Bato's Scary Skit

Nice to see Senator Ronald “Bato” De La Rosa back. He looks burly and beefy. Months of hiding must have kept him busy around dumbbells, without necessarily being so with bells.

On Monday, 11 May 2026, he suddenly appeared on the Senate floor to help his kind elect Alan Cayetano as yet again the new Senate president, replacing Tito Sotto. How he made it in time to re-constitute a new majority is a masterpiece in precision. It is comparable to a Michael Jordan game-winning play, with zero seconds left, and Calvin Abueva choking him from behind. The timing of his raucous entry was impeccable. For a feat that could alter the course of the nation’s history, he could be the hero of the day.    

He looked genuinely worried about being hauled away in handcuffs. It seems the full scale of the unfolding plot was beyond him. Denied to thousands of suspects felled by assassins’ bullets in a drug war he supervised, there is for him a back alley the width of a runway on which he can flee anytime he wishes, but he does not seem to see it. Yet. Which is how any mastermind would want it.

Because it is possible—like how the government appears to be making a show of arresting fugitives like Zaldy Co and Atong Ang—he and his antics are being preserved for future use.

What complicates the reading of Bato is the mosaic façade. His tough guy image is a handy cover for a chicken, which is an outrageous insult to game birds that, if you ask Atong’s kind, fight to the last drop of their blood. The bravado he displayed months ago over the threat of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant turned to horror when the threat, in the form of arresting officers, materialized before him.

When he dashed towards the Senate Session Hall on that fateful afternoon, using the staircase instead of the elevator, one being for a clandestine emergency flight and the other for the doodling crowd, the sight of a fleeing prey was in full display. That scared the wits out of his fans, seeing how he could have ended worse than being bruised in one finger, probably from a gecko-like grip on the rail to keep his balance. That would have been a waste of a national treasure: a rare earth, no matter how thick the dirt that covers it; a gemstone, no matter how pliant; a rock, no matter how soluble.  

Not to be outdone, a supposedly staff member of the Senate Sergeant at Arms limped upstairs to magnify the optics for the claim that NBI agents had mauled him.  

All these are part theater and part destiny. Bato may have saving Vice President Sara Duterte as his sole motivation. Still, he deprives a nation of its restful sleep, a country of confederates engaged in perpetuating control by political dynasties. From his threesome with Senator Bong Go and Davao City Mayor Baste Duterte, nothing but a profession of mutual edification can be heard in public, yet at least two of them could, in private, be positioning themselves to steal the spotlight if and when Sara is out of the way. She is the ultimate prize that is better left unclaimed.   

The latest Senate shake-up suggests having at least two objectives. One is to block or at least delay the trial of Sara’s impeachment case until something shitty—like a wet blanket from the courts—happens. That Cayetano denies it makes it obvious: for the world has learned to decode the truth from the opposite of anything he says. The other is a variation of the main line, which is to build the stage conceited enough to make it easier to frame the charges as nothing more than partisan hubris.

Both, however, can be undermined by public pressure. A Sara-friendly Senate can better manage perception, because left alone, in the order of WYSISWYG (what you see is what you get), the evidence presented at the “pre-trial” conducted by the Justice Committee of the House of Representatives is enough to condemn a saint.

At any rate, Bato’s surprise appearance clinched it for senators hurt by the mention of their links to anomalies in committee reports. The way it unraveled was so atypical that no decent transition seeker may replicate it. The ground has been paved for the veneration of the corrupt. A nation tired of official malfeasance had hoped to reshape its history, but that longing is now in doubt given a Senate that owes its dramatic transfiguration to Bato’s heroic run.  

Sotto said the National Bureau of Investigation told him that Bato would resurface on the day he must have thought he was going to be unseated.  

If they truly wanted to, there was no way the combined forces of the NBI and the Department of the Interior and Local Government-Philippine National Police could fail in the task of denying Bato his niche in history. Never mind the supposedly ICC arrest warrant ready to be served; there was a subpoena, whose subsequent recall by the DILG showed that somebody was bluffing all along.

The takeaway?

Don’t let the administration’s display of incompetence fool you. We never know if the impeachment of the vice president, whose rich kid tantrums are surprisingly missing recently, was meant, away from the public eye, to placate Martin Romualdez, and the Senate shake-up that augurs well for Sara to keep her lead in the race to 2028, was meant to keep the promises made between the fumbling partners of the Uniteam.

There is honor, after all, even among thieves. They—or the next generation of deeply-rooted dynasts—will one day meet again. Why burn the bridges today when organized looting is easier done among allies tomorrow? Kind promotes kind.