When Sen. Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa surfaced to help Alan Peter Cayetano seize the Senate presidency from Sen. Tito Sotto, President Bongbong Marcos came up with a ‘hands-off” policy and refused to have the senator arrested even if the International Criminal Court or ICC already issued a warrant of arrest against him for crimes against humanity, the same case that has led to the incarceration of former President Rodrigo Duterte in The Hague in The Netherlands.
Interior and Local Government Secretary Jonvic Remulla even spent some “happy hours” with Bato and some senators in the Senate building and elements of the National Bureau of Investigation or NBI were ordered to stand down as the Senate placed Bato in its “protective custody” and even as Bato left the Senate premises with the help of Sen. Robinhood Padilla and after some “discharge of firearms” drama.
Now that Bato is gone, the Marcos government is going through the motions of looking for him. They didn’t arrest him when he surfaced and now that he is gone, they want to arrest him. It is actually like one of our favorite games when we were kids: “tago-tago.” The game starts with the designated “IT” closing his or her eyes to allow the participants to hide. After that, the “IT” starts looking one-by-one for the participants, whom he allowed to hide in the first place.
I understand the difficulty of the situation Bato is in. He already saw the setup involving the former president, especially on the hiring of lawyers that cost millions of pesos and the difficulty of visiting a prisoner who is in the Netherlands and is not in the Philippines. Of course, Bato is still luckier than the many victims of the “war against drugs” who were killed without the benefit of litigation.
The Marcos government’s failure to arrest Bato compounds another of its failing, which is the failure to file a case against and arrest the people behind the flood control scandal. This will hound the Marcos presidency until Bongbong Marcos’ term ends in 2028. That may be one of the reasons why the government is belatedly looking for Bato at all costs. But arresting him is difficult given the resources now at his disposal. So we may have to wish this government luck.
There are those who insist that while Bato may not be as rich as his boss, he does have money amassed while he was still in power. I don’t actually know about that because I have not heard that Bato is being sued because he enriched himself while in power. But even if he has the resources to pay those expensive lawyers, being incarcerated abroad is still a problem especially on the matter of visitation. That is why I am not really particular about his arrest.
But Bato should not leave the country because he is a fugitive as far as the ICC is concerned, meaning that if he goes to any ICC member country he will be arrested there. That would also negate the argument about him staying in the country so relatives can have easy access to him.