“Here is an unsolicited advice: go to Camp Crame and ask your comrades-in-arms headed by the circumspect Jose Melencio Nartatez, your under-class cavalier, to put you in custodial detention while you avail of your legal remedies”
I love the way Jonvic Remulla cut Sonny Trillanes down to size.
“There’s a reason why Trillanes lost three elections in a row. Nau-una ang yabang kaysa mag-isip. I don’t respond to losers,” riposted the DILG secretary.
The former senator who has re-engineered himself into the ICC’s constable in this benighted land earlier accused the younger Remulla of “incompetence” for failure to arrest Bato de La Rosa based on a warrant of arrest issued by his foreign “principal.”
Two days before, Trillanes barged into the chamber where once he sat, along with NBI agents sent by the agency’s newly minted dross of a director to execute the arrest of a long absent senator who suddenly re-appeared.
The agents were allowed by the senate president on Monday, through his sergeant-at-arms, to enter its premises without any warrant or other authorization in hand. The warrant from a foreign entity no country but the most supine honors was instead brought by Trillanes, hoping perhaps to make a “citizen’s arrest”.
But the ringmaster who allowed such trespass of his big tent was sooner than soon decapitated by a 13th vote supplied by the besieged Bato, who was then granted protective custody by the new majority under Alan Peter the “pious”.
Tumultuous and surprise take-over was capped by high drama in the chamber on Wednesday night, when shots rang out in rapid succession because some armed confidential agents of the NBI “invaded” the chamber despite prior agreement with the new SP thus triggering an exchange of fire with OSAA officers.
Into the melee rushed the DILG secretary accompanied by the PNP chief and therein assured the senate president that the police will take over and investigate the facts behind the “invasion”.
He even met with “the rock” who once also headed the PNP and declared that absent a real warrant, his rights will be respected.
Jonvic must have remembered that he was called to task by the same chamber a year before because of the extraordinary rendition of Rodrigo Roa Duterte and a legal dispute occurred between State recognition of a diffusion notice from the Interpol upon behest of the ICC, which was made the basis of the arrest and immediate shanghai to Den Haag.
His president and his older brother, then the DOJ secretary, kept declaring that the State would not recognize any arrest warrants from the ICC, and later used an Interpol notice that was discovered to be short of “red” as basis and excuse for the extraordinary rendition.
But in this instant case of Bato, there was no Interpol notice, whatever the color or form. Instead, there was an ICC warrant brandished by constable Trillanes and not the law enforcement agencies of the State.
Jonvic was just being consistent with the earlier declarations of his president and in so doing, shielded him from involvement in the assault on a co-equal branch of government.
After all, on March 8, 2025, while relaxing in cold San Francisco by the bay, he was ordered to come home immediately, because his president had decided to render his predecessor to the ICC using an Interpol diffusion notice as excuse to circumvent earlier declarations of non-recognition.
Arriving the following day, he merely listened to the plan hatched by the National Security Adviser in Malacanang, with then PNP chief Marbil having already assigned Quiboloy catcher Gen. Nicolas Torre to execute the plan.
The president was supposed to announce the rendition of the former leader once the plane had left NAIA. The arrangement was for Jonvic as DILG secretary, Gibo as DND secretary (whose only role was to ensure the use of Villamor Airbase for the operation), and the NSA head to flank the president on his midnight address to the nation.
But only Jonvic stood behind the president when he made that fateful announcement. The two others were a no-show.
Now that Jonvic is doing things “by the book,” ICC constable Trillanes accuses him of being a Bato coddler. DDS na ‘yarn?
Wisely, the younger Remulla refused to dignify the accusation made by a three-time “loser”. I love the sarcasm. Touche!
***
Now back to Bato.
His wife sent a long message by text to SP Alan Peter, where she said that Bato wanted to spare the Senate from all the attendant troubles his custody caused on Wednesday night.
Quo vadis, Bato?
Here is an unsolicited advice: go to Camp Crame and ask your comrades-in-arms headed by the circumspect Jose Melencio Nartatez, your under-class cavalier, to put you in custodial detention while you avail of your legal remedies.
That, Sir, would be an honorable sacrifice that would help spare the entire nation from the curse of partisan politics at a time when the people scrape to survive the economics of rudderless leadership.
