The oligarch who hunted oligarchs

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

I’ve covered Philippine politics long enough to know that the words “dismantling the oligarchy” usually mean someone else is getting the seats. Rodrigo Duterte said it louder than most — called them a cancer, illustrious idiots, sons of bitches sitting in their private planes while the meter ran. People believed him and a lot of people still do. But then you look at the Senate in May 2026, held together by a fugitive’s vote and run by the children of the country’s richest man, and you start to wonder what exactly was dismantled.

On May 11, 2026, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano — Duterte’s own 2016 running mate, former foreign secretary, and one of the drug war’s most articulate defenders — engineered a Senate leadership coup timed to the hour that the House of Representatives was voting on Sara Duterte’s impeachment articles. Tito Sotto was out. Cayetano was in. The 13 senators who backed him include some of the most recognizable names in Philippine dynasties: Bong Go, Jinggoy Estrada, Robin Padilla, Rodante Marcoleta — and both Mark Villar and Camille Villar from that very rich political dynasty from Las Piñas.

Let that last part simmer for a moment.

Duterte spent years insisting he was dismantling oligarchic power. He threatened to “ruin the face” of Jaime Zobel de Ayala. He drove Roberto Ongpin out of PhilWeb after calling him out by name in a 2016 speech, watching the man’s shares crater 70 percent in a single week. He blocked ABS-CBN’s franchise renewal and told the Lopez family — one of the country’s oldest media dynasties — effectively to pack up. These were real consequences for real targets.

But while ABS-CBN was going dark, the Duterte-controlled National Telecommunications Commission was handing its broadcast frequencies to Advanced Media Broadcasting Systems — backed by Manny Villar, by then the Philippines’ richest man, whose fortune ballooned to $8.3 billion during the Duterte years. His son Mark served as DPWH secretary during that same period. His wife Cynthia, a Duterte Senate ally. His daughter Camille is now in the Senate. The family has held political office across four decades and multiple government positions simultaneously.

When asked in 2019 whether the Villars were a political dynasty, Senator Cynthia answered without flinching: “A good dynasty.” Which is, in its own way, the most honest thing anyone in Philippine politics has said in years.

The distinction Duterte was always drawing — between “bad” oligarchs and his own allies — was never ideological but tribal. The Ayalas and the Lopezes were “yellow,” critic-aligned, politically inconvenient. The Villars were not. Scholars have a name for this: oligarchic rotation. Each new administration doesn’t dismantle the system; it just redistributes the seats.

Now look at who is sitting in those seats in 2026.

Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa — the former police chief who oversaw Operation Tokhang, the anti-drug campaign linked to thousands of extrajudicial killings — has been absent from the Senate since November 2025, when an ICC arrest warrant for crimes against humanity was disclosed. He surfaced only on May 11, using Cayetano’s own car to get to the session hall, to cast the 13th vote that made the leadership change possible. Cayetano had promised him protective custody. Two days later, gunshots rang out inside the Senate building as NBI agents attempted to serve the warrant. Dela Rosa fled.

Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, also part of the Cayetano majority, surrendered to the Sandiganbayan on May 29 on large-scale corruption charges tied to flood control project kickbacks. Mark Villar, whose DPWH tenure is at the center of the same flood control scandal, has denied receiving kickbacks.

These are the people now decrying what they call the “persecution” of the Senate and the undermining of Philippine democracy.

It is worth taking that argument seriously for a moment, because it is not entirely without merit. Serving an ICC warrant on the Senate floor during a live plenary session is constitutionally fraught. Institutions matter, and how enforcement actions are conducted matters too. A fair reading of events has to acknowledge the optics problem on both sides.

But the argument collapses the moment you ask who is making it. The same senators invoking democratic norms are the ones who engineered a coup to control an impeachment trial. The same bloc citing due process sheltered a fugitive wanted for crimes against humanity inside a government building. And the same political family whose children now sit in the Senate majority was the primary beneficiary of a presidency that bypassed due process for thousands of ordinary Filipinos who had no senators to call, no cars to flee in, no protective custody to hide behind.

Duterte declared he could “die happy” having dismantled the oligarchy without martial law. He said it shortly after ABS-CBN went dark and shortly before the Villars got ABS-CBN’s frequencies.

Rebranding, not dismantling

The Senate today is not a victim of political persecution. It is what happens when a system built to protect power — and never seriously reformed — is finally forced to face its own contradictions. The institutions the Cayetano bloc is defending were the same institutions that looked the other way when Tokhang was killing the poor. The “democracy” they are protecting is one that has, for decades, meant oligarchs picking oligarchs to replace oligarchs.

What genuine reform looks like from here is not complicated to describe, even if it is very hard to do. It means letting the courts — Philippine and international — run their processes without legislative interference. It means taking the flood control corruption cases seriously regardless of who the respondents are. And it means, at some point, passing the anti-political dynasty law that has been pending in Congress for over three decades while families like the Villars accumulate positions and contracts and broadcast frequencies.

Duterte once asked Filipinos to believe he was different from the elites he raged against. A lot of people did believe him. That’s not something to condescend about — the anger at dynastic power was real and legitimate then, and it still is now.

But the proof was always going to be in the results. And the result — a Senate held together by a fugitive’s vote, cemented by the children of the country’s richest family, presided over by the man who once defended the drug war to the world — is not what dismantling oligarchy looks like.

It’s what replacing one set of oligarchs with another looks like.