by Diego Morra
With world-class chutzpah, Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio declared that she wants her impeachment trial to be a “bloodbath,” as worse as the Salem witch trials, the persecution of the Protestant Huguenots and the decimation of the Beguines in France and the Stormking massacres in Indonesia in 1965 that turned the rivers red with the blood of millions of intellectuals, activists, lawyers, journalists and ordinary citizens suspected of involvement in a bogus coup plot designed by the Berkeley Mafia.
Sara’s image makers have even personally vouched for her sterling quality, he steadfastness and political durability, with one PR operator claiming in a quote card that Sara had been the subject of sustained character assassination for four years and yet she hasn’t folded. This is an inveterate lie. Sara was praising Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez during the campaign trail, crediting him as an indefatigable campaign manager who sewed up her astounding victory in 2022. Not even a year later, Sara was condemning Romualdez as “tambaluslos,” the mythical forest creature in Austronesian lore with humongous genitalia who preys on girls, and tagging him as the partner of Ako Bicol Rep. Zaldy Co in stealing bulk of the national budget.
Her image has been sullied by her record, and Sara has not reported on her dozens of excursions, her watching a Taylor Swift concert while Typhoon Carina flooded Metro Manila and Luzon, her regular visits to The Hague and her addressing Duterte cult followers in Europe led by Harry Roque to drum up support for her 2028 presidential campaign and her constant prevarication about the state of the deteriorating nation. Now that Sara is on trial before the Senate for the unexplained disappearance of P612.5-million in confidential funds, culpable violation of the 1987 Constitution, she had demanded a “bloodbath,” only to retreat and plead with the Supreme Court (SC) to spare her the agony of taking the oath and promising to tell the truth before the impeachment court. Sara is simply incapable of telling the truth, or admitting that she had been lying through her teeth in the past four years.
The way things stand, Sara is demanding that the Filipino people accept her hypocrisy and respect her right to defend herself from the truth. Sara thanked Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for choosing her as his running-mate. Profuse with gratitude to Imee Marcos and Marcos Jr.’s wife, her tune changed not even two years after becoming vice president. Sara accused Marcos Jr. of being “corrupt, incompetent and indolent,” with zero ability in managing the government and must resign. As to the First Lady, she alleged that she was her “mentor” on corruption, and whatever she learned about graft was courtesy of Liza Araneta Marcos. She also accused Romualdez of plotting the ouster of her other mentor, Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, as a result of bloody intrigue in the chamber about a power grab.
Scared stiff of being peppered with questions, her defense panel has invented the excuse that she is present in the proceedings through counsel. Yet, these lawyers are incompetent to answer questions about how the CF money was spent by her and her bodyguards Cols. Raymund Dante Lachica and Dennis Nolasco. They are not Sara, who has personal knowledge of the entire financial operation, perhaps including the plan to use 2,669 informers, living and dead, young and old and existing only in the windmills of her mind. Yet, by 2023, Sara herself was laying the groundwork for her own power grab, as dazibao materialized in Metro Manila heralding the “pagbabalik ng agila” and demanding that “let Sara rule.”
Sara’s quirky break with Marcos Jr. hews closely to the purported plan of the Duterte political dynasty to force Marcos Jr. to resign, hand her the reins of power and flee. Blame it on the amateurish cabal egging Sara on, but the obsession with wresting power from Marcos Jr. was only consistent with what observers have dubbed as a Palace coup by way of a systematic campaign to render his administration as utterly incompetent, consistent with the equally incompetent assessment by Rodrigo Duterte that the Marcos Jr. ship would sink in two years.
If this facile plot were true, then there must be some substance to the claim of Ramil Madriaga that Rodrigo Duterte was supposed to be the architect of the “term-sharing” scheme, in effect saying that the 2022 race was a dress rehearsal for a Palace coup by 2025. This explains why Sara was so obsessed with having P500-million in confidential fund (CF) even before she was sworn it, and even crafted a recruitment campaign to organize 950,000 Metro Manila residents into her own urban poor mass base even as she established 13 satellite offices and three extension offices nationwide to justify her domestic wanderlust. As education secretary, Sara also had access to additional CF, allowing her to fiddle with two CFs, thinking that since the money is for “confidential” purposes, she can use it as she pleases.
As she is now on the dock and being summoned to face the impeachment court and answer questions about her assigning two military officers to handle P612.5-million in CF and how she disbursed the money to 2,669 informers in record time, Sara has the golden opportunity to engage in the “bloodbath” she had wanted to experience, bloodied but unbowed. Instead of a bloodbath, her defense lawyers led by Sheila Sison are giving her a tongue bath, claiming that her physical presence is not needed as the defense counsel represents her. This is tragic logic since hostile witness Michael Poa proved that only Sara and her two bodyguards knew how the CF was spent.#
