3 days ago
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Rodrigo Duterte made three calamitous mistakes in the last seven years that, through their accumulated weight, brought him, a former strongman, directly to Villamor Airbase and pushed him up the stairs of the chartered Gulfstream taking him to The Hague.
The first mistake was withdrawing the country from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This may seem counterintuitive, even incoherent. Wasn’t withdrawal meant precisely to avoid the possibility of prosecution? But in fact this was a tempting of the very fate he sought to avoid.
I wrote in March 2018, a few days after he issued his order: “President Duterte’s decision to withdraw the Philippines from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court will not protect him; rather, it has only made him even more vulnerable to a potential criminal case. No amount of hiding behind the flag, or the ostentatious kissing of it, can mask the message his decision sends. He is saying: I do not consider myself accountable.”
It was the sort of legal maneuver that Duterte learned from his years as a fiscal: prosecution is in the end not about facts and the law, but rather about the calculated application of power through the processes of the law. That is why, as he proudly said in one of his many midnight press conferences, he used to plant evidence or intrigue, to trap the accused he had already judged guilty. Withdrawing from the ICC was a power move, not only in the sense that the architect of foreign policy could order it, but also in the sense that the order was issued to protect the issuer.
But the consequence was clear: “Mr. Duterte’s unmanly withdrawal…only reinforces the impression that he has manipulated the instruments of the government so as never to be held accountable — ironically creating the very condition that would invite the ICC Prosecutor to investigate a sitting head of state.”
And that is what happened; the intention behind the order of withdrawal colored the Duterte administration’s attempts at accountability. Only a handful of policemen involved in Duterte’s so-called war on drugs, which killed thousands, were ever convicted. After starting a formal investigation into the extrajudicial killings in September 2021, the ICC agreed to suspend its investigation a mere two months later, to give the Duterte administration the opportunity to prove that it was holding the killers to account. But (not to put too fine a point on it), nothing happened. In January 2023, half a year after Ferdinand Marcos Jr. succeeded to the presidency, the ICC resumed its investigation, with the withdrawer-in-chief first on the list.
Failed succession planning
Duterte’s second mistake was mismanaging his transition from office; he failed to install his successor of choice and dissipated his political capital.
To be sure, only one president in the post-Edsa era has ever succeeded in handing power to her chosen one: Corazon Aquino in 1992 (and then only barely). But every president has mounted a vigorous effort to install their choices and preserve their political capital.
“For the first time,” I wrote in January 2022, “an incumbent president and his political party have no candidate for president. The lack of a succession plan at the start of the election cycle becomes even more glaring in the light of repeated attempts over the years to ensure continuity for the Duterte brand of leadership: a Congress-led campaign to change the Constitution (failed); the President’s own overtures to military leadership to form a junta (politely ignored); bureaucratic efforts to revoke a ‘revolutionary government’ moment (stillborn).”
It is true that, in the end, he reluctantly embraced his daughter’s alliance with Marcos Jr., and the allies won. But in disparaging his eventual successor in unmistakable terms, and in publicly seeking alternatives to him (his daughter Sara, his closest ally Bong Go, even Mayor Isko Moreno), he undermined his position in the new administration, becoming merely the retired leader of yet another political faction.
“[Duterte] came out of 2021 having dramatically failed to secure his overriding objective: choose the terms of his transition from office. In language the basketball-crazy country he has misruled for five and a half years might use, he was completely boxed out, again and again, in the year’s most important plays. It wasn’t the so-called lame duck syndrome that diminished the President, although his failure can only accentuate the negative in his last six months in office — it was the spectacular collapse of ALL his succession plans. Strip the President’s substitution strategy of all the drama and the noise, and his situation is clear. He did not get what he wanted.”
Point of no return
The third mistake was declaring war on the Marcoses (and their cousins the Romualdezes). It is possible that he mistook his still-high ratings as a measure of his political capital; it is more likely that, ever since he entered politics, he knew only to move at one speed: reckless.
In January 2024, alarmed by the Marcos administration’s stealthy maneuver to change the Constitution, he started saying the quiet part about his successor out loud again. “Bangag,” he described Marcos Jr. — that is, stoned or high on drugs. He tried to walk it back the following month, but last November he was back at it, describing Marcos Jr. as a drug addict, and calling on the military (the same military he had tried to coax into forming a junta) to intervene in what he called the country’s “fractured governance.” He asked in Filipino: “Until when will you support a president who is a drug addict?”
He wasn’t the only Duterte calling Marcos Jr. names. Davao Mayor Baste Duterte called him lazy and demanded that he resign. And months before Vice President Sara Duterte told reporters she “agreed with the assumption” that President Marcos was a drug addict, she was seen laughing when her father called Marcos Jr. bangag. This rankled the person Marcos Jr. trusts the most: his wife.
In April 2024, Liza Araneta Marcos gave a candid interview to the radio anchor Anthony Taberna. I wrote then: “With her interview, Mrs. Marcos was signaling to the Marcos allies that the point of no return has been crossed. I think she has recognized that the Dutertes will never step back; that the insults from the Duterte men can never be unsaid, and will in all likelihood be followed by more insults; that the Dutertes no longer trust the Marcoses; above all, that the Dutertes see President Marcos Junior as fundamentally weak — a ‘kuting’ (kitten) no match against the Duterte tiger.”
I identified four ways in which Marcos had not yet deployed the formidable powers of the presidency against Vice President Duterte: remove her from the Cabinet, disband the vice presidential security group, isolate China supporters, and arrest the former president. “Allow the arrest by the national police of former president Duterte and others implicated in the drug-related extrajudicial killings if and when the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant.”
Instead of focusing on the pro-China positioning of the Dutertes’ remaining political allies, Marcos, especially in his campaign sorties for his senatorial candidates, has chosen to highlight the brutality of his predecessor’s war on drugs. But everything else on that list? Sara Duterte out of the Cabinet: Check. Her personal security force reduced: Check. Her father arrested, on behalf of the ICC: Check.
In truth, Duterte’s real, fundamental mistake was his signature legacy, as mayor and then as president: killing his constituents. But landing in The Hague was not inevitable; at three decision points, he made the exact wrong choice. Each one brought him closer to the padded interior, the secure self-contained space, of that Gulfstream jet. – Rappler.com
Veteran journalist John Nery is a Rappler columnist and program host. In the Public Square with John Nery airs on Rappler platforms every Wednesday at 8 pm.
