An Elimination in Three Acts

8 min readSep 15, 2024

Including an Extended Prologue from a Previous Presidency

2023: When Bonhomie Was Still The Order Of the Day

Apologies for the long hiatus. One advantage, though, of doing an omnibus update, is that it allows my articles to come together, thematically.

Where the Dutertes remain formidable is online, and a clear demonstration of this is the rumor mill compelling the President to deny he’s sick (and with it, the even stranger story that he had assaulted the First Lady). Less strange: talk of Duran Duran being flown in for a one-night-only performance at a birthday party for the President -as the online refrain goes, old habits die hard.

Eclipse and Elimination

An interesting article by Antonio Montalvan II in VeraFiles. Writing in The end of the Dutertes is here, enumerates the trouble the Dutertes are in:

It is not even because Rodrigo Duterte may possibly and eventually be indicted in the International Criminal Court. It is not also because his daughter Sara, originally not a respondent in the ICC case, was ultimately included as a secondary respondent after the ICC assayed the testimonial evidence submitted.
It will not be because even the son Baste Duterte may just turn out to be a benchwarmer after all at Davao city hall when talks, circulating since June, materialize that he will be suspended from public office.
The other son Paolo, already stripped of his P2B pork barrel as congressman, is now facing criminal charges before the courts for drugs smuggling together with alleged POGO financier Michael Yang. Paolo also faces graft complaints. Drugs smuggling alone will cost him the prospect of life imprisonment.
It is not because the principal Duterte bankroller Apollo Quiboloy is now in jail, his opulent religious empire now rendered penniless with more than 60 bank accounts and dozens of properties frozen by the Court of Appeals. The Jose Maria College has no more funds to operate. The unfinished 75,000-seat Kingdome may emerge as his biggest white elephant. Quiboloy is now past tense. For the Dutertes to associate themselves with a criminally charged person is a kiss of death.
The end of the Duterte rule will end not only because Sara herself may face impeachment raps..

These passages, however, from the same article, are the one’s I’d like to comment on:

Rodrigo Duterte’s vital dilemma lies in a very serious internal inadequacy that even his own children cannot fight because they are gasping for air in their own battles.
His chief political strategist and ideologue, Leoncio B. Evasco Jr., has been hopelessly impotent to produce warm bodies to unseat Marcos Jr. in a people power to catapult Sara Duterte to the presidency and restore the might of Dutertismo. As Duterte’s think tank, Evasco conceptualized and strategized the Hakbang ng Maisug rallies.
If the old man Duterte, now 79, has one foot in the grave, so too is Evasco who is now 80 years old. The Duterte dream of restoring itself to Malacañang does not have the luxury of time, much less of stamina and of bright ideas.
The former rebel priest Evasco was Duterte’s campaign manager for the latter’s first foray in Davao city politics in 1988. Widely regarded as Duterte’s alter ego, Evasco was responsible for crafting a grassroots movement for Duterte’s presidential run in 2016. He was his national campaign manager. Duterte appointed him cabinet secretary in 2016 and placed 12 government agencies under his supervision.
After the Duterte victory in 2016, Evasco organized in October 2016 the Kilusang Pagbabago designed to generate citizen-driven support for Duterte. Among its aims were to fight the culture of corruption ingrained in government, participatory governance to protect the electorate’s gains against elitist politics, and support Duterte’s war on drugs.
All that of course, easily went down the drain in six years. Duterte created his own set of Chinese businessmen cronies with largesse of government contracts. The fight against corruption increasingly became nebulous as Duterte rewarded himself with huge unaudited confidential funds, some of it going to rewards for extrajudicial kill quotas of police in the drug war.
Overall, the Duterte rhetoric of tough-talk bravado was not designed to see change in governance “by empowering the people in raising their political consciousness.” If ever it saw success, it succeeded in damaging the moral psyche of the Filipino by using troll-generated popularity. Duterte was exposed as a quintessential trapo whose aim was only self-preservation and entitlement for his family. That is the same bravado that Evasco conceptualized as counterbalance to the Marcos Jr. government — maisug (brave).
If the Maisug rally led by Harry Roque at Liwasang Bonifacio last August 29 was the gauge, the Duterte magic is now dead. Roque chastised rallyists who left in the middle of his speech, imploring them to come back because food had yet to be served.
Simply put, the people are not buying a Duterte return to power. The tough talk against corruption was a big dud. Roque himself is the wrong speaker for these rallies as one of the most hated personalities ever in the national arena. He now faces the grim prospect of charges for having allegedly enriched himself in office under Duterte.
The Maisug rallies turned to embattled Apollo Quiboloy’s sect followers. It boasted of making an “8-million march to Malacañang.” It never happened. Estimates of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ’s membership are only at the range of less than 200,000 members. Quiboloy embroidered so much hype and fantasy to garnish his false persona that he was the “son of god.”
The Duterte dilemma lies not in the break-up of team unity and the unrelenting attacks against his family by the Martin Romualdez House. His real dilemma lies in the bankruptcy of his political strategy that he and Evasco thought they could reprise from his 2016 run.

I spent a lot of time observing and chronicling a showdown that took place inside the Duterte administration. It was between Leoncio Evasco and Bong Go, and was quite a fight to behold because it took place both behind the scenes and in plain view for all too see -except that the arena was in presidential paperwork, as both competed to amass and defend turf while trying to dismantle the other side’s. At first, Evasco won; then Go rolled him back, and won, leaving Evasco no recourse but to pursue a (failed) local government bid.

Let’s review how it all played out.

By December 14, 2016 the lay of the land, as far as the Palace and thus the presidency, was concerned, had already become clear. The two people that mattered were Evasco and Go: The Little President

As of January 18, 2017 the staggering ambition — and organization — of Evasco’s vision to remold the bureaucracy, change the constitution, and institute a permanent power-holding mass movement, was not only evident but being attempted: An offer no bureaucrat can refuse

January 25, 2017 saw glimpses of the party cadre past of Evasco playing out in his vision of a mass movement to make all political parties obsolete: The urge to make a movement

By March 1, 2017 it became clear that while Evasco might push, others would push back. The first reverses or limits to what the rest of the administration would be willing to do, was becoming noticeable: Reality bites

By April 19, 2017, Go being the rival power center — and increasingly a more succesful one — was identifiable, as was the battleground between Evasco and himself (executive issuances, proof of access to, and thus support from, the President): Fight over fundamentals

On September 27, 2017 it became indisputable that Evasco’s ambitious plans were in ruins and thaqt the victor in the showdown was Go. There was paperwork to prove it: Go, grow and Glo

February 7, 2018: the fight over rice tariffs also illustrated the factional infighting and alliances that were created on an ad hoc basis. In this case, a murky story did reveal glimpses of Evasco, Go, and Piñol: Still at square one

Another glimpse of the way Go mattered in Palace intramurals was on show on the same topic — rice importation — on April 18, 2018: Pasha presidency

By November 7, 2018, Evasco was well and truly done — and out (he would go on to lose his bid for local office). The remnants of his administrative empire were abolished at that time. Go was the last man standing: Five — plus Aguilar — versus eight

As things geared up for the 2019 midterms, on February 13, 2019 I provided a glimpse into the party political and not just bureaucratic politics, side of Bong Go: his ability to knock down rivals for the senate: All roads lead to the status quo

From time to time we saw the ghosts pf Evasco’s political project in schemes dusted off then almost as quickly forgotten again, as I noted on July 24, 2019: Ambition’s back, big-time

On June 30, 2021 I pointed out the legacy of the struggle between Evasco and Go was the direction the administration would take — which had consequences increasingly felt as the term wound down: ‘Obosen’

On September 1, 2021 it was time to take stock of Bong Go: unknown to many, he is one of the champion bureaucratic infighters of all time, and the latest in a long tradition of irreplaceable lieutenants to presidents. Why he has been seemingly check-mated in the Senate: Go, going, gone.

(Most recently, of course (August 29), Drug war ‘poster boy’ testifies in House quad-committee: this goes a long way to explain the edge Go had over Evasco).

This extended background is connected to Montalvan’s article because Duterte’s inability to leverage his popularity into an organized opposition to Marcos began not in his post-presidency, but during his incumbency. He preferred the tactical approach of Go to the strategic one of Evasco; he didn’t put in place an independent infrastructure and network that could endure. So, when Go found himself on the defensive in the Senate, Duterte’s calling on Evasco wasn’t useful because Evasco lacked the means to muster a meaningful mobilization.

The eclipse of the Dutertes was accomplished in three Acts

Act 1 was the erosion of Duterte’s political infrastructure, the neutralization of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the discreet accomodation of the International Criminal Court, and the exoneration of Leila de Lima; Act 2 was the dismantling of the POGOs; Act 3 was the smashing of the power (and the media) of Apollo Quiboloy.

The anticipated outcome after all these, is the impeachment of the Vice President, with the case being made rather systematically in the House. Of my recent columns, in I looked at the increasingly eccentric behavior of the Vice President, a phenomenon that has to be seen in parallel to the disintegration of the Duterte political machine;

In Failed bombardment (July 17) I examined the manner in which the one-formidable Rodrigo Duterte charisma and clout has been evaporating; he pulled out all the stops, only to be neutralized -or worse, ignored- at every turn;

Act 1: De Lima

In Doubling down on De Lima (June 26), I looked at de Lima’s exoneration and why, as Salvador Panelo put it, she had to be punished for daring to prosecute Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Rodrigo R. Duterte.