Why is the ex -rumble of the Philippines ended?

Just before his 80th birthday, Rodrigo Duterte, a man who once promised to purge his country through a bloody anti -drug and crimes campaign, He was overcome and in custody.

The former president was received by the Philippines Police when he arrived in Manila on a flight from Hong Kong, where he had been gathering his candidates for the next half -period elections between the great Filipina diaspora there.

It turned out that the justified arrest warrant of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was, already in the hands of the Philippine government, which moved quickly to execute it.

A Mr. Duterte, fragile, walking with a stick, was transferred to a base of the Air Force inside the airport perimeter. A rented plane was quickly prepared to take it to the ICC in The Hague.

How had this happened? How had it been so under such a powerful and popular man, often called “the triumph of Asia”?

In vain, his lawyers and relatives protested because the arrest did not have a legal basis and complained that Duterte’s fragile health was being careless.

While he was in office, Mr. Duterte formed an alliance with the Marcos family, the children of the expelled dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who for a long time had been working on a political return. Duterte could not work again in the 2022 elections, but his daughter Sara, mayor of the southern city of Davao, was also popular and a strong contender to replace him.

However, Ferdinand Marcos’s son, Bongbong, who had been in politics all his life, was also well located to win and very well financed.

The two families reached an agreement. They would work together to take Bongbong to the Presidency Ya Sara in the Vice Presidency, according to the assumption that it occurred in the next elections in 2028, his turn would come and have the formidable machine Marcos behind her.

It worked. Both won their positions by a wide margin. Duterte expected his alliance to protect him from any setback on his controversial presidency once he was out of power.

The most serious threat that he had left over him was an ICC investigation into his guilt for thousands of extrajudicial murders carried out during the anti -drug campaigns he ordered, after becoming president in 2016, but also during his mandate as mayor of the city of southern Davao since 2011.

Duterte retired Philippines from the Jurisdiction of the ICC in 2019, but his prosecutors argued that they still had the mandate to analyze the alleged crimes against humanity committed before that, and launched a formal investigation in 2021. However, President Marcos initially declared that his government would not cooperate with the CIC.

That position only changed after the dramatic breakdown of the Duterte-Marcos alliance. The strains in their relationship were evident since the first days of the administration, when Sara Duterte’s request to receive control of the powerful Ministry of Defense was rejected and instead gave him the Ministry of Education.

President Marcos also distanced himself from the mercurial policies of his predecessor, repaired the fences with the United States, faced China in the seas disputed and arrested the threats of compensation for remuneration against drug traffickers.

In the end, these were two ambitious and hungry clans of power in order to dominate the Philippine politics, and there was not enough power to share. The relationships arrived at a Nadir last year when Sara Duterte announced that he had hired a murderer to kill President Marcos, if something happened to him.

At the end of last year, the Chamber of Representatives of the Congress, which is controlled by Marcos’s loyal ones, presented a petition to dismiss Mrs. Duterte. That trial will take place in the Senate at the end of this year.

If she is accused, under the Constitution, she would prohibit her from having a high political position, killing her long -standing presidential ambitions and further weakening the political power of the Difertes.

President Marcos now seems to have moved skillfully to neutralize his main political rival. But its strategy is not risk -free. The Dutetes are still popular in much of the country and can mobilize protests against the prosecution of the former president.

Sara Duterte has issued a statement accusing the Government of giving her father “foreign powers” and violating Philippine sovereignty.

An early test of the support enjoyed by both clans will be the elections in the middle of the period in May.

In his comments to the journalists after the plane that led to his predecessor had taken off from Manila, President Marcos insisted that he was fulfilling the country’s commitments with Interpol, which the ICC had delivered. But he was shy about the fact that it was an order of the ICC that he was executing, since many Filipinos will question what the CPI mandate is in a country that has already left its jurisdiction.

Nor is it free of risks for the CPI. The court is an institution in conflict these days, with the Trump administration threatening to arrest its senior officials if they travel to the United States, and few countries willing to extradite those who have accused. Bringing the former president Duterte to The Hague, therefore, might seem a success of a high profile welcome.

But there was a warning, from China, it is certainly not a signature for the ICC and currently in Loggerheads with the Philippines, not to politicize the cases of the ICC. This was a thin reference to the fact that this case, which is supposed to be responsibility for serious international crimes, has ended up playing a decisive role in a national dispute in the Philippines between two rival political forces.