Peeling an onion

Back in 2016, Homobono Adaza once described Rodrigo Duterte as “the bravest boy-man in town with the longest tail,” and recounted in his column an example of why he could make this bold conclusion. When broadcaster Jun Pala of Alsa Masa notoriety was killed in 2003, another broadcaster, Waldy Carbonnell, joined a National Press Club team that went to Davao to look into the murder. According to Adaza, “Duterte was so pissed off that he challenged Waldy to a duel near the Davao City Hall at 9 o’clock in the morning, to bring two magazines for his pistol and with Duterte having only two bullets.” Adaza went on to recount that, “Waldy … was on time at 9 o’clock in the morning as directed by Duterte. Fifteen minutes passed and not even the shadow of Duterte appeared. Waldy, together with members of Davao City media, waited for another 15 minutes, still not even the shadow appeared.”

Even earlier, in 2001, then Mayor Duterte and then Senior Supt. Eduardo Matillano, the Southern Mindanao police director, began a feud that flared on and off for over a decade. In retrospect, the fuel for the fire that wouldn’t go out was the creation by Matillano of Task Force Vigilance in October 2001 to look into the liquidation of around 150 pushers and petty criminals in Davao from 1995. Press reports from the time have a contemporary ring to them: the task force was reported as having “established the involvement of some policemen and former members of the New People’s Army urban partisan unit in the executions,” adding that, according to Matillano, “DDS members do the killing for the money, adding that a patron pays each member of the hit squad at least P5,000 ($100) for every drug pusher or petty criminal killed.” However, “Matillano declined to name the suspected patron of the death squads.”

In 2010, still-mayor Duterte issued a warning to Matillano, by then part of the Presidential Anti-Smuggling Group, to lay off extorting bribes from local businessmen; Matillano responded, in turn, on live radio by challenging Duterte to a duel—with the mayor supposedly being a no-show. Though Duterte reportedly replied that he would only take part in a duel if Matillano showed up with then Speaker Prospero Nograles, whom Duterte accused of being Matillano’s “principal.”

At the time, these events were remarked upon, but they hardly made a dent in the public image of Duterte: I partially mentioned them in 2021 simply to point out that Duterte’s bluster is a tactic that often but not always works. In that instance, I’d noted that the soon-to-be-ex-president had tried to bully his daughter and the Marcoses in a bid to salvage the candidacy of his (Duterte’s) preferred successor, Bong Go, but the effort not only failed, it may have actually boomeranged. But just as allegations and preliminary investigations made during the long Duterte mayoralty and since the end of his presidency have revealed, unpeeling the story layer by layer like an onion, what is increasingly exposed is a shrinking core that may have nothing left by the time the last layers are peeled off.

But the arsenal remains the same; the Old Man has to fight back as he has always fought back, with bluster and guile, just as Daughterte had to stick to the familial brand in her recent attack on the President (a note on the political and personal affinities of two presidential daughters, Imee and Sara, increasingly making more sense: the two may believe they are the most loyal, most capable, heirs of their respective fathers but unfairly saddled with the misogynist biases of their father’s devotees). And so he dared the House of Representatives to summon him, saying he’d appear if asked, and answer questions, rather than continue to see his loyal lieutenants persecuted.

But when the summons came—his lawyers sent an excuse letter. So sorry, it said, it’s too soon, and besides, my client doesn’t feel well.

Perhaps, in his prime, his return to the House, which he more than once derided as a place he found a waste of time when he was briefly its member, might have been the kind of showdown in which the congressmen could have been silenced with a glare or a snarl, much in the same manner that Juan Ponce Enrile’s silent appearance at the side of Mrs. Marcos at the hearing meant to pin down Imee Marcos let the air out of Rudy Fariñas’ up-to-then amazingly effective prosecution.

But the former president is no longer in his prime. And everyone he used to intimidate seems to know it.

This is why the famously thin-skinned Duterte never tolerated scrutiny. Get past the outer layer, and soon nothing will be left.

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Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @mlq3