “kidnapping,” forgetting that for several years, Duterte was being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and that he was facing allegations of committing crimes against humanity as a co-perpetrator. Of course, you have Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa, howling to high heavens that Marcos Jr. betrayed him as he vowed not to allow the ICC to arrest Duterte and him, along with possibly 77 other respondents.
Sara’s starring role at the Imee probe on Mar. 20, 2025, did not clarify her issue since her word contradicts Rodrigo’s statement to Honeylet that there was a warrant for his arrest. It didn’t matter to Sara that her father had been taunting the ICC to fly in and arrest him before he made an appointment with the angel of death. As they say, be careful what you wish for. Rodrigo was not only careless; he was clumsy in announcing where he was and what day and time he would arrive in Manila. Sara insists that her father was forcibly taken by the police upon his arrival in Manila from Hong Kong. “This was patently an illegal arrest which constitutes extraordinary rendition. A Filipino citizen, a former President, was taken into custody without a valid warrant issued by a Philippine court — without due process and without any legal basis under our laws,” she howled.
Apparently, she didn’t know anything about RA 9851. “For an arrest to be lawful, it must be carried out pursuant to a warrant issued by a Filipino judge of a Philippine court. Nasaan po ang warrant of arrest na inissue ng hukuman ng Pilipinas? Wala,” she added. Since there was no warrant from Judge Fernando Tempura or Judge Mary Grace Piattos, the arrest was invalid. Even by ICC standards, her father should have been brought “before a Philippine judge to determine the validity of arrest before he was handed over to a foreign court.”
“What happened on March 11, 2025 is not just about one man. It is about all of us, it’s about the country. If a former president can be taken without due process, what stops them from doing the same to any Filipino?” she asked. “We have now lost a former president. I pray that we do not lose the country next,” she told the Senate. The Imee-Sara show did pander to the usual socmed trolls and crones who have been fabricating quotes from Donald Trump, two TV show characters, and a bunch of people who had long been sympathetic to devils. The Duterte troll army, whose manufactured posts have been debunked 99% of the time, which is a bad record for Malou Tiquia and company, should do better than cut and paste photos, from Argentina to Nis, Serbia, to the religious festivals in Cebu and the much-maligned Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) rally on Jan. 17, 2025, and pass them off as massive demonstrations in support of Rodrigo, the patriarch.
Duterte, the master manipulator, narcissist and necromaniac, used the counsel of the despised Cambridge Analytica to massage his image and present himself as the greatest gift of the gods to the benighted country. “If you want to control a people, create an imaginary enemy that appears more dangerous than you, then present yourself as their savior,” Noam Chomsky wrote. Duterte presented himself as the savior, the knight in shining armor who would rid the country of crime in three months, exterminate drug pushers in six and vowed unlimited or “unli” killings to transform the country into his version of paradise. These promises were made in 2016 and in less than two years, the country was a mess, with only the mortuary business becoming a sunshine industry. Then came COVID-19, and then the national debt tripled. This is yet another crime—the crime against the national kitty.
