THE IMPOSSIBLE TRUTH

May 26, 2024 Opinion

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on public order and dangerous drugs Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa seems bent on proving, or at least lending credibility, to supposed leak documents from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) that allegedly ties sitting President Bongbong Marcos with cocaine use a decade ago. In one of the hearings (there have been three hearings conducted so far) Senator Bato attempted to authenticate the leaked documents commenting that since the said documents bore signs of being stapled with other documents then the presumption is that these were part of other PDEA documents in a file folder that may have been authentic.

That is his impression, unfortunately, these vain attempts to legitimize these leak documents and what they purport to claim in implicating President Marcos for drug use fall flat when we look at the bigger picture in relation to the war on drugs begun by former President Rodrigo Duterte during his term (June 30, 2016 – June 30, 2022). If we go by the timeline these PDEA leaked documents were allegedly prepared as an authority to operate and preoperation report way back in March 11, 2012. Three years thereafter, or on June 30, 2016, Rodrigo Duterte sat as President
while Senator Dela Rosa back then was the Chief of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the war on drugs began in earnest.

President Marcos lost to then former Vice President Leni Robredo during the 2016 Vice Presidential election, thus
becoming a private citizen in the middle of 2016. If we are to assume then that there were no sacred cows in the war on drugs initiated by former President Duterte in 2016, and if the PDEA leak documents are indeed authentic and
existing from 2012 to 2016 then how difficult would it be for the former President Duterte and his former top cop Senator Dela Rosa to conduct an in-depth follow-up and investigation whether the PDEA authority to operate and
pre-operation report 2012 linking the President to cocaine use has any iota of truth.

Likewise, we have to emphasize that if the said PDEA leaked documents were in fact existing in 2012 then that could have been the basis of a more intrusive investigation not only by the PDEA but by the anti-narcotics office or department of the PNP which in 2016 was led by no less than Senator Bato himself. In fact we recall that former President Duterte in several instances even went public in naming several personalities both in government and in private as being involved in illegal drugs. Some of them were even arrested or killed afterwards. The question then that begs an answer is where the hell are these PDEA leaked documents when the war on drugs was raging between 2016 until 2022?

If Jonathan Morales, the resource person invited by the Senate Committee on dangerous drugs and who provided the said documents, is able to prove their authenticity (being a former PDEA agent) then the Senate committee should start an investigation on why these documents were not acted upon by former President Duterte and Senator Bato Dela Rosa when they started their war on drugs, if as they had previously claimed, their campaign against illegal drugs is an honest to goodness effort to prevent the Philippines from becoming a narco state. We cannot but harbor the sneaky suspicion that the Senate hearing is in fact not in aid of any future legislation but something else.

As Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri commented during a press briefing that, “while legislative inquiries are very liberal in terms of adhering to rules of evidence, hearings should be aimed at ferreting out the truth using evidence and facts, and that otherwise, the faith of the people in inquiries in aid of legislation may be diminished, especially when it causes reputational damage to other parties”. One other thing that must be pointed out is that during the
entirety of the three senate hearings regarding the PDEA leaked documents everything boiled down to mere allegations and which still has to be proven and the documents themselves authenticated.

That fact that it was still a pre-operation report already tells us that the alleged use by the President of cocaine has yet to be substantiated or validated by actual follow-up anti-drug operations (which never happened) or by other sources from the various intelligence and antinarcotics branches of the government. Finally, during the third hearing
a video was presented by the resource person Jonathan Morales purportedly showing an attempt by several individuals at preventing him from testifying in front of the Senate Committee on dangerous drugs ostensibly upon the orders of the wife of the President.  In trying to erode the credibility of President Marcos Morales and whoever is
pulling his strings are using everything in their power and at their disposal to manufacture an impossible truth.
In this we trust Senator Dela Rosa to not be waylaid by the poorly crafted claims and untruths made by Morales.