Revelations in congressional hearings in the past few days have been explosive, to say the least.
At the Senate, alleged drug lord Kerwin Espinosa claimed he had been coerced by Senator Ronald dela Rosa to say former Senator Leila de Lima was a protector of drug traffickers. Dela Rosa supposedly threatened Espinosa to toe the line – or harm would come to his family members. Espinosa’s father, imprisoned for being in the narco-list of the previous administration, was killed in jail, nonetheless.
At the House of Representatives, Police Col. and former Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office general manager Royina Garma read aloud her affidavit detailing an elaborate reward scheme through which the deadly drug war of former President Rodrigo Duterte was consummated. She recalled introducing her upperclassman at the Philippine National Police Academy, until recently the commissioner of the National Police Commission Edilberto Leonardo, to then-President elect Duterte. She tagged Senator Christopher Lawrence Go as having full knowledge of the operations, with an aide of the senator acting as “money bags.”
Adamant denials have been heard, with both dela Rosa and Go assailing the credibility of those who dared name them in the Duterte drug scandal. Espinosa, after all, is entangled in drugs while Garma has been accused of having a hand in the murder of PCSO board member Wesley Barayuga.
These bombshell testimonies come at a most unsettling time – when China continues to bully and threaten us, when candidates for the May 2025 elections have just signified their intention to run, and when the country is struggling to achieve respectable economic growth amid inflationary pressures and uncertainty in the Middle East.
But as controversial as these revelations may seem today, they will ultimately die down in the days to come. The question, then, is what this administration will do to ensure that the truth is revealed and that justice is served, especially for those whose lives were snuffed out.
At this point, many Filipinos are wary that these rumblings are no more than a projection of the political war between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, who two years ago ran and won together under the banner of Unity. Two years has proven to be a long time, however, and that unity was exposed to be flimsy and contrived.
The accusations we heard over the weekend are not mere gossip fodder. They are not simply goods that one political camp can have over its rival. The accusations are so serious they must transcend the impermanence of political rivalry. They are acts of individuals heady with power, consumed with greed and violence even if it comes at the expense of thousands of others, and drunk with impunity, invincibility, and entitlement.
Filipinos deserve no less than the closure of seeing these grave accusations to their rightful end. Any good leader – which simply happens to be Mr. Marcos today – would know that now is the time to cooperate with the International Criminal Court. A probe by an external, independent third party will remove the suspicions of political maneuvering, expose what really happened, and make the guilty truly accountable for their crimes.
