First of three parts
THE kidnapping last year of former president Rodrigo Duterte to stand trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the attempted abduction of Sen. Ronald (“Bato”) de la Rosa last week by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s minions were abominable and despicable operations to prevent Duterte’s daughter Sara from running for president, and most probably winning in 2028.
This truth is so obvious if one refuses to be swayed by the massive propaganda through mainstream media by the Marcos camp together with the Left.
Fortunately for us, we have social media — the equivalent now of the “mosquito press” in the twilight years of the Marcos dictatorship — where you can read not just short pieces, but well-argued essays by unbiased lawyers, international-law experts, and even former Supreme Court justices.
The plot is so depraved that the Marcos clique was more than willing to surrender our sovereignty and ally with the Communist Party. Marcos’ minions even tried to forcibly abduct from the Senate’s premises Senator de la Rosa, who won the third biggest number of votes of 21 million in the 2025 election for senators.
No president has ever done something so nefarious. This truth will be so obvious in the face of this crucial fact: ICC trials last from eight to 10 years.
Out of the 33 cases tried by the ICC since its founding in 2002, it has granted bail in only one case, that of former Democratic Republic of Congo vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba. “Bail” is not even in the ICC’s terminology, which calls it “interim release.” The 81-year-old former president Duterte petitioned for such “interim release” last year, which was denied, even if he had proposed a third country to host him.
Estrada trial
Even our notoriously slow courts rule on cases in far less number of years than the ICC. The ousted president Estrada’s trial for plunder lasted four years, and he was allowed, in consideration of his past high positions, to stay during his trial in his mansion in Tanay in a sprawling 19-hectare estate, complete with a swimming and cabins for his many visitors. President Macapagal-Arroyo’s plunder trial took four years, with the Supreme Court acquitting her. In consideration of her past elected posts (six years as senator, two years as vice president and nine years as president) as well as her cervical spine problems that could require emergency medical care, she was allowed to stay in an officer’s quarters adjacent to the golf course at the Veteran’s Memorial Hospital.
It is an atrocity: A former president of the Republic beloved by millions of Filipinos will be spending eight to 10 years in a 5x10 meter cell inside a Dutch prison complex at The Hague.
I can certainly sympathize with Duterte. The Marcos dictatorship imprisoned me for two years. My three weeks’ confinement in a small cell called bartolina, deprived of any form of social interaction, was hell. And Marcos, the Left and the Pinkos want Duterte to spend 10 years in a small cell?
Duterte will be 90 years old when the ICC is done with him. Instead of enjoying his twilight years with his grandchildren, he will be alone in a prison cell with the guards and the other detainees, who are mostly from Africa and are not English-speakers so that they cannot converse with him. Duterte is in effect deprived of social interaction, which is so important to any human being. His abduction by the Marcos regime, in fact, is already a death sentence for Duterte.
There is another punishment meted out to the accused in an ICC case: financial ruin for him and his family. One estimate is that a defense team would cost 50,000 euros per month (P3.6 million), not including expenses for the lawyer’s travel, experts, translation and office operations. Duterte has to spend P43 million per year. If the case lasts for 10 years, he would be spending P430 million. The ICC does provide a defense team, if requested by the accused, who has, however, to prove that he is indigent. It also sets a limit to its contribution to defense expenses. Duterte has officially asked for such funds for his defense, to which the ICC has yet to respond.
Trillanes
The Marcos administration has left no stone unturned to find Duterte’s wealth alleged by the crackpot Antonio Trillanes III. They can’t find any. Duterte’s ICC case will impoverish him and his family.
The fact that ICC trials can last 10 years with the accused detained in a small cell is the one important reason why many countries, including the US, China, Russia and India, as well as Asean except for one country — which make up 60 percent of the world’s population — have not joined it.
They condemn it as a criminal court, as it violates the universal values of fairness and justice since it treats an accused as guilty until proven innocent, with the process itself — the trial that lasts years — already the punishment.
Will the ICC be able to allow Duterte to recover the years that he will have spent in prison during the trial, were he to be acquitted? Indeed, the ICC has acquitted four African leaders, after they spent seven to 10 years in the ICC jail.
If Marcos, the anti-Duterte leftists and Pinkos believe that he ordered the alleged extrajudicial killings during his war against drugs, why wasn’t a single case brought against him before a local court, especially after Marcos jettisoned his daughter as a political partner?
Marcos gave up our sovereignty by delivering the former president to a foreign court, violating the Constitution’s bill of rights, which categorically says that only a Filipino judge can issue a warrant of arrest against a Filipino. It has in effect consigned Duterte to a fate more cruel than death itself.
Charisma
Why? In order to weaken Duterte’s massive political support in the country, with Marcos calculating that with the former president on the other site of the globe, his charisma and supporters will gradually fade, so that he becomes powerless to help his daughter win the presidency in 2028.
Now Marcos wants to throw de la Rosa to the same hell-on-earth. Why? To weaken the 13-senator bloc that overthrew the pro-Marcos cabal of nine, so that they could recover control of the Senate.
What for? Because if they control the Senate, Marcos’ minions can easily manipulate the conduct of the VP Sara’s impeachment trial to obtain a guilty verdict, which would result in her being banned from running in the 2028 elections. One rumor is that the Tulfo brothers — who joined the Marcos cabal — have sold their souls to Marcos, who promised Raffy that he would be his candidate in 2028, even bankrolling his electoral bid by tens of billions of pesos.
Marcos fears that a President Sara would be catastrophic for him and his family, not just because he threw the former president in prison hell, but because there are tons of evidence proving his and his family’s corruption. A Sara presidency could mean Marcos with his wife, son and cousin, spending the rest of their lives in jail.
Smarter
Senator Bato is much smarter than the Yellows think. He found out that the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber had issued a secret warrant for his arrest on November 6 last year. He knew it was kept secret in order for Marcos’ agents — the NBI this time around — to carry out an ambush arrest, and only then would the arrest warrant be revealed. The senator therefore went into hiding and didn’t even attend the Senate sessions. Marcos’ minions were so frustrated that he couldn’t be found that Senators JV Ejercito and Panfilo Lacson proposed imposing sanctions against him.
Senator Bato, however, proved to be a patriot: He risked being captured when he attended the Senate session on May 11 to add his vote to the move to remove Marcos supporter Vicente Sotto as Senate president. Several columnists lied when they claimed that his was the crucial vote. If he had not attended that fateful session, the pro-democracy senators would have numbered 12, still more than the pro-Marcos bloc of 9.
Duterte chose to conduct himself with dignity that he didn’t even attempt to physically resist the police team sent to capture him. The then Criminal Investigation and Detection Group head Nicolas Torre III, who headed the team, was rewarded by Marcos by making him PNP chief two months later.
However, it proved to be Duterte’s biggest mistake, as he will now have to spend the last years of his life in prison on spurious charges to be decided by foreign judges. His supporters would have stormed the airport lounge if he had called on them to come to his aid — probably triggering a people power kind of revolt that would have toppled Marcos.
Senator de la Rosa is smart, knowing that it was a life and death matter for him to avoid being kidnapped. Yet many uncharitable Duterte haters even made fun of his dash to escape the NBI agents attempting to abduct him, with one sanctimonious Yellow columnist writing that “it was straight out of a ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoon flick.” Sick.
Now we know why even German Catholics supported the Nazi genocide of Jews.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
X: @bobitiglao
Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
