Congress probes intended to destroy Duterte for May 2025 elections

(Editor’s Note: We are reprinting here, due to its relevance to the present political situation, the article of Ambassador Rigoberto Tiglao that appeared last October 14, 2024. With the author’s permission).

“INVESTIGATIONS in aid of reelection” has been a longstanding joke about inquiries and probes launched by Congress committees. That joke refers to the fact that such investigations very rarely result in substantial legislation. Instead, at best, they boost legislators’ popularity as a result of media coverage and have even succeeded in raising funds for themselves from those threatened by the inquiries — thus helping their reelection.

The two investigations being conducted in Congress now are investigations on steroids, the scale and intensity of which has never happened before. But the real aim of these investigations is far, far more sinister, and that is to totally politically destroy former president Rodrigo Duterte so he will be a feeble, even marginal force in the May 2025 midterm elections.

I don’t think the Marcos camp will succeed. Duterte has been the most popular president in the post-EDSA period. Some 88 percent of Filipinos were satisfied with his governance, according to a poll taken in June 2022, or just when he ended his term. This is the highest end-of-term ratings in Philippine presidential history, a rarity in the country’s politics. He inarguably has charisma, and it takes decades for a leader’s mass following to vanish, if ever.

The Senate investigations on the Philippine online gambling operators (POGOs) will paint a picture of a Duterte regime as responsible for the crime and graft that these mostly Chinese-owned firms spawned. After all, it was during his administration that these POGOs flourished as part of his pro-China stance. But these accusations fall flat on its face with the simple question: Why didn’t Marcos Jr. ban POGOs on his first day in office? Curiously, the Pagcor that supervises POGOs ordered all past licenses to be rescinded and issued new licenses. Why? For new pay-offs?

Quad

On the other hand, the hearings by the so-called quad committee in the House of Representatives will resurrect the charges of extrajudicial executions against Duterte that resulted from his war on drugs. Indeed, retired police colonel Royina Garma claimed the former president asked her to recommend a police officer to undertake a reward system for police executing drug lords. It was odd, though, that just two days before her allegations, a police colonel testified that Garma had ordered the killing of a PCSO official who had been compiling evidence. Was that a threat that if she didn’t go “against” Duterte, the quadcomm would pursue investigating her alleged crime?

The investigations aim to demonize Duterte so much that his candidates and he himself would lose in the May 2025 midterm elections. His demonization will drag down the prestige of his daughter Sara, so far the shoo-in to be the next president.

The US, of course, is supporting this campaign to take out Duterte politically through its huge billion-dollar budget allocated for media operations worldwide and through its operators in the International Criminal Court, which the Americans succeeded three years back in getting it to investigate Duterte and his officials for “crimes against humanity” resulting from his war on drugs.

The US will pull out all the stops to prevent Sara or any candidate from sharing Duterte’s vision, as she or he would call for an end to Marcos’ disgraceful servility to the US. Marcos has made us the sole US pawn in Asia, so much so that Marcos has even called our Asean neighbors cowards by “looking the other way” in the face of alleged Chinese aggression.

Bases

Three decades after the Philippines kicked out US military bases, Marcos has restored them in a cost-effective way for the Americans by designating nine of our military camps and international airport bases they can use at their whim. These bases are critical for the US military projection in case of a war with China, especially over Taiwan. The US will not allow another anti-US Duterte or his surrogate to lead the Philippines.

In its early stages, the Senate investigation by a committee headed by Sen. Risa Hontiveros seemed to be apolitical, albeit a curious probe into small-town Chinese Filipino mayor, Alice Guo, who built up a huge complex of online gambling companies, despite allegedly having a fake Filipino citizenship. The Hontiveros committee claimed that Guo’s POGOs had been engaged in “human trafficking” (by bringing in illegal Chinese to work in the firms) and oppressed her firms’ employees.

However, the hearings later painted a picture of the previous Duterte regime as corrupt since it was during his watch that POGOs flourished and were allegedly the source of big-time graft by officials of his administration. Indeed, Sen. Ronald Dela Rosa, the police chief during Duterte’s presidency, disclosed in a recent hearing in the Senate that his sources disclosed that one purported resource person was planning to link him to Guo, that he was allegedly getting bribes from her during Duterte’s regime.

How the hell did the Hontiveros committee, which is the Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality, end up probing POGOs? Hontiveros’ track record has been in human rights and family issues. How could she have been interested in online gambling and apparently international Chinese-run criminal syndicates? The only explanation is that she, as well as other members of the committee, were fed information on Guo and POGOs by, who else, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission (PAOC), which has been deeply involved in the investigation from the start.

Guo

The investigation of Guo’s alleged crimes, however, is not the task of Congress but of the executive branch. Specifically, it is the task of the justice department, especially since under it are the National Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Immigration. The PAOC, indeed, already had been investigating Guo even before the Hontiveros hearings. President Marcos could have ordered a special team consisting of officials from these agencies and augmented by the Intelligence Services of the Armed Forces.

Of course, the public will not be aware of that kind of investigation, the results of which will be disclosed only when cases are prepared to be filed in the courts, which will take years — or after the May elections next year. Useless.

In the case of the pork barrel scandal, for instance, the Commission on Audit undertook from 2007 to 2009 a special audit of congressmen’s use of the Priority Development Assistance Fund and found scandalous cases of corruption. It was exposed in 2013, with the hearings there providing only additional proof, mainly by way of a whistleblower’s disclosures, which helped the court cases filed against the officials involved. Most of the hundred cases are still pending in the courts, with the accused senators Bong Revilla, Jinggoy Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile acquitted.

POGOs

Guo is just one person among the tens of thousands of Chinese from the poor parts of China recruited by POGO operators who found it cheaper (and more practical since they’d have two passports) to acquire Filipino citizenship by bribing officials of the Bureau of Immigration — long notorious for being one of the most corrupt agencies in the country — to get them the papers. The hearings on Guo, in which Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian has played a very active role, are in their seventh month now. Has the committee done anything to uncover the corruption at the Bureau of Immigration and to propose legislation to correct this?

Nada. It has been Guo, Guo and Guo since April. And the committee now has rather ridiculously taken on a national security task, claiming to be exposing China’s spy ring in Asia. Rep. Bienvenido Abante, a religious preacher by profession, had a flash of insight when he called his committee’s investigation a “teleserye” since many Filipinos have been purportedly following the hearings, mesmerized by its drama. Abante didn’t realize that it indeed is a true teleserye, a work of fiction, which in this case gives the committee heads a lot of ballot-gathering name-recall.

Abante, though, made a more serious slip of the tongue when he said on television, addressing Guo: “Just go back to China to finish these hearings, and just leave your wealth here.” To whom, I would be curious to know.

After seven months of investigation, Hontiveros and Gatchalian seem to have no idea where their investigation is leading in terms of proposing new laws.

Strange

I find it strange that of all senators, it is Gatchalian who seems to be so keen on going after Guo intensely for her allegedly fake Filipino citizenship. I would have thought he would be more sympathetic to Guo’s plight. It is widely known in the ethnic Chinese immigrant community here that many of them chose the path of faster, more expensive acquisition of citizenship by bribing immigration officials.

His father, William, was accused in 1962 of not being a Filipino citizen, and it was only in 1991, or 29 years later, that the Supreme Court would rule that he was indeed a naturalized Filipino. If William had not been able to prove his citizenship, there would be no magnate to fund his son’s campaign to become a senator.

Maybe that could be Guo’s fate since she demonstrated her skill in winning a mayorship at the age of 36. With her name recall, comely looks and wealth, she could even be a senator in 2028 and sit beside Gatchalian, posing with her imperturbable smile.