The gloves are now off. President Rodrigo Duterte has thrown down the gauntlet in the direction of Senator Leila de Lima, ahead of her highly-publicized Senate investigation on the so-called extra-judicial killings that have taken place under his administration.
“You want to know the name? De Lima.”
Earlier, at the national police headquarters in Camp Crame, Duterte told of an unnamed senator—or more precisely, the senator’s driver and lover—receiving money “from Muntinlupa.” He was referring, of course, to the national penitentiary, where drug lords supposedly continue to ply their nefarious trade despite their incarceration.
But at a press conference late in the afternoon at the Manila airport, Duterte was coy no longer. It was his old nemesis, De Lima, that he was referring to as the senator who benefited (albeit once removed) from the illegal drug trade, he said.
The declaration ended hours of speculation about the identity of the senator, even if many had already concluded that it was, in fact, the former justice secretary. And De Lima and Duterte, as everyone knows, have clashed publicly before, ever since the latter’s name came up as a presidential candidate.
I suspect that Duterte was attempting to take the wind out of De Lima’s sails by making the announcement. As many who have publicly jousted with the president know by now, Duterte is not one to shy away from a fight, whether your name is Jose Ma. Sison or Philip Lustre, that colleague of mine who claimed that the former Davao City mayor has been stricken with a life-threatening disease.
It’s true that Duterte has also reconciled with people whom he has been feuding with. The most prominent of these is Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, to whom Duterte apologized after admitting that he made unnecessarily harsh remarks after the top magistrate wrote him about the judges named in his first “narco-list.”
But that feud ended only after Sereno probably realized that fighting a very public war of words with the president was going to be counter-productive. Sereno declared that she would no longer say anything about the matter after Duterte unleashed a verbal barrage against her. That gave the president, a lawyer and an officer of the court, time to realize, as well, that he should not be fighting with the highest magistrate in the land; so he apologized profusely in his old-school manner.
De Lima, however, is another matter entirely. Duterte has long been stewing about the former justice secretary ever since she brought up the issue of Duterte’s alleged creation and sponsorship of the Davao Death Squad, the feared (and near-mythical) vigilante group in that city.
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De Lima, of course, can be expected to say in her defense that she is just doing her job as a senator and as the chairman of the chamber’s committee on justice and human rights. And whatever the other motives imputed on De Lima in her unrelenting pursuit of Duterte, at least she’s been a consistent critic, even when the president was still a mayor thinking of running for president.
But De Lima took it one step further, deciding to play the victim card. She described Duterte’s allegations as “character assassination,” something she “did not expect from the president.”
How the latest flareup in the long-running Duterte-De Lima word war will affect the senator’s upcoming investigation of the recent killings is uncertain. Even if Duterte had truly intended to take the senator down a notch or two ahead of the hearings that she will preside over, in order to discredit them, De Lima does not have the option of backing down; after all, she has already declared that she has witnesses lined up who will talk about who perpetrated the killings and why.
If De Lima is truly the “professional public servant” that she claims to be, she will not allow Duterte’s allegations to bother her as she conducts her investigation. If anything, she should prove that she is better than the president because she can actually substantiate the charges that she has made.
The senator is certainly no stranger to the brickbats lobbed by her critics, who have long accused her of everything from protecting the drug lords inside the national penitentiary to having an affair with her driver. If it is true that she simply ignores these allegations, now is the time for her to put her stoic “refusal to engage” her critics to the test.
I certainly hope that De Lima is able to deliver on her promise to uncover what really happened to the hundreds of alleged drug pushers and users who have died in Duterte’s war on drugs. If she can’t do that and instead uses Duterte’s latest broadsides against her as an excuse, then I will be forced to conclude that she has no evidence and is merely engaged in the usual Senate grandstanding.
This is not about being “immoral” or not. It’s about promising and then not delivering —which, while not politically fatal, can be truly debilitating, especially in the eyes of ordinary Filipinos.