01 The whole story of former President Duterte’s arrest
Last night, a bombshell came out.
According to Singapore’s United Morning Post, Interpol issued a Red Notice for former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the Philippine police and other agencies deployed at least 7,000 officers to arrest Duterte.
The Philippine Presidential Communications Office said that we have heard that the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of former President Duterte on charges of crimes against humanity, and that the government is prepared for any contingency.
It was originally reported that on the evening of the 7th, Duterte went to Hong Kong. His daughter, Sarah, also went there and canvassed for her party’s senatorial candidate in Hong Kong. And, while in Hong Kong, he also responded to the charges of the International Criminal Court, responding, “What is my crime? Everything I have done in my time is so that Filipinos can have a little peace and tranquility.
Evidently, Duterte is not trying to hide, much less in fear.
And the latest news is that he was detained by the police just after he returned to the Manila International Airport on the 11th. According to the footage captured by reporters at the scene, he said If I don’t agree, you’ll just have to kill me.
02 Power struggle only for midterm elections
Back in November of last year, the struggle of the Filipino political families reached the point where white knives go in, red knives go out. On the one hand, there was President Marcos Jr. and his family, now in power, and on the other, the family of former President Duterte, whose daughter, Sarah Duterte, is now serving as Vice President.
At that time, Sarah had openly told reporters that the current President Marcos Jr. might want to kill her.
She also said if I’m killed, I’m going to kill President Marcos Jr. the first lady and the speaker of the House of Representatives! Philippine Speaker of the House of Representatives, Romualdez, is Marcos Jr.’s cousin. Earlier, he slashed the budget of Sarah’s vice presidential office by two-thirds.
Sarah also said angrily that this country is going to hell because we’re being led by a man who doesn’t know how to be president, and he’s a liar.
On Marcos Jr.’s side, as the ruling administration, he has used his power to spare no effort in suppressing his political rivals, the Duterte family.
On February 5 of this year, he formally initiated the impeachment of Sarah for irregular use of classified funds during her tenure. During the same period, the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) also recommended that criminal charges be filed against Sarah for alleged sedition.
So why are the two sides fighting? Simple, for votes and power.
The Philippine midterm elections kicked off on January 12 of this year and will last until May 12th. During this time, the Philippines will be in a high fever stage, extremely treacherous, and it’s not surprising that anything will go wrong.
Midterm elections in the Philippines, which occur every three years, will determine hundreds of seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In particular, the fate of 12 of the 24 seats in the Senate is critical. Marcos Jr. has to win this midterm election if he wants to ensure policy continuity and the right to designate a successor for the 2028 presidential election.
But according to the 2024 polls, Sarah inherited his dad Duterte’s popularity and is the temporary leader in favorability.
On February 5, the Philippine House of Representatives, with an overwhelming 215 votes in favor, passed the impeachment case against Sarah. But according to Philippine law, after the impeachment is transferred to the Senate, it needs to be approved by two-thirds of the 24 senators, or 16 senators, before it can take effect.
However, after the impeachment was transferred to the Senate, the Senate then went into recess, resuming around June 2, right after the midterm elections. In this way, Sarah is considered to have come back from the dead , with more time to fight back against her opponents.
From the point of view of public opinion, it is unpopular for Sarah to be brought up for impeachment. As early as January this year, 1.6 million Filipinos held a peaceful rally against Sarah’s impeachment.
It turns out that Marcos Jr.’s side claimed that at least 73 of the people supported Sarah’s impeachment. But according to the latest poll recently released by public opinion research firm WR Numero, only 33 3 of the people favored impeachment while 46 7 chose to oppose it.
This time, Marcos Jr.’s use of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to charge Duterte with anti-humanity offenses should be considered a brilliant move. Because Duterte’s popularity has been built up by his tough drug rehabilitation and ruthless governance, during which he was indeed accused of killing innocent people very early on. So if the anti-human accusations hold up, it will hit the old Duterte’s popularity base hard.
But on the flip side, this borrowing of international power against political opponents could itself backfire. Duterte is not afraid of being arrested, he ran back to the meeting, and he is happy to go to the meeting, betting on the Philippine public’s aversion to Marcos Jr.’s use of the International Criminal Court to deal with Philippine family affairs. If you don’t get it right, the Duterte family’s votes will rise dramatically as a result. So Marcos Jr. probably made a bad move.
03 Uneven division of the spoils, cooperation turns into antagonism
The conflict between Sarah and Marcos Jr. came to a head last June when she suddenly announced that she was quitting the Marcos Jr. Cabinet.
But in the 2022 elections, the two families were quite amicable, and at one point, you and I were at loggerheads.
On May 31, 2021, Sarah’s 43rd birthday, the Marcos Jr. siblings went to Davao City in person to celebrate Sarah, who was then mayor. Despite the fact that the Philippines was in the midst of a new outbreak, the trio took off their masks and had lunch together, cracking jokes from time to time.
On October 23 of that year, Sarah met with the Marcos Jr. siblings again in Cebu.
A few weeks after the Cebu meeting, Sarah made a public announcement that she would be running for office alongside Marcos Jr. This announcement immediately shocked the nation. Because at the time, the most vocal potential presidential contender was Sarah herself, not Marcos Jr.
In hindsight, Sarah did not even inform her father, Duterte, of her decision. It is said that she had always wanted to do something independent of her father.
But Duterte never saw Marcos Jr. as too weak to lead the Philippines. And the two families, too, were in competition. Working together would not be beneficial to the Duterte family, which is already in the lead.
Duterte Sr. loves his daughter Sarah very much and often praises her in public, expecting her to become the president of the Philippines. Sarah, like her father, has a very hot personality, and once publicly swung two punches in the face at an incompetent sheriff.
In addition, Sarah has a close relationship with former President Arroyo, both as a mentor and a friend. Honestly, Sarah’s chances of being elected if she runs for president in 2022 should be very high.
It’s just a shame that she chose to work with Marcos Jr. and helped the latter become president while she willingly became vice president.
I guess what she regrets even more is that after Marcos Jr. was elected president, he started to turn his back on his father and daughter.
On the one hand, Marcos Jr.’s parliamentary allies are constantly hitting out at Sarah over classified funds, while on the other hand, they are chasing Duterte over the so-called investigation into the war on drugs.
Behind the scenes, there is said to be an uneven division of power between the two families. A major reason for this is probably Marcos Jr.’s failure to honor pre-election favors given to the Duterte family.
Right after the 2022 elections, the Duterte family asked Marcos Jr. to allocate half of the Cabinet seats to himself. But Marcos Jr. was apparently reluctant and denied Sarah the chance to be defense secretary, instead appointing her only as education secretary with little power.
Then, in May 2023, the Philippine House of Representatives abruptly removed former President Arroyo as vice speaker. Arroyo had originally wanted to take down House Speaker Romualdez, who, as mentioned earlier, is Marcos Jr.’s cousin. If he’s removed, Marcos Jr. could be impeached.
Anyway, the two families, so they fought, and now it’s like a fire and brimstone.
The Duterte family’s base camp in Mindanao in the southern Philippines, while the Marcos Jr. family dominates the northern province of Ilocos Norte, both are among the top political families in the Philippines.
The Philippines, by nature, is a clannish country. The whole country is controlled by hundreds of big and small snake families, and politics is basically hereditary and privatized by the big families, and the competition for the position of the president is also a competition between families.
The key, the struggle between the major families, is very jungle. Private armed pandemonium, the use of mob assassination tactics, is a common occurrence. So Sarah really wasn’t kidding when she said that someone wanted her dead. This arrest of the former president is also routine.
Epilogue.
The overall fight between the two families so far is still dominated by the Marcos Jr. side, after all, he is the president and holds more of the state apparatus.
Especially last May, he even extended his hand to Davao City, the stronghold of the Duterte family. Removing Davao City police chief Richard Bataan, Duterte’s confidant, and 40 policemen. The President took over local policing under his direct command of the force.
This pokes at the lungs of the Duterte family. It is to be expected that the two families, one of which will be injured or killed, no longer have the possibility of reconciliation.
Duterte, now 79 years old, has two sons and a daughter, are currently in the Philippine political arena to mix. But his most beloved or daughter Sarah. 2016 Duterte’s presidential campaign, Sarah pregnant with triplets, shaved her head, for her father’s electioneering, during the period because of overwork, resulting in hemorrhaging, two of the triplets lost their heartbeat. Duterte Sr. said he hid in the bathroom and shed tears.
Sarah had mixed feelings about his father. On the one hand, she respected him, and of course fully supported him politically. But on the other hand, she could never get over the fact that her father left her and her mother behind to go out and fool around at night.In 2015, Duterte and Sarah’s mother, officially ended their relationship as husband and wife. Sarah was devastated and publicly called her father a womanizer and accused him of mentally abusing her mother.
But it may also be this emotional gap between father and daughter that makes Sarah want to be herself and not discuss anything with her father. The Marcos family has also seized upon Sarah’s emotion
And the Marcos family, it is also seized Sarah this emotional loophole, using her to get to the top, and then cross the river to break down the bridge, finally brewed into today’s two families you die and I live and die of entanglement.
Speaking of which, Marcos’s father, Marcos, was a famous dictator in the Philippines back then. He was a dictator in the Philippines for 20 years, and then stepped down because of election fraud. But after he stepped down, his luxury brand-loving widow, Imelda, retained her senate seat. Now that Marcos Jr. is president, the family’s power is growing stronger and stronger.
From a political spectrum perspective, the Marcos family, belonging to a right-wing dictatorship, is more pro-European and American. After he stepped down, the presidents who came after him, including Estrada Arroyo and Duterte’s predecessor, Aquino III, are considered to be more to the right.
Only Duterte, after coming up, has been particularly unorthodox and uncharacteristically seldom utilized the Western values to bluff people, seldom talked about democracy, rule of law or human rights, and has acted in an extremely tough style.
In his anti-drug and anti-triad activities, he does not just arrest people, he really kills them. Although a lot of data proved that the effect is not ideal, but also create a lot of negative effects, but the people at the bottom of the people just recognize ah, at least to give them a kind of out of a mouthful of bad breath of pleasure, they also seem to have finally found a spokesman.
Duterte is characterized by his lack of hypocrisy and his ability to admit to killing people. If his predecessor was a hypocrite, he is a true villain.
In fact, no one does not yearn for a fair judicial and political environment, but the problem is that in this part of the Philippines, the so-called human rights, fairness and the rule of law have never been false to the core. In a den of thieves, the police can be called in to do the dirty work, while the police station also hires private assassins to kill people, and there are officials in the triad society, and there are a large number of triad societies among the officials.
In this chaotic world of black and white, a felonious celebrity will not be held back from dealing drugs and making records in prison, but an unarmed commoner from the lower class may be killed for a small mistake and left unattended.
It is this muddy environment that makes the underclass crave for a strongman like Duterte, who at the very least can put all the drug addicts on the streets in jail and return the streets to safety and cleanliness. Piercing the false facade of justice and human rights, using fists and bullets, and facing the bloody truth head on, that’s Duterte, and that’s why the Filipino underclass loves him.
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I’ve written long articles on the Philippines and Duterte’s story in the past, for those who are interested
Philippines Tough Guy Duterte
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