Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
MARCOS’ twin plot to secure his regime’s hold on power — the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte and the crushing of opposition figures, symbolized by the jailing of Sen. Rodante Marcoleta — effectively began yesterday, as if some exasperated deity, tired of Filipino blindness, decided to compress the opening shots into a single day so no one could pretend not to see.
Hours after the Senate impeachment court moved from preliminaries into the formal trial phase against VP Sara, the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court — over the weekend after the Ombudsman filed the case last Friday — scrambled to raffle the case to its Third Division, which promptly ordered the arrest of the pro-Duterte Marcoleta on some absurd charge of plunder.
The Senate, already convened as an impeachment court since May 18, had locked in July 6 as the start of the trial proper, with senators sitting four afternoons a week as “judges” in what is the biggest political case of this administration. On that same date, Marcoleta went to the Third Division, thinking he could argue for the case to be dismissed. Instead, he was led away by the Philippine National Police’s (PNP) burly policemen, handcuffed and hauled to the PNP jail in Payatas, in a convoy of vans and SUVs.
Another prominent pro-Duterte figure — Marcoleta — was thrown in jail, after Sen. Ronald dela Rosa was forced to be a fugitive on May 11 in order to evade a foreign court’s very anomalous arrest warrant, which the Marcos regime enthusiastically committed to implement.
If a novelist invented such timing, an editor would probably strike it out as too contrived.
This convergence did not arise overnight. Marcos’ ruthless project — after the Duterte forces crucially helped him to win the presidency in 2022 — to politically destroy Sara has been a long, grinding effort that began with the first impeachment articles in the House last year, dressed up as a moral crusade against corruption and abuse of power. The initial attempt to railroad an impeachment was slapped down by the Supreme Court in July 2025, which unanimously declared the first set of articles unconstitutional for violating the one‑impeachment‑per‑year rule. The high court, however, carefully noted that a new complaint could be refiled once the one‑year bar lapsed — effectively telling Marcos’ operators, “Not now, but try again next year.”
They did exactly that.
‘Justice’
By April 29, 2026, the House’s misnamed “justice” committee — composed of lawmakers who owe their careers and pork barrels to the Palace — unanimously found “probable cause” to impeach Sara Duterte over alleged misuse of public funds, unexplained wealth and supposed death threats against President Marcos, his wife and allies. All 53 members of the committee dutifully voted to send the complaint to the plenary, which then produced the constitutionally required one‑third vote to transmit the case to the Senate. It was a textbook weaponization of “probable cause”: in Philippine politics, that phrase often means “we have the votes.”
From there, the script unfolded with grinding precision. The Senate convened as an impeachment court in mid‑May. The impeachment court scheduled pretrial conferences through the latter half of June and set July 6 as the kickoff of the trial proper — then publicly assured reporters that despite a “tight” calendar, that date remained “not yet an impossibility.”
In other words, the Marcos camp had circled July 6 on the calendar as the day Sara Duterte would be dragged before a Senate “court” under national and international media glare. And on that same day, Marcoleta would be dispatched to jail.
Seen in isolation, Duterte’s impeachment and Marcoleta’s arrest can be defended as “legal processes.” Taken together, and situated in their precise timing, they reveal the architecture of a regime project to secure Marcos’ political future beyond 2028.
Step 1: Cripple the strongest challenger to the ruling coalition. Sara Duterte is not just a vice president; she is the leader of the Duterte network, with deep roots in the local political machinery and a base that still sees her father as the decisive, no‑nonsense alternative to oligarchic power. An impeachment trial — even if it ends in acquittal — locks her in the dock for months, drains her financial and political capital, and forces her to fight for survival instead of building a national campaign. Only the most stupid Filipino or Marcos’ propaganda corps can’t see that his perpetuation project had to be rushed, as he had effectively only a year-and-half to wield the state’s weapons against Sara and prevent her from becoming president in 2028. Sara had become the existential threat to the Marcos clan.
Step 2: Terrorize her allies and sympathizers through selective prosecution. Marcoleta has become one of the most vocal pro‑Duterte figures in the legislature, and was pursuing the exposé of 18 ex-soldiers that they personally delivered billions of graft money to Marcos, his family and his allies.
Marcoleta suddenly found himself in jail on the non-bailable charge of plunder — on the absurd claim that donations he received from three friends — including former congressman Michael Defensor, another vocal Marcos critic — for his electoral campaign in 2022 were graft money. The legal merits of the case are almost irrelevant at the signal level: If a senator known for his Duterte alignment can be put behind bars, the message is clear to every mayor, governor and congressman who ever attended a Duterte rally.
Step 3: Normalize the entire operation through legalese. Everything is done with court orders, committee reports and solemn invocations of the “rule of law.” Marcos’ project is a classic case of the weaponization of law. The Supreme Court’s earlier ruling is used as a procedural road map, not a restraint; Congress wraps its power play in constitutional jargon; the Sandiganbayan cloaks its move in the language of anti‑graft enforcement. The Marcos regime advances its project not by openly suspending the Constitution, but by colonizing its institutions.
Martial law
This is not the same as the crude declaration of martial law in the 1970s. It is a more sophisticated capture of formal mechanisms and their use as bludgeons against inconvenient rivals.
What makes yesterday stand out is the almost theatrical compression of these tracks into a single date.
For months, Filipinos treated the impeachment as just another “telenovela” — a Senate “trial” to be half‑watched on television, debated in coffee shops, then pushed aside by the next scandal. The charges against Duterte were discussed piecemeal: misuse of funds here, alleged threats there, unexplained wealth thrown in for flavor. Marcoleta’s case, meanwhile, was filed and reported as yet another “anti‑graft” action in a country saturated with corruption stories.
Then came July 6, when the two tracks of Marcos’ perpetuation project — impeachment and criminal prosecution — converged.
One could imagine some cosmic intelligence, fed up with Filipino political stupidity and selective amnesia, deciding: “Let them see it all in one day.”
History teaches that democracies often die not with a bang but with a series of “legal” acts whose cumulative effect is the concentration of power in fewer hands. Marcos’ push to impeach Duterte — after one failed, unconstitutional attempt — and the simultaneous jailing of Marcoleta must be read in this light. They are not isolated moral crusades; they are two rails of the same train.
Put together, they sketch the silhouette of a project: Clear the field of the Marcos regime’s most potent rival, then cow her allies and potential financiers into silence. Elections will still be held; the Constitution will still be cited. But the substantive contest — the real clash of organized political forces — will have been shaped in advance by selective institutional violence.
Yesterday was not merely the start of Sara’s impeachment trial, nor simply the day Marcoleta was ordered thrown behind bars. It was the day the Marcos regime starkly revealed its project to perpetuate itself in power beyond 2028.
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