The Maleta Circus and What It Is Really Selling

Start with the detail that got buried: Atty. Levito Baligod went on Ted Failon and DJ Chacha and admitted he added partylist Rep. Leila de Lima to a list of legislators who supposedly received suitcases of cash — not because his clients said she received cash, but because she attended ICC-related meetings. He then clarified the delivery was not a suitcase at all, but a paper bag, possibly containing PHP 5,000,000 to PHP 10,000,000.

Clerical errors do not retroactively change suitcases into paper bags. If the affidavit’s own author contradicts it on air the day after the press conference, the affidavit is not evidence of anything — except, maybe, of how this operation was put together.

And yet that admission barely registered, drowned out by the noise of PHP 805,000,000,000 in alleged cash deliveries and 18 men with suitcases. Which, frankly, was the point.

This is worth sitting with. The story did not need to be true to work. It only needed to be loud and early — out the door before the fact-checks, ahead of the rebuttals, already screenshotted and shared by the time the Philippine Navy confirmed that four of the 18 self-described former Marines were never in the military at all. Disinformation at this scale does not operate like a lie waiting to be caught. It operates like a stain — the correction rarely reaches everyone the original claim did.

The timing alone should have been the headline. On February 23, the same morning the ICC opened confirmation-of-charges hearings against Rodrigo Duterte in The Hague, Baligod was holding court in San Juan City. The Philippine Navy moved quickly once the press conference wrapped, verifying within 24 hours the fake credentials. Most of the others were dishonorably discharged. Sen. Panfilo Lacson noted the inconsistencies: rank designations that did not hold up, timelines that clashed with military records, no coherent chain of command. Major outlets stayed away entirely.

These are not the ingredients of a credible whistleblower operation. These are the ingredients of one designed to generate screenshots, not scrutiny. And that distinction matters — because in the current information environment, scrutiny is optional. Sharing is not.

Here in Iloilo, four of our legislators ended up on that list — Reps. Baronda, Garin, and Ang, and former Rep. Manuel. They span different parties, different constituencies, different political histories. What they have in common, apparently, is that they were useful names to attach to an allegation. Baronda herself said it plainly: the most likely reason for her inclusion is her association with former Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog, a Duterte critic. Manuel pointed at his Kabataan affiliation and the camp’s long habit of recycling kickback stories against him.

Neither explanation is flattering to the people who assembled this list. Whether it was deliberate targeting or sloppy guilt-by-association, the effect is the same — names smeared with no verified evidence, in a document that the presenting lawyer is already walking back. That is how this works. Precision is secondary. Volume is the strategy.

It would be a mistake to treat this as an aberration. In Philippine political warfare, disinformation is not the exception that proves the rule — it is the rule. The machinery is familiar: a lawyer with a credibility backstory, witnesses with just enough detail to sound rehearsed, a venue, a prop, a number large enough to be staggering. The 2013 PDAF scandal gave Baligod his reputation. That reputation is now the packaging for a very different product. The brand was built on exposing corruption; the brand is now being used to manufacture the appearance of it — selectively, strategically, against people who happen to be on the wrong side of a collapsing political alliance.

The deeper problem is not the specific allegations. It is what this kind of operation is designed to produce over time: a general exhaustion with accountability, a sense that everyone is equally dirty, that documented evidence and manufactured spectacle are more or less the same thing. That is the real product being sold here — not proof of corruption, but corrosion of the idea that proof matters. When people stop being able to tell the difference between a debunked affidavit and a years-long ICC investigation, the disinformation has done its job — not by winning the argument, but by making the argument feel pointless.

The ICC case rests on documented killings, witness testimonies taken under oath, and what former SC Justice Antonio Carpio described as a prosecution that clearly demonstrated the systematic and widespread nature of the violence. Suitcases with shifting contents do not touch any of that.

But they do give people something else to talk about. And in a political culture where disinformation is less a moral failing than a standard tool of survival, sometimes that is entirely enough.