The headlines these days are a parade of horror, spectacle, and sideshow: An impeachment complaint hounds Sara Duterte, while the Senate drags its feet. A new witness emerges in the long-cold case of the missing sabungeros. Allegations of mass murder, a business tycoon and a controversial actress named as masterminds, and bodies allegedly dumped in the depths of Taal Lake.
Is this how our national conscience is being managed? One crisis to eclipse another?
Let’s start where the circus began: The impeachment.
Filed with theatrical timing and unmistakable political weight, the impeachment complaint against Sara Duterte didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of long-simmering frustration over her actions, alliances, and entitlement to power. The fallout has been swift, flooding the airwaves, hijacking headlines, and exposing deep cracks in the Marcos-Duterte alliance that was never built to last.
Then, just as the spotlight sharpened on Sara Duterte’s possible downfall, another beast resurfaced from the shadows: The sabungeros.
In 2022, the disappearances began quietly. One man gone after a cockfight, another after logging into e-sabong. It wasn’t until the number hit 34 that the country took notice. Then, silence. Years of agony for the families. No arrests, no bodies, no justice.
Suddenly – this week – a “breakthrough.” “Alyas Totoy,” a whistleblower now working with authorities, claims all 34 were killed. That they were dumped in Taal Lake. That the true number may be closer to 100. That the motive was e-sabong fraud. That a business tycoon and a female celebrity are involved.
Are we watching truth surface, or just another wave of misdirection meant to split our focus and attention?
No one’s denying that the sabungeros case deserves attention. It’s a national shame that it took this long for authorities to even suggest using modern tools, a Japanese submersible, no less, to search the lake. But why now? Why this week?
In the Philippines, political timing is almost always calculated. Just as Sara Duterte faces the biggest political threat to her career, the horrors buried in the sabungeros case finally resurface, this time with chilling detail.
The fact that no bodies have been recovered doesn’t erase the horror. It deepens it. The families have been waiting for years. Anonymous or not, the informant has already done more than what authorities managed in two years of inaction. And if the celebrity angle feels like bait, it only reflects how long the powerful have gotten away with everything because no one dares to speak their names.
Meanwhile, Duterte’s loyalists are working overtime to shut down the impeachment, shielding Sara from scrutiny the same way they did when she bungled the Department of Education. But the public hasn’t forgotten her disastrous leadership, her arrogance, or the billions wasted under her watch. The complaint isn’t just some sideshow, it’s long overdue.
It’s a national game of duck, cover, and spin.
And the casualties? The grieving families, who once again are being dragged through a media frenzy without closure. The public, forced to toggle between suspicion and exhaustion. And truth, which is constantly being buried deeper, beneath headlines, beneath scandals, beneath a lake.
We must demand clarity. Not political smokescreens.
If the sabungeros were murdered, find the bodies. Name the killers. Hold them accountable in court, not just in headlines.
If the impeachment is rooted in real violations, then pursue it, openly, lawfully, without the circus.
But stop feeding the public one scandal after another just to bury the last. We’re not just choking, we’re suffering from a kind of national indigestion, unable to process the flood of outrage, half-truths, and political sideshow.
Justice is neither a circus nor a spectacle. It is a duty owed to the living and the dead – a process grounded in truth, not theatrics.
