Two other women in powerful positions are currently under siege by the Duterte regime: Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales, who has opened an investigation into how 6.4 billion pesos worth of meth were smuggled at the Bureau of Customs, and Supreme Court Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, who has consistently voted against the regime in cases brought before the court. Both had been appointed by the Aquino administration. Despite her nephew being married to the president’s daughter, Ombudsman Morales opened an investigation into the Duterte family fortunes, upon the filing of information of the family’s unexplained wealth by Senator Trillanes. Duterte immediately threatened to create an agency to investigate corruption in the Office of the Ombudsman. Morales’s reply was succinct, “Sorry, Mr. President, but this office shall not be intimidated. The President’s announcement that he intends to create a commission to investigate the Ombudsman appears to have to do with this office’s on-going investigation into issues that involve him. This Office, nevertheless, shall proceed with the probe, as mandated by the Constitution.”[11]
Supreme Court Justice Sereno, on the other hand, is the object of impeachment proceedings in the Duterte-controlled House of Representatives, based on a complaint filed by a lawyer who is a member of a supposedly anti-crime organization, which seems to focus mostly on critics of the president. In response to the presidential spokesman’s call for her to resign, Justice Sereno’s lawyer said that resigning wasn’t even to be considered an option. “As previously declared, resignation has never been an option. The CJ [Chief Justice] needs to face the impeachment proceeding precisely to preserve the dignity and independence of both the Supreme Court and the Office of the Chief Justice. She has done nothing to ‘damage’ the institution, and she has been doing everything to strengthen it,” said lawyer Carlo Cruz, one of Sereno’s spokespersons.[12]
Duterte’s intimidation tactics had worked before on several of his male critics—but using such tactics on women who have likely faced a lifetime of intimidation is clearly not working. On the contrary, his pronounced dislike for intelligent women and pronounced liking for those who feed his ego—even with nonsense—contribute to a steadily hardening resistance to not only his policies but to his person as well. He could not have forgotten that it was a woman, now his ally, who survived a left-wing call for people’s power to oust an incumbent president.
An Abstract Leftism
President Duterte had a leisurely eight months to consolidate control over the government and the nation, primarily through weak opposition the mainstream left offered. Beguiled by Duterte’s claims that he was a “socialist,” a “leftist” and could possibly consider a “coalition government” with the Communist Party of the Philippines (Maoist), this section of the political left in the Philippines carefully calibrated its responses. At the start of Tokhang, the New People’s Army declared its support for Duterte’s “anti-drug campaign” and even carried out a few operations against supposed drug suppliers. Eventually, as some activists were killed, the NPA withdrew its support. The CPP, meanwhile, continued its flirtation with Duterte, principally through the National Democratic Front’s peace-negotiations team. Duterte rewarded the NDF with cabinet appointments—lucrative but not too powerful positions, from which they were ousted, nine months later, by the Congressional Committee on Appointments. Duterte washed his hands; it was not his decision, he claimed.
Did the CPP believe in its love fest with Duterte? The latter’s tirades against the West—he used his favorite swear against then US President Barack Obama, threatened to cut diplomatic relations with Australia because it denounced his crude rape joke about a murdered Australian missionary woman, swore to end the Philippines’ military agreement with the United States, and denounced a 1906 US massacre of Muslim men and women—were indeed astonishing for a country used to paying obeisance to the West. Even on the eve of his overthrow, the late dictator Marcos appealed to the US for help, not to any ideological opponent of capitalism.
On the other hand, the CPP has had a long relationship with Duterte in his city of Davao. A slew of photographs show him attending various celebrations of the NPA. The party knew him, not simply of him, and likely knew what he was—of the kind the party calls “bureaucrat capitalists,” i.e., people who use government positions for capital accumulation. Marcos was one of them and his family continues the practice. The richest Marcos crony in Davao, who contributed seventy-five million pesos to Duterte’s campaign in Davao belongs to the category. The former alliance between bureaucrat capitalists and the traditional landed gentry of the ruling class broke during the Marcos dictatorship. A struggle for economic dominance has been played out between the two reactionary forces, as the bucaps (bureaucratic capitalists) parlayed the capital gained through government corruption into control of mining, communications, cash crop plantations, power utilities, and technology. In the 2010 presidential elections, the CPP and its mass organizations chose to partner with one such bucap, endorsing Miguel Villar and allowing its legal personages to join the latter’s senatorial slate.[13] That made for some awkward moments, as the Villar party included Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos in its senatorial slate. Villar lost to Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.
When CPP founding chair José Maria Sison said in a press interview that he would perhaps be able to end his thirty-year exile if the new president were matino (reasonable) like Grace Poe or Rodrigo Duterte, it opened the door for the rank and file to support either one, despite the supposed alliance of their political parties with Grace Poe. How much that statement turned the elections into a poll on Sison no one knows. When Duterte won, the country was rife with rumors that Sison would be at his inauguration. Bayan, the largest left formation, conferred the Gawad Supremo, named after the title of the head of the Katipunan which launched the revolution against Spain in 1896, on Duterte and Sison. Peace negotiations were reopened shortly thereafter.
Still, there had been bad omens. During the campaign, Duterte threatened “to kill” the KMU, the labor federation of the “national-democratic” left. He also attacked the National Democratic (ND) left’s women’s organization, despite its rather tepid response to his rape jokes. And though some activist community organizers and peasants were killed in the first months of Tokhang, the response from the ND left remained muted. Indeed, its human rights organizations kept a tally only of “political killings,” keeping those killed in the anti-drug campaign separate. It would take some ferocious words from Duterte and the cancellation of peace talks to end hopes for a “coalition government.” As if to drive the point home, fifteen NPA members were killed in the province of Batangas on December 4, 2017.[14]
13
“Capitalist Villar Is Communist Party’s Bet for 2010,” GMA Network News, December 24, 2009.
14
Delfin Mallari Jr. and Jodee A. Agoncillo, “NPA: 15 Dead in Batangas Were Ours,”