Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former chief of the Philippine National Police under former President Rodrigo Duterte, is now a fugitive—hunted by the very institution he once commanded. He slipped out of the Senate in the early hours of the morning to evade an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant, leaving behind a chamber in panic, its security forces firing shots to create the impression that the Senate was under assault.
The irony is almost too neat: the man who oversaw a drug war that killed thousands could not summon the nerve to face a single warrant. He ran. That is all that needs to be said about Bato dela Rosa. The more important revelation is that he is so unlike the man he served, and that difference tells us about the nature of impunity as an element of populist power.
Impunity, at its most potent, is not merely the ability to break the law and escape punishment. It is a form of power, one that works by projecting an aura of invincibility. The person who wields it does not simply evade accountability; he appears to stand above the very authority that would hold him accountable. This is what gives impunity its mystique. People stand in awe before it, and institutions hesitate. Followers are emboldened, and even some critics, sensing that resistance is futile, fall silent.
This was the kind of power Rodrigo Duterte wielded during his violent presidency. When he appeared before congressional hearings, no longer president, facing questions about thousands of deaths, he was almost unperturbed. Yes, he said, in effect: I ordered it. So be it. The legislators questioning him were visibly deferential, reminding him almost apologetically that he was confessing to crimes. He merely shrugged. No Philippine court ever formally charged him. The families of his victims, denied justice at home, decided to bring their cases to the ICC.
His response to the ICC was the most brazen expression of impunity. He simply withdrew the Philippines from the Rome Statute—unilaterally, with minimal resistance. It was a declaration that not even international law applied to him. His followers read it as validation of what they already believed: that he was beyond the reach of any law. His subordinates drew their own conclusion: that they, too, were shielded, having acted on his orders.
What finally broke the aura of immunity was not legal argument but political calculation. As long as the Marcos-Duterte alliance held, the ICC warrant was a dead letter. Without state cooperation, arrest was unlikely. But when the Dutertes became a liability to the Marcos presidency rather than an asset, the shield vanished. Suddenly the law had room to move.
I suspect Duterte knew what was coming. He could have remained in Hong Kong where he was vacationing, and where his relationships with Chinese leaders would have made extradition impossible. He came home genuinely convinced that his presence alone would give the arresting officers pause. He had become a prisoner of his own mystique.
But he was wrong about one man: Gen. Nicolas Torre did not hesitate. He arrested Duterte, calmly read him his rights, and, despite Duterte’s delaying attempts, escorted him to the plane that delivered him to ICC custody. The mystique has been dented but is not shattered.
The polls show that the Duterte aura lives on in his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, who is positioning herself for the 2028 presidential race. Her allies in the Senate are doing everything in their power to block any legal or political process that might keep her off the ballot. The sorry spectacle of recent days—the fabricated panic, the fugitive senator who surfaced just to vote for a new Senate president, the shots fired at phantoms—is part of this rearguard action to preserve what remains of the Duterte culture of impunity.
But that spectacle also reveals that the mystique is not always transferrable. The memes that came in the wake of Bato dela Rosa’s stumble at the stairs proved that. So did those that ridiculed the senators who panicked at the sound of shots that their own security had fired.
Sara Duterte is a different and more serious question. She is her father’s daughter in ways that go beyond biology. She’s combative and skilled at channeling the resentments of those who feel avenged by her father’s boldness. Whether she carries enough of the mystique to reconstitute the impunity system around herself is something we cannot yet answer.
The 2028 election will be that answer. If the Filipino people choose to return the Duterte brand to power—knowing now what it costs and having seen where it leads—impunity will not merely survive. It will have been ratified. And a ratified impunity is far more dangerous than one that simply evades the law, for then it will carry a democratic mandate. Only an electorate that refuses to be seduced by the mystique of defiant power can end the culture of impunity.
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