THIRTY-ONE trial days in, the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte has collapsed under the weight of what it never had: a witness who can say, under oath, that Sara herself stole money, ordered someone else to steal it, or personally pocketed a single peso of it. The prosecution has produced boxes of records, confidential-fund liquidation papers, bank statements, corporate filings — and, most recently, Sara’s own brother.
What it has not produced after a month of trial is the one thing an impeachment for graft and corruption actually requires: a direct line from the money to her.
The impeachment project has all but imploded. The Fates seem to have conspired to get Sara’s brother, Davao Mayor Sebastian Duterte, to make a dramatic appearance at the trial, stupidly subpoenaed by the prosecutors themselves. Clad in an all-black suit, Baste Duterte exuded a quiet gravitas and undeniable charisma, stepping into the impeachment trial like a stoic executioner telling the conspirators that the impeachment will soon be led to the gallows. Even the prosecutor Teodoro Te, a human rights lawyer, appeared to have cowed under Baste’s gravitas that he stammered while asking him questions.
The House persecutors have been ignorant of what an impeachment is. The Constitution allows removal of a high official for “high crimes” that make them unfit for public office: culpable violation of the Constitution, treason, bribery, graft and corruption, or betrayal of public trust — not for messy bookkeeping. Documentation defects and liquidation irregularities may be real, and the prosecution insists its evidence already proves misuse and misappropriation. What they are really claiming is their own inference, not proof.
Compare this trial to the one that actually took down a president. Joseph Estrada fell because Chavit Singson said he personally delivered jueteng payoffs, because bank officer Clarissa Ocampo watched Estrada sign “Jose Velarde,” because his own finance secretary turned on him. Those were eyewitnesses describing what they saw Estrada do. Thirty-one days into this trial, the prosecution is still relying on auditors, custodians of records and inference piled on inference.
Article 1 is where that weakness shows most starkly. Prosecutors built an elaborate case around confidential funds at the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education — questionable acknowledgment receipts. But not one witness in 31 days has said: Sara ordered me to steal this; I handed her the money; I faked these documents on her instructions.
Conceded
And on Sept. 8, the prosecution itself quietly conceded the point — it dropped all 15 remaining Article 1 witnesses, after already dropping two former security aides. Lead prosecutor Gerville Luistro called it a litigation judgment. It reads like an admission that more witnesses weren’t going to supply what the first round never did: the bridge between defective paperwork and an impeachable act committed by Sara Duterte herself.
Article 2, the unexplained-wealth charge, fares no better. Prosecutors zeroed in on one obscure outfit GenCorp Industries, a food company Sara listed as a business interest in her 2024 and 2025 statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs), and produced government records showing roughly P35.9 million over several years in government contracts involving GenCorp, including deals with Davao City. Fair enough to scrutinize. But GenCorp’s own corporate records don’t list Sara’s name anywhere — her declared SALN interest is the entire basis for chasing the company in the first place.
What’s GenCorp anyway? Nowhere the kind of listed, high-flying company — BW Resources — that Estrada was accused of illegally helping. For chrissakes! it’s a mom-and-pop fast-food business in Davao City.
Which brings us to the prosecution’s most self-inflicted wound: putting Davao City Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte on the stand as a hostile witness, hoping he would tie GenCorp’s contracts to his sister’s influence. He didn’t. Baste confirmed the city awarded GenCorp contracts and said he wouldn’t have allowed them had he known of Sara’s interest — but he also testified he didn’t know about that interest at the time, and that Sara never intervened in the procurement. Prosecutors presented no evidence that Sara ever lifted a finger to cash in on it.
Instead, on the trial’s 31st day, what the bungling prosecutors produced was the opposite of what it wanted: a national platform for a Duterte who hadn’t had one. Before the subpoena, Baste was known mainly as Rodrigo’s son and Sara’s brother despite running Davao City. The prosecution handed him hours of airtime in the country’s most-watched courtroom — airtime it did not control and could not script. That is the risk of calling a hostile witness: He shows up with his own answers, his own temperament, and in this case a surname the prosecution should have thought twice about amplifying.
61 percent
The public hasn’t missed any of this. Pollster Momentum Research’s August survey put Sara’s approval at 61.3 percent, up 3.3 points from July, against President Marcos’ 36.4 percent. Another “Pulso” Intelligence tracker in late August found 47.9 percent believed her not guilty against 35.9 percent who believed her guilty, with daily public attention to the trial already fading. If the point of 31 trial days was to convince the country that Sara committed offenses grave enough to remove and disqualify her, the numbers say it hasn’t worked.
The prosecution’s own conduct hasn’t helped. What should be an extraordinary constitutional proceeding has looked like a procedural scuffle — awkward exchanges, jokes, clips built for social media rather than for building a case the public can follow. Social media has made fun of the prosecutors, such as Bel Zamora – whose sole qualification as representative is being the daughter of longtime San Juan kingpin and billionaire Ronaldo Zamora — who was so self-conscious or too shy that she degenerated into asking questions in a flirtatious manner. The legitimate complaint is narrower and more damning: Has the prosecution assembled a chain of proof a Filipino voter can actually follow, from the money to Sara Duterte?
After 31 days, none. Nada. Zilch. It is becoming obvious that the strategy was to throw whatever charges they could hurl at Sara, and let Marcos’ minions with their numbers convict her.
It isn’t just the evidence that keeps wobbling — it’s the prosecution’s own confidence in its case. Fifteen witnesses dropped. Two security aides never called. Public musing about skipping the bribery article entirely to shorten the trial. Competent lawyers streamline cases; that’s not automatically a weakness. But stacked together, these retreats look less like strategy and more like a prosecution still arguing with itself about what its case even is, months after the trial began.
One major development may have also doomed the impeachment. Former House speaker Martin Romualdez was central to the original impeachment push — the 2025 complaint carried 215 House signatures, his among the most prominent.
Romualdez
I don’t have a doubt that it was Romualdez who bankrolled the prosecutors and has since cut off their funding because he is in a quagmire, having been charged with the non-bailable case of plunder and thrown to jail. Why would he spend a centavo for a project of his cousin Marcos, who has thrown him under the bus?
Why would representatives the likes of Gerville Luistro, Joel Chua, Terry Ridon — who totally have no reputations for a crusade for accountability — take on a towering political figure like Sara? While I think she’s over the hump, the expensive, bulldog-looking lawyer Lorna Kapunan is reported to accept a case only for a P10-million commitment fee, and P1 million per appearance.
Here is the actual problem, stated plainly: An impeachment trial is supposed to get simpler as it goes, not more complicated. By now, an ordinary citizen should be able to say in two sentences what Sara did, who saw her do it, where the money went, and why that clears the constitutional bar for removal. Can you, dear Reader?
Instead, the case has sprawled from confidential-fund receipts into corporate filings, procurement records, food-service contracts and her brother’s cross-examination. More material has not meant more directness. It has meant the opposite.
Politically, the damage is done. Thirty-one days were supposed to sharpen the accusation and harden public opinion against Sara Duterte. Instead, they produced an argument over whether sloppy bookkeeping counts as an impeachable offense, a corporate trail that still proves nothing about her personally and a hostile witness who may have handed the Duterte family a bigger platform than he handed prosecutors a case.
Many even among the senators who had complied with Marcos’ project to block Sara from winning the presidency in 2028 would now be embarrassed to vote her guilty, or would shirk from being identified as that incompetent president’s unthinking minion.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
