Sara paradox

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Vice President Sara Duterte’s appearance at the Quezon City Hall of Justice on Sept. 5 turned into an unscripted display of political whiplash.

Arriving to post PHP 360,000 bail on a grave threats charge, she hesitated at the entrance and openly declared her distrust of the very institutions she and her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, once championed.

“Wala akong tiwala sa korte, wala akong tiwala sa pulis. I do not feel safe,” Duterte told reporters.

Later, she added: “Pakiramdam ko papatayin nila ako.”

She said she feared being cornered in an elevator with armed police, and she invoked the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. to make her point.

“Do you remember that Ninoy Aquino died on the staircase?” she asked.

The pivot that followed was harder to miss.

Duterte turned to the journalists covering her appearance, asking them, not police escorts or her own security detail, to stay close as she entered the building.

“I want a lot of people to see it. I really don’t know what will happen to me in there,” she said.

The request is striking given her family’s record with the Philippine press. Weeks earlier in The Hague, she told reporters that Philippine journalism falls short of international standards, accused local newsrooms of chasing profit over principle, and held up social media as the more trustworthy source of truth. Her father built a legacy on ordering the country to “kill journalism,” a phrase that helped set the tone for the shutdown of ABS-CBN’s broadcast franchise and years of legal pressure on Rappler. On Saturday, it was journalists and their cameras that made her feel safe.

Her distrust of the courts follows the same arc. Weeks ago, while defending her father before the International Criminal Court, she insisted the Philippine justice system was intact: “Our judicial courts are functioning… There is no breakdown,” she said in July. Facing her own case on Sept. 5, she offered a different verdict: “Wala akong tiwala sa korte.” A system can function in general while a specific case is contested; that is a defensible legal position. Politically, though, the reversal is hard to miss, and it runs through her fear of the police as well.

The ICC is investigating Rodrigo Duterte over thousands of deaths tied to his anti-drug campaign, charges his daughter has defended him against for years. Outside the courthouse, she voiced the same fear of police custody that critics of that drug war have raised for a decade: what state agents might do once no independent witnesses are watching.

No evidence has surfaced that police intended her harm. The Philippine National Police says its officers acted professionally, and Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla said the personnel serving the warrant wore body cameras specifically to head off any confrontation. Remulla also pushed back on her claim of state surveillance. “It was the people around her she must look out for. They told us where she was,” he said Sunday.

Those competing claims will be tested in court, not in press statements. Her grave threats case has cleared only a finding of probable cause, and she retains every right to challenge jurisdiction, contest evidence, and use the protections Philippine law affords any defendant.

What will not survive the process untouched is the symbolism. A vice president who once defended the courts now says she does not trust them, and the daughter of a president whose drug war drew international condemnation for police killings now says she fears the police herself. A political family long hostile to the press, meanwhile, spent Saturday treating reporters as the safest people in the room.

None of that settles her guilt or innocence. It does say something about how institutions look different once the power holding them up starts to feel the other side of the law.