Top Duterte critic’s acquittal pushes back on revenge politics in the Philippines

On July 25, 2016, as he was making his way to the stage to deliver his first State of the Nation Address as Philippine president, Mr Rodrigo Duterte took an unexpected detour and headed to where then Senator Leila de Lima was seated in the front row and shook her hand.

Ms De Lima did not expect the affable act, as Mr Duterte had, just days earlier, vowed to make her life a living hell now that he was president.

But she took it as a harmless, frivolous gesture from a man known for his many contradictions.

“He didn’t say anything. He just looked me straight in the eye… He had a childish smirk. I thought it was him being mischievous,” she said later.

What she should have done was look more deeply into Mr Duterte’s eyes. The playful pivot and the handshake were not a reconciling gesture, but an omen of the very long, very brutal ordeal Mr Duterte had in store for her.

Months later, on Feb 24, 2017, Ms De Lima was arrested and held at a jail cell inside the Philippine police’s headquarters in the capital Manila, where she remains to this day.

Government prosecutors accused her of abetting the illegal drugs trade by using her “power, position and authority” as justice minister under former president Benigno Aquino to “extort money from high-profile inmates”.

They alleged that she allowed jailed drug lords to continue to operate their trade from the national penitentiary in return for money used to fund her 2016 Senate campaign.

Mr Duterte’s allies in Congress paraded in their public hearings narcotics kingpins who said in exchange for the money they supposedly gave Ms De Lima, they got unfettered access to luxuries including golf carts, truckloads of beer, mobile phones, laptops and prostitutes.

One said he even managed to build his own recording studio, where he cut an album that became a modest hit and that he ran a brothel inside the prison compound.

Another inmate claimed Ms De Lima pursued an affair with him.

But over the years, the cases against the 63-year-old Ms De Lima have been crumbling.

Multiple witnesses have recanted their testimonies, claiming they were coerced into implicating Ms De Lima. Two witnesses have died.

On Friday, a court

acquitted her on one of two remaining drug trafficking charges

filed against her.

“Glorious day, glorious day. (This is the) beginning of my vindication,” she told reporters shortly after the verdict was read.

“I had no doubt from the very beginning that I will be acquitted in all the cases the Duterte regime has fabricated against me based on the merits and strength of my innocence,” she said in a statement she issued later.

Cannot let go of grievances

Mr Duterte is a man known to hold grudges.

As president, he upended the Philippines’ foreign policy –

pivoting towards China

and unleashing a steady stream of tirades at the United States – because he believed that US government agents once undermined his authority as mayor of a southern Philippine city by helping a self-styled American treasure hunter accused of committing arson escape his grasp.

He has also been nursing grievances ever since his one-time girlfriend was denied a US visa. He has since vowed never to travel to the US.

But he harboured a particular dislike for Ms De Lima because she challenged his almost maniacal war against the illegal drugs trade.

Ms De Lima and Mr Duterte first collided in 2009, when she opened, as head of the human rights commission, an investigation into the thousands killed by “death squads” purportedly nurtured by Mr Duterte to go after criminals and his political rivals when he ruled the southern city of Davao from 1986.

One of her witnesses was a former policeman who recounted how he and other death squad enforcers strangled and disembowelled drug suspects they picked up, hacked them to pieces, torched them and dumped their bodies at sea.

He said one of their victims was fed alive to a crocodile.

Ms De Lima kept investigating when Mr Aquino, the former president, appointed her justice minister in 2010. It was closed in 2016 when a court said it found no convincing evidence linking Mr Duterte to the drug killings.

But when she was elected a senator in 2016, she again opened an investigation, this time in Congress, against Mr Duterte, who had by then become president.

What happened next was that Ms De Lima landed inside a jail cell, and Mr Duterte managed to finish his six-year term as president relatively unscathed, his only defeat being a “crimes against humanity” case

filed against him before the International Criminal Court.

Tide is turning

But since Mr Ferdinand Marcos Jr was

elected president in 2022,

the tide has slowly been turning in Ms De Lima’s favour.

Mr Marcos has been walking back Mr Duterte’s most controversial policies, including his brutal drug war. He has said he would not interfere in cases pending against Ms De Lima.

That seemed to have signalled to the courts that leniency for the former senator is now back on the table.

Mr Marcos’ Justice Minister Crispin Remulla said in reaction to Ms De Lima’s acquittal on Friday: “The rule of law has prevailed, and it just points out to us that the independence of the judiciary is a basic foundation of our democratic system. So, it’s good. It’s good for us.”

But Ms De Lima’s campaigners say her long incarceration has already been a miscarriage of justice and that she should already be released now or at least allowed to post bail.

“The authorities must not delay her release any longer and allow her to be reunited with her family, friends and supporters after six long years,” Ms Montse Ferrer, Amnesty International’s interim deputy regional director for research, said in a statement.

Ms De Lima’s youngest brother Vicente de Lima II told reporters: “Today, truth reigned over fake news. Today, justice reigned over injustice.”

Human Rights Watch Asia division deputy director Phil Robertson said the acquittal demonstrated “the bogus, harassing nature of the charges”.

He said Ms De Lima was a victim of a “vindictive campaign to destroy her”.

“Freeing her now is critical so she can return to her family, leaving the injustice of years behind bars in pre-trial detention caused by Duterte’s vengeful cruelty,” he added.

Ms Ferrer said: “She should not have spent a single day in jail.”

For now, though, the lawyer and mother of two would just have to wait.