Sara Duterte fires back: My father understood spirit of Edsa

Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte Carpio (INQUIRER FILE PHOTO)

DAVAO CITY— Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte on Friday recalled being woken by her father, then city prosecutor Rodrigo Duterte, at the height of the people power revolt that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

Sara remembered how at seven her father took the entire Duterte family to the San Pedro Cathedral, where the bells tolled and people danced on the streets to celebrate the end of Marcos’ brutal two decade regime.

“On the evening of Feb. 25, 1986, I was playing in dreamland when my father interrupted my slumber and told me to get dressed because we have to go downtown,” said Sara, now 39.

“While we were huddled in the car, he told us, ‘Remember this night. Do not forget it,’” she said of her father, who at 71 has landed the job as the country’s 16th president but has found himself on the defensive for his antidrugs crackdown that has left more than 7,000 dead.

“I have a memory of myself standing on the stairs of the San Pedro church bell tower, listening to the incessant ringing of the bells. I did not understand what was happening, but I surmised that it must be something very important because my father had to get me out of bed to watch cheering and partying adults on the streets,” she said.

Worse than 100 Dutertes

She said her father “perfectly understood what the spirit of Edsa” was, directly responding to Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas, the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines who had alluded to her father as the man who “defaced” the memory of the revolution.

Sara branded Villegas as “deeply worse than a hundred President Dutertes,” and said her father understood the spirit of Edsa better than the archbishop.

Villegas earlier wrote an open letter to the late Cardinal Sin, remembering the People Power 31 years ago and alluded to the present day’s campaign against drugs that has concerned rights groups.

“Four days of bloodless revolution! Wow!” Villegas wrote.  “Now eight months of relentless killings of the poor in the name of ‘change’! It is a nightmare, Your Eminence! It is a shame,” he added.

Villegas scored historical revisionism, with Mr. Duterte allowing a hero’s reburial for Marcos.

“The plunderers are now heroes … How long can we endure?” Villegas asked.

But Sara would have none of it, and on Friday stressed that the problems besetting the country started long before her father became President.

“How dare you say that my father has single-handedly defaced the memory of the Edsa revolution?” she asked. “Since 1986 and until seven months ago, I remember that our nation has been hounded by corruption, crime, territorial war of gangs and drug lords, extrajudicial killings, narcopolitics, terrorism, protracted rebellion, abuse of power in government, political bickering and the entry of foreign mafias.”

“It surely did not start when President Duterte took office,” she said, adding that she found it hard to understand why Edsa has become the “standard definition of freedom for our country.”

“And this standard is forced down our throats by a certain group of individuals who thinks [it is] better than everyone else,” Sara said. “These are the elite and their friends, including Archbishop Villegas.”

She also protested Villegas’ tag that her father was a “pimp of the Edsa spirit.”

“How dare you say that we are trying to prostitute the meaning of Edsa?” she said.

Yellow Friday

Mr. Duterte’s mother, Soledad, popularly known as “Nanay Soleng,” was one of the leaders of the Yellow Friday movement in Davao City.

“She was always there in the planning and meetings,” Oscar Casaysay, a student activist in the 1980s, said of the President’s mother, who was active in the Justice for Aquino, Justice for All (Jaja) Movement in Davao City.

A widow of former Gov. Vicente Duterte of the undivided Davao, she was such a respected personality that the group always delegated her to become a member of the “negotiating team,” to deal with the police during protest marches and rallies, Casaysay said.

When Corazon Aquino assumed the presidency, she offered the vice mayoralty seat to Nanay Soleng, who declined. But she made a counteroffer to let her son, Rodrigo, then a government prosecutor, to take her place instead.

Mr. Duterte, as a young prosecutor, was already known in the national democratic movement at the time. A source from the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines recalled how Mr. Duterte used to help in cases involving political detainees.

“As a government prosecutor, he would look into the loopholes in cases filed against arrested activists and suspected rebels,” the source said.

Sara said her father won the presidency despite Villegas’ effort “to put into power a leader, someone who is definitely not Rodrigo Duterte.”

“When your friend failed as a President, I cannot remember you calling it the rape of Edsa,” Sara said, referring to former President Benigno Aquino III. “You just swept it under your glitzy rugs and you moved on, back to business—back to acting as if you can save us all from hell.”

She also called Villegas and his “group” a “bunch of delusional hypocrites.”

“You preach about freedom as if you invented it, as if it is your gift to us. Let me tell you what freedom is. It is to live a life that is free from your selective moral standard. This is the meaning of Edsa,” Sara added.

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