FOR a second, let’s pretend that what Ramil Madriaga said in a sworn statement is true.
For one whom former Ombudsman Samuel Martires called “a nonentity,” he is one-of-a-kind in the blind eyes of the court. It’s a fall-and-fly story, of rising like a phoenix from near disaster, a la Lazarus being dug out of the grave. Convicted by the Pasig City Regional Trial Court in 1997 for kidnapping, he and two other co-accused were sentenced to die by lethal injection. But six years later, the Supreme Court not only acquitted them, but it also commended them for the rescue of what was initially judged as a victim.
He worked at the National Security Council for over a decade, from around 2001 to 2015. He first met Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte through the late Roilo Golez, who previously served multiple terms as representative of Parañaque City before Gloria Arroyo appointed him her national security adviser.
He appears to possess a unique set of skills, given the bespoke job description he had in the service of Duterte and, later, his daughter Sara. He carried out “campaign and organizing activities, intelligence gathering and sabotage, and transportation of large sums of money.” During the Duterte presidency, from 2018 to 2021, he said he worked as a civil counterintelligence agent for the government. What this means may not be clear to lay people like me. He does explain that the task entailed providing “intelligence information for the government’s antidrug campaign, ‘Oplan Double Barrel,’ and taught tactical driving and strategic transport courses for the Presidential Security Group.”
Despite the explanation, how a civil counterintelligence agent looks still does not cut a convincing figure. Maybe an outsourced service provider in the mold of Vladimir Putin’s Wagner? I suspect this can only be better verbalized with a graph, juxtaposed with statistics that include the likes of a Korean businessman being killed under police custody, within the Camp Crame compound, no less. You throw in words like “tactical driving” and “strategic transport” into the pond, and all we see is mud. That’s what lawyers do to impress their clients and get better paid.
“Sabotaging” Antonio Trillanes IV, which appears to be another deliverable, adds more esoteric stuff and may make sense only to the underworld. What is publicly known is that Trillanes launched for himself a variety of worldly missions, including filing charges that brought Duterte to The Hague and foraying into local politics in Caloocan City. Madriaga may have succeeded in thwarting him in the present world; it remains to be seen what he does in the next.
In any case, we already heard something like this when a congressional hearing took fancy to the word “neutralize.” For much of the time, legislators had come close not to what the f*cking word means, but to showing the extent of how much of a gangster the police organization had become.
For Sara, Madriaga seamlessly transitioned from taking discreet roles to basking under the sun as a partisan political campaigner.
He makes it look like he was there when Bongbong Marcos and Sara struck a political union in 2022. He also seems to have an idea of how the decoupling started to crack.
The claim that Bongbong and Sara had agreed to share the minutes of a presidential term (i.e., three years for him [2022-2025] and three years for her [2025-2028]), can be dismissed outright as a fabrication. But it can be the subject of further study, not because the idea is novel (the equally power-hungry brokers in Congress have already done this), but because it shows an attempt to normalize the level of fraudulent practices in the public sphere to a new high. We are not talking here about the fringes; we are seeing the prospective top two officials of the land playing games.
There is no truth in advertising; that much is validated by common experience. Political “slopaganda” is not only next to human nature; one can be chided for being serious with it, like how the elder Duterte parried the question of what happened to his “jet ski” campaign blurb. “Naniwala pala kayo,” he said, and one had to pause and think how foolish Filipinos are.
A term-sharing deal, agreed upon between would-be servants, unknown to the boss (the voter), clinches it. There is simply no limit to what lying and stealing can do.
The increasing amounts of confidential funds, budget insertions and unprogrammed appropriations that attracted attention during the closing years of the Duterte government, which further obscenely picked up during the first three years of the Marcos administration, indicated how thieves must hurry up because tomorrow may never come, to copy the lyrics of a song. Zaldy Co and company had three years to bulk up. Pity the next batch of robbers because somebody botched the term-sharing deal, and the key to the vault was lost.
Just as the Bongbong-Sara team implodes, Madriaga, sometime in 2023, crossed his Rubicon, unable to reconcile a grievance with his patron. The rhythm of good fortune grinds to a halt, as it were, reminiscent of how Erap and Chavit turned on each other back in 2000.
Somebody had Madriaga locked up for kidnapping, which he believed was Duterte’s presidential spokesman, Harry Roque. Why did she not lend him a hand? Why did she let Roque do Roque things?
Meanwhile, the implication is that there is a side show of who gets in and out of jail being determined by who has the connection.
He probably grieves his being less consequential to Roque. Or somebody is more wary of one than the other. Could Roque be ready with his own sworn statement, more damning than what Madriaga has?
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