Umbrella in a Shitstorm
True to her name, Senator Leila De Lima now finds herself in a very curious dilemma. Between a rock and a hard place would be an adage that aptly describes her rather unfortunate predicament. As President Rodrigo Duterte himself put it, it was De Lima herself who dug her own hole. Crawling out of it seems hopeless now that the shit just hit the fan – and the proverbial stew just flew in all directions.
A sweeping denial of all these charges would have been appropriate, but such a denial would be totally unconvincing if just one of these allegations can be proven true. And foremost among these is the true nature of her relationship with her erstwhile bodyguard-driver, Ronnie Dayan, who it appears, could provide all the answers to the riddles confounding the general population. Dayan refuses to surface, and is claimed by De Lima herself to be in hiding because he allegedly fears for his life. How can somebody who is free from guilt have anything to fear? I think what he dreads most is the prospect of having to tell the truth in public, since he has no choice but to implicate his former boss and lover. How else can he explain his frequent visits to Bilibid? What about the two houses in Pangasinan? His alleged affair with the Senator?
De Lima herself simply cannot deny the obvious, so she admits to “snippets of truth,” and in the process establishes one incontrovertible fact – the President IS telling the truth, one way or the other. Now, distinguishing the truths from the half-truths and the lies seems like her only procurable line of defense. But the premise itself remains indefensible. If it can be proven that Dayan went in and out of Bilibid collecting money from these drug lords, De Lima would find herself facing the wall. This is what most of the President's critics do not seem to comprehend. Establishing the link is necessary. The rest is collateral damage.
Human rights groups and the previous administration's allies are quick to rush to De Lima's defense. The Senator's personal affairs, they say, should be nobody's business but her own. Nothing can be more ludicrous than this argument. She had an affair with her married driver (some say it began during her CHR days). It is possible that she simply fell in love and was used in the process. But it is also possible that she was aware of what she was doing and used her driver as a pawn. Dayan, if he so chooses to surface, is the key. The only question is whether he'll surface dead or alive. Who else would have the motive to silence him and keep him out of the public eye? De Lima seems to be taking a page from Binay's playbook - dismiss the charges as political assassination while keeping mum about the details. Binay's longtime secretary Eduviges Baloloy and his alleged bagman Gerry Limlingan never surfaced, but it didn't matter. Binay was finished. The strategy obviously didn't work for Binay. The same won't work for De Lima.
Balancing political power play with executive disposition is a pretty complicated task, and President Duterte is smart enough to know this. That the President chooses to take it slow on De Lima only adds torture to her ordeal. Why finish her off with one single stroke when he can expose her slowly and more painfully? Duterte knows all too well that drug coddlers do not deserve a quick death. They deserve to wallow in shame and face the public's wrath before they meet their doom. President Duterte is a master strategist. He peppers his exposés with juicy details about her sordid affairs because that's the only way to get the public endlessly fixated about the whole plot, much like watching a Pinoy Telenovela. The fact that he does these exposés himself is another deliberate strategy. The public wouldn't be as interested if it were somebody else, Aguirre or Calida, for instance, dropping the bombs.
Now that he is enjoying a level of political and popular support unparalleled in history, everything that comes out of the President's mouth is gold, and everybody from the press, businessmen and politicians to the ordinary balut vendor are hooked on his statements with endless anticipation. Now everybody's interested about De Lima's alleged new boyfriend “Warren,” an MMDA motorcycle constable, never mind if he's connected with drugs or not. And the stills of the much dreaded sex video of De Lima with an unidentified partner circulating online, whether real or fake, only add fuel to the fire. For Duterte, exposing crooks in government is an art form, and every little side detail and manner of presentation is part of a bigger strategy. As far as the President is concerned, she pretty much had it coming. To her credit, the President says, De Lima is a fighter. But this is a fight she'll never win. She can never hope to outsmart the President, more so that the President is armed with the truth.
How else were these drug lords able to operate behind bars with absolute impunity without her knowledge and approval? How was it possible for her driver to collect money from these drug lords if their requests were not reciprocated and their illegal activities suppressed? Would she have allowed all these to happen under her watch without monetary and political gain? Would things have worked the same way in Bilibid if it was somebody else's driver giving the green light and not her's? If these drug lords knew that Dayan was just an ordinary driver to the former Justice Secretary, how can one explain the immense power he wielded at the National Penitentiary? Where did Dayan or his sister get the money to build such grandiose houses? And what was De Lima doing in one of these houses every weekend with her bodyguard-driver?
The more questions we ask, the more difficult it seems for De Lima to explain her innocence. De Lima's personal affairs paved the way for her corruption, and if by some legal pitfall corruption cannot be directly linked to her or fully established, it would be safe to say at the very least that her affair with Dayan paved the way for her complicity and negligence. Either way she's fucked – for lack of a better word. Her weaknesses – love and/or lust, along with greed, a twisted sense of self-righteousness and an illusion of unending power have all conspired to bring her to her eventual downfall.
Nowadays, De Lima is witnessing her own Karmic destiny going full circle. What goes around, truly comes around. She can scoff publicly at the allegations but on the inside she knows the truth and that the end is near. Right now she is beyond salvation, tangled in a web of her own doing, with nothing but an umbrella in a shitstorm.
