Political Murder: A Coalition Trap
Baronial Liquidators Run Amok In Duterte's Absence
My column this week continues some thoughts I first explored last week (see last week’s newsletter, Political Murder: Migrating from the margins to the center.)
I’ve referred to the former President as baronial. Back in 2021, in Barons assembling, I mentioned that,
It also suggests that the past six years of paradoxical “strongman rule” — paradoxical, because for all the bullying and bluster and ability to hog the limelight of the incumbent, President Duterte’s administration has been, in many ways, not strong, but rather, a weak one — and the resulting atrophy in our national institutions which all developed a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome with the President, means power has leached into unexpected places.
These places range from the police, who exercised more local power than at any time since martial law, to local political parties responding to the almost-permanent state of disruption in what passes for the ruling coalition (exceeded only by the starvation in resources being experienced by the opposition).
Consider this article from 2019: A Tale of Two Warlords: Andal Ampatuan, Rodrigo Duterte, and the Philippines’ Mutating Politics, by Mesrob Vartavarian. It’s beginning and end provides a concise description of this baronial political culture and the connections between the national and the local, though I do believe what it describes was what emerged towards the end of the Marcos dictatorship but not what existed at its height :
Philippine presidents have long distributed resources and political protection to local and regional warlords in exchange for votes. After the 1986 EDSA revolution, restored cacique elites easily reconnected with sub-national strongmen as the Marcos regime never possessed the military or administrative capacities to govern locales through a centralized state apparatus. Regional crony plenipotentiaries merely superimposed themselves over an anarchy of local bosses. National oligarchs dealt more directly with these bosses after their crony overlords fell away. Although numerous variations in strongman rule ensued, two types came to the fore during the Estrada-Arroyo years (1998-2010): regional and urban warlords. The Ampatuan clan of Maguindanao and Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte best exemplified these regional and urban variants respectively…
The literature on post-EDSA Philippine politics has focused on cacique restoration and the shortcomings of procedural democracy. While there can be no doubt that these are important issues, other things were happening. Restored caciques had to rebalance patronage chains and political privileges to accommodate parvenu political bosses. Resilient social reform movements posed a serious challenge to the sociopolitical status quo and could only be contained by disbursing favors and protection downward to sub-national strongmen who augmented the national oligarchy’s coercive powers. Local and provincial warlords had been an integral component of national politics since the postwar period. Yet, unlike Alejandro Almendras, Ampatuan and Duterte had not spent prolonged periods in Manila acclimating to its legislative politics. During the Arroyo years, they increasingly influenced national affairs from afar by dealing out violence in their respective locales. As traditional caciques broke back into power, frontier warlords sought new ways to break out.
That Duterte represented the urban “variant” of strongman (and, furthermore, the latest manifestation of being a strongman, as historian Al McCoy proposed in Global Populism: A Lineage of Filipino Strongmen from Quezon to Marcos and Duterte, in which he stressed the “role of performative violence in projecting domestic strength and a complementary need for diplomatic success to demonstrate international influence”) meant that whether by intuition or a still-unacknowledged institutional memory of the presidency, Duterte was playing a role familiar to the gallery if no longer familiar to media, business, and even many of his political peers.
That he could surprise his peers may owe more to the unwillingness of Duterte to be socialized into the political culture of the capital when he served as a legislator without, it seems, particularly bothering to immerse himself in the mores of legislative and national life. This meant he retained the status of an outsider even when he achieved paramount status as President: what he did was simply preside over the diversion of patronage and opportunities to his region (and one would surmise, the rapid influx of lieutenants and other associates to the metropolis). His being and remaining an outsider, shielded by a wall of hangers-on, made him formidable. The prominent from the capital who’d dealt with him either paid dearly for perceived slights (the Lopezes) or, despite having done business cordially for decades, got out of the way (the Zobels) or laid low (Andrew Tan) even as others knew how to cultivate him.
So: shrewdness and ferocity were accompanied by a hard-nosed understanding of the public’s psychology. Being a particular kind of urban strongman —a frontier city boss— meant a connection to both the rural and urban societies and their traditional expectations; the foremost of these expectations being the assumption of not just authority, but responsibility. In, Liquidations, I pointed out:
To repeat: the President created the conditions for a sense of impunity to embolden the police and armed forces, by taking on any and all moral and legal responsibility himself, and guaranteeing impunity to those who obey his orders (and conditions: being careless and antagonizing public opinion will lead to a withdrawal of presidential protection). He also perfected the manner in which the bloodlust of the loyal are inflamed, and that bloodlust channeled into a concerted campaign of liquidations.
As the architect of the policy of liquidations, the President was keen to demonstrate control over its actors, abandoning those who embarrassed him, protecting those who stayed within the broad parameters of permissible action he personally defined. In the absence of a similarly-inclined (and similarly-adept) chief executive, we have what we have: the liquidators running riot.
This week’s The Long View
THE LONG VIEW
Bloody quicksand
By: Manuel L. Quezon III – @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:00 AM March 29, 2023
Back in July 2020, Negros Oriental Gov. Roel Degamo had pointed to a foiled assassination plot in which an Army reservist, a retired Army soldier, and a tricycle driver were apprehended after the governor received text messages alerting him of a plot. He didn’t name names, but attributed the plot to, as the press then put it, “political detractors.” The governor, who’d been suspended and dismissed from service on multiple occasions, successfully invoked a loophole when it came to the three-term limit on local office: Each instance, the Supreme Court had ruled, represented an involuntary interruption to his terms, allowing him to run for essentially a fourth term.
As last Lent began, Bishop Julito Cortes of Dumaguete expressed “tremendous concern” over election-related killings and the “specter of massive vote-buying.” Later that year, a commentary in The Diplomat, summed up political killings in Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental in this manner: “There persists on Negros a climate of violence and impunity supported by, but beyond the control of, the Duterte administration.” Much as the so-called “war on drugs” gave cover for the liquidation of the anonymous poor and selected high-profile targets, and much as counterinsurgency, in turn, was invoked as a justification for the assassination of inconvenient radicals, there, too, existed a brutal local political culture whose sheer impunity was a national scandal waiting to happen.
That scandal came to pass with the assassination of Degamo under circumstances so brazen and crude, that the House of Representatives (voting 292-0 or unanimously) vomited out one of its own, suspending Negros Oriental Rep. Arnolfo Teves Jr. who has refused to return to the country. He went as far as issuing a video statement saying he’d been told that the Palace had given instructions to persecute him on top of a previously ongoing “operation” against him also ordered by the Palace. Teves shrewdly then added that he doubted that the President himself would order his persecution simply to allow another party in the province to monopolize cockfighting. The President, obviously piqued, felt compelled to respond, assuring the congressman of protection if he returned. Some scoffed at the sight of the President either giving assurances to Teves or saying there’d been discussions. But so long as Teves is overseas, he is utterly beyond the reach of the authorities; the President knows this and can only call Teves’ bluff by announcing there is no obstacle to his return.
That was him playing good cop. Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla’s job is to be bad cop. Last Monday, Remulla announced Arnolfo Jr. was being considered a potential mastermind of the Degamo assassination and the involvement of his brother, Pryde, was also possible; scenes of weapons being dug up in a Teves property have been shown, and yesterday the latest revelation was that the assassins had stayed in a safe house allegedly owned by Teves. The fugitive, suspended congressman too, Remulla said yesterday, might have links to a “criminal organization” behind killings in the province, including that of the governor. What the President said the other day is coming to pass: Having slighted the President’s offer (made as much, if not more, out of consideration for the congressman’s other kin who remains in office and thus remains part of an anxious establishment), Teves isn’t going to know what hit him.
As far back as 2010 when an ex-beauty queen was gunned down, what has weighed heavily on Negros Oriental has been as much a pervasive atmosphere of intimidation that made even discussing such incidents taboo, as the actual murders themselves. Even incidents of the well-connected throwing their weight around or getting away scot-free could neither be discussed openly nor even risk acts of compassion or generosity to affected families, lest it is misconstrued by the powerful. The intimidation, then, is the other half of the story, and the one, it seems to me, left unsaid but acknowledged by the good-cop, bad-cop, routine in Manila: The infrastructure of intimidation still exists in Negros Oriental and it can still be operated by remote control.
Last week I mentioned Peter Kreuzer, the scholar of political murder. His research has gleaned, as he recently said, that “The Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to do politics,” with one report summarizing his findings as follows: that the Philippines is a “country with one of the highest levels of violence against the political class in the world, even higher than those of the nations with the most murders in general, such as Mexico, Colombia, South Africa or Brazil.”
We have gotten used to hearing a similar notorious standing for the Philippines with regards to journalists—except the politicians have successfully conditioned the public into not caring what happens to journalists. The vote for the suspension of Teves suggests that politicians at least care about what is happening to themselves.
When Rodrigo Duterte successfully staked a claim on representing empathetic leadership in 2016, he was given license to liquidate people at the margins, because he freely took upon himself the moral responsibility for it and swore to protect those who followed his orders. In a similar manner, he compensated the military for the effects of his short-lived but high-profile coalition with the communists by declaring open season on anyone tagged a communist. He brought to the heart of the state the baronial behavior of local officialdom. His successor is now presiding over the worst elements of both the civilian and military leadership, doing to the top what was only supposed to be done to the bottom. The danger is, the more those at the top belatedly try to act, the more it might drag everyone down.
Things to Read Department:
Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’ in The Guardian
Inside the very tough business of trying to disrupt media, in Vanity Fair
Pope Francis, ten years later and What has been Pope Francis’ way of governing? in MondayVatican