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Singapore: In Filipino, bato means rock. An appropriate nickname, then, for a man who in 2016 warned the nation’s crooks: “Not only will we crush you, we will bury you.”
Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, then 54, had just been handpicked by Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte as the nation’s next top cop, vaulting him over far better-credentialed and traditional candidates. But Duterte, sporting his own moniker, “The Punisher”, liked what he had seen in their native Mindanao, the sprawling island at the southern end of the Philippine archipelago.
As police chief of Davao City for about 20 months of Duterte’s tenure as mayor, Bato implemented the boss’ local “war on drugs”, a ruthless campaign to eliminate the city’s criminals, or at least those presumed to be.
Dela Rosa, “The Rock”, was just who the new president needed to nationalise his crackdown.
“Do your duty, and if in the process you kill 1000 persons because you were doing your duty, I will protect you,” Duterte told the police rank and file at dela Rosa’s inauguration in July 2016.
Not even two months later, dela Rosa told a Philippine Senate hearing that 712 people had been killed in police operations. Another 1067 had met their end at the hands of Duterte-loving vigilantes.
For more than two years, he was Duterte’s key police henchman. It was a fraction of the duration of the mayor-turned-president’s bloody, years-long campaign. Some rights groups estimate as many as 30,000 people, including children, were dead by the time Duterte’s stint as president ended in 2022.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) caught up with Duterte in March last year as he landed at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Armed with an arrest warrant, local officers detained the former president and promptly put him on a plane to the Netherlands to face charges in The Hague of crimes against humanity.
On Monday, the law came looking for dela Rosa, too, setting off several extraordinary days in the Philippine Senate, beginning with an apparent chase and culminating in a gunfight.
At the time of writing, dela Rosa’s whereabouts were unknown.
In Davao City, The Rock was sometimes called Vin Diesel after the American action star who also sports a bald head and hulking frame. Both names suited his brutish brand. But he is no witless thug. Years before entering Duterte’s employ, dela Rosa earned a master’s degree in public administration and a PhD in development administration, according to his government biography. In 2019, the staunch Duterteist was elected to the national Senate.
Upon his former boss’ arrest last year, dela Rosa declared on Facebook that “he was ready to join the old man” at The Hague so he could take care of him. His bravado faded in November, however, when rumours and leaks began circulating that the ICC had prepared a warrant for his arrest, similarly for alleged crimes against humanity committed in the drug wars.
Dela Rosa stopped turning up at the Senate. “There was so much talk that he shouldn’t be receiving any remuneration, considering that he was not functioning as a legislator in the first place,” said Professor Edmund Tayao, a university lecturer in the Philippines and president of consultancy Political Economic Elemental Researchers and Strategists, or PEERS.
So it was newsworthy when he arrived at work on Monday. The occasion was important because in the lower house, politicians were impeaching Vice President Sara Duterte – Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter and herself a presidential frontrunner for 2028. Among other things, she is accused of threatening the life of current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr, himself the wealthy progeny of a dictator.
Pro-Duterte politicians were attempting to get one of their own, Alan Peter Cayetano, elected as Senate president – a “coup”, according to some. Analysts suggested the move was at least in part because this chamber was casting its final impeachment judgment on the younger Duterte.
Dela Rosa’s presence there that day helped get Cayetano over the line in a 13-9 vote, with two abstentions.
As if by some cosmic, or somehow calculated, connection, Monday was also the day the ICC chose to unseal the arrest warrant for dela Rosa that had been in someone’s filing cabinet since November.
When National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) officers turned up to nab The Rock, he and his crew bolted through hallways and fire escapes into the “protective custody” of the Senate chamber and his ally Cayetano, who vowed not to hand him over.
For almost three full nights, dela Rosa holed up there, imploring Marcos not to allow him to be sent to The Hague. “We don’t know, one day, you might face the same hurdle, Mr President. You will know, you will feel what I feel right now,” he said in Filipino.
On Wednesday, the pacing of the heaving press pack and staff inside the complex gave way to gunshots: about 30 in all, causing panic in the building and plunging it into lockdown. No one was injured.
In the chaos, about 2.30am on Thursday, The Rock made his escape.
Who fired the shots and why is a point of political intrigue and conflicting accounts. People at first figured it was the NBI trying to storm the building to make their arrest.
But this was not the case, according to both Marcos and the NBI director. No government forces had been sent to get dela Rosa on Wednesday night.
The Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms, which provides security to the Senate and is led by an old friend of dela Rosa, fired most, if not all, of the shots, including the first – a warning to the armed NBI officers in an adjacent building.
Cayetano said the presence of armed men and drilling noises was interpreted as an attempt to invade the Senate, news site Rappler reported. Amid the finger-pointing and confusion, authorities arrested a 44-year-old NBI driver as the suspected gunman.
Among analysts and anti-Duterte politicians, the events of Wednesday night and Thursday morning increasingly look like a set-up to get The Rock out of the Senate and away from the NBI’s watch, a claim angrily rejected by his allies.
Richard Heydarian, a Filipino political scientist at Oxford University, said: “Effectively, what happened here is that Bato dela Rosa, who’s facing an ICC warrant of arrest, and who has been in hiding for months, came out of the cave, safely made it to the Senate, cast a vote to change the leadership of the Senate to get the pro-Duterte elements in power so that they can game the upcoming impeachment trial of Sarah Duterte. And then it looks like they made a drama … and Bato escapes. Again.”
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