Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio’s tortured monologue has persuaded many observers to conclude that stream-of-consciousness prose, flight of fancy, and non-sequiturs define her language, like the word salads of her father that never explain anything. Their loyal lieutenants, Sens. Bong Go and Bato de la Rosa, are also speaking with forked tongues, believing that they can conduct Senate investigations designed to clean up the Duterte crap on their mere say-so, contrary to the law and tradition of the Senate.
The Davao City syndicate is going nowhere. First, Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio botched an attempt at projection, tagging the congressional panel looking into her dubious expenditures at the Office of the Vice President (OVP) is engaged in sullying her reputation and the 1,000% adulation of her by the Filipino people. She must be a firm believer in her own propaganda. Empty tin cans make the loudest noise, but it is noise. Second, Rodrigo Duterte claimed there was no reward system for his bogus “war on drugs” but there was a reward system against the “ninja” cops that Bong Go told reporters in 2019.
There was a reward system for the Duterte Death Squad (DDS) as confirmed by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the late Fr, Armando Picardal, retired SPO3 Arturo Lascanas, and hitman Edgar Matobato. Third, Bato de la Rosa said not a single red centavo was paid to the killers deployed in the Duterte drug war, contrary to the allegations of retired Col. Royina Garma, who named Muking Espino and Peter Parungo as the finance operators. He also wants Duterte loyalists to be invited to the Senate hearings to clear himself, Bong Go, and their godfather, Duterte Sr.
Sara is a bad communicator as her monologue showed, and it is embarrassing for her PR staff to continue with additional teledramas that cannot explain why hundreds of millions of pesos were misused at the OVP, billions of pesos were wasted at the Department of Education (DepEd) and why her accomplishment ratings were in the single digits at the department. Moreover, the testimonies of Michael Poa, Atty. Resty Osias and Gloria J. Mercado indubitably show that Sara, who was regarded as an absentee secretary, had been dishing out cash to her underlings responsible for the computerization program and a raft of well-funded projects. Surely, giving tens of thousands of pesos monthly to her subordinates was not the product of the goodness of her heart.
What Sara’s soliloquy achieved was to unleash her fury at Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and the Marcos family, Liza Cacho Araneta Marcos included, for having used her to win the May 9, 2022 presidential race, for Marcos Jr. as not being her friend, for blaming Sen. Imee Marcos for convincing her to run in tandem with her brother, and for Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez for harassing her and working to kneecap her by pushing the OVP and DepEd investigations. Romualdez was also accused of masterminding her impeachment. The Makabayan Coalition, whom Sara has accused of being comprised of “terrorists,” is drafting the articles of impeachment after more than a year of reflecting on the matter. The coalition believes that Sara thinks she is entitled to her omerta as far as financial irregularities are concerned. Any dialogue with her will not be fruitful.
The plenilune of Oct. 18, the Hunter’s supermoon, did not help her shine a light on the fuzzy “facts” about her quick disbursement of P125 million in what she perceived to be her Confidential and Intelligence Fund (CIF) but which the Office of the President (OP) and Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin categorized as cash from the OP’s Contingent Fund (CF) for which Sara is accountable. Like a black cow on a dark night, she failed to clarify the opaque nature of her spending, with more and more receipts being produced about her luxurious safehouses, her twisted reward system that pays for “medicines,” “food” and “other products” rather than cash for her informants and spooks. Nobody buys this crap but Sara insists that rewards in kind are now the rage in the betrayal business. Yet, suspicions run deep that the cash went into her pockets.
In Sara’s proposed P2.037-billion budget for OVP next year, more than P900 million was allotted for social services centered in the National Capital Region (NCR), with her office claiming that scrapping the allotment would adversely impact poor families and the nearly 1 million beneficiaries. The 2028 presidential election is more than three years away but Sara is rushing to build her own constituency in Metro Manila, just as she rushed to establish 10 OVP satellite offices as soon as she took office on June 30, 2022. The entire trouble is that she is campaigning this early using public money, which is unconscionable. “Ang tumakbo nang matulin, kung matinik ay malalim” goes the saying. She never learned that in school as lived in his father’s kingdom called Davao City.
Then, there is the matter of 34 safehouses for which the taxpayers paid through the nose, and the Commission on Audit (COA) only got acknowledgment receipts, not the official receipts from the corporate owners of the ritzy “safehouses” in the enclave of plutocrats called the Bonifacio Global City (BGC), where the walls have ears that can hear conversations in “safehouses.” Those “safehouses” were used as ATM sites for the quick disbursement of cash before Dec. 31, 2022. The COA will find it hard to find those who received the “rewards” if they ever exist at all, just as a squad of military officers was dumbfounded to learn that Sara spent P15-million for the Youth Leadership Summit (YLS), a counterinsurgency activity that was bankrolled by the Philippine Army (PA) and local government units (LGUs.) It’s deception of the worst kind when the OVP classifies its expenditures as legitimate just because its documents say so. Even if it were in black and white, the documents can hide a scam, especially one committed by a creature who ridicules honesty and sincerity as obsolete.
