Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the Rock, arrest warrant

Singapore: Bato means rock in Filipino. A fitting nickname, then, for a man who warned the country’s crooks in 2016: “We’ll not only crush you, we’ll bury you.”

Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, then 54, had been chosen by the Philippines’ new president-elect, Rodrigo Duterte, to be the country’s next top cop, putting him ahead of far more well-qualified and traditional candidates. But Duterte, who uses his own nickname, “The Punisher,” liked what he saw in their home state of Mindanao, the sprawling island at the southern tip of the Philippine archipelago.

Bato, who served as Davao City’s police chief for nearly 20 months during Duterte’s tenure as mayor, implemented the boss’s local “war on drugs,” a brutal campaign to eliminate the city’s criminals, or at least those deemed to be so.

Dela Rosa, aka “The Rock,” was the person the new president needed to nationalize his repression.

“Do your duty, and if you kill 1,000 people in the process for doing your duty, I will protect you,” Duterte told police at dela Rosa’s inauguration in July 2016.

Less than two months later, dela Rosa told the Philippine Senate hearing that 712 people had been killed in police operations. Another 1,067 people ended up at the hands of vigilantes who loved Duterte.

He was Duterte’s top police aide for more than two years. That was a fraction of the duration of the mayor-turned-president’s bloody years-long campaign. Some rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people, including children, have died by 2022, when Duterte’s term as president ends.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) caught Duterte landing at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport in March last year. With an arrest warrant, local officers detained the former president and immediately put him on a plane to the Netherlands to face charges of crimes against humanity in The Hague.

On Monday, the law also came calling for dela Rosa, setting off a series of extraordinary days in the Philippine Senate that began with an apparent chase and culminated in a gunfight.

At the time of this writing, dela Rosa’s whereabouts were unknown.

In Davao City, The Rock was sometimes called Vin Diesel, in memory of the American action star who also had a bald head and a portly build. Both names suited his rugged brand. But he’s not a mindless thug. Years before taking Duterte’s job, dela Rosa had earned a master’s degree in public administration and a doctorate in development management, according to his government biography. In 2019, the Duterte loyalist was elected to the national Senate.

After his former boss was arrested last year, dela Rosa declared on Facebook that he was “ready to join the old man” in The Hague so he could take care of him. But his courage faded in November when rumors and leaks began to circulate that the ICC was preparing an arrest warrant for him, as well as for crimes against humanity allegedly committed in the drug wars.

Dela Rosa stopped coming to the Senate. “There was a lot of talk that he shouldn’t be receiving any remuneration, given that he wasn’t serving as a legislator in the first place,” said Professor Edmund Tayao, a lecturer at a university in the Philippines and president of the consultancy Political Economic Elemental Researchers and Strategists (PEERS).

That’s why it was newsworthy that he showed up for work on Monday. This was important because politicians in the lower house were impeaching vice president Sara Duterte, Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter and herself a frontrunner in the 2028 presidential race. Duterte is accused of, among other things, threatening the life of current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr., himself the rich kid of a dictator.

Pro-Duterte politicians were trying to get one of their own, Alan Peter Cayetano, elected Senate president in what some called a “coup.” Analysts suggested the move was at least partly because that chamber had made the final impeachment decision against the younger Duterte.

Dela Rosa’s presence that day helped Cayetano cross the line with a vote of 13 to 9, with two abstentions.

As if by a cosmic or somehow calculated connection, Monday was also the day the ICC chose to open an arrest warrant for dela Rosa, who had been in someone’s filing cabinet since November.

When National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) officers showed up to capture The Rock, he and his team made their way through corridors and fire escapes and into the “protective custody” of the Senate chamber and his ally Cayetano, who vowed not to turn him in.

Dela Rosa hid there for almost three nights, begging Marcos not to allow her to be sent to The Hague. “We don’t know, one day you may face the same obstacle, Mr. President. You will know, you will feel what I feel right now,” he said in Filipino.

On Wednesday, the tempo of the press group and staff inside the complex gave way to the sound of gunfire: around 30 people in total, causing panic in the building and placing it on lockdown. No one was injured.

Amid the chaos, around 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, The Rock escaped.

Who fired the shots and why is the subject of political intrigue and contradictory explanations. At first, people thought it was the NBI trying to storm the building to arrest them.

But according to both Marcos and the NBI director, this was not the case. No government forces had been sent to take dela Rosa on Wednesday night.

The Sergeant-at-Arms Office, which provided security for the Senate and was run by an old friend of dela Rosa, fired most, but not all, of the shots, including the first; It was a warning to armed NBI officers in the adjacent building.

Cayetano said the presence of armed men and drilling sounds were interpreted as an attempt to invade the Senate, news site rapper reported. Amid the finger-pointing and confusion, authorities arrested the 44-year-old NBI driver as a suspected gunman.

Among analysts and anti-Duterte politicians, the events of Wednesday night and Thursday morning increasingly look like a trap to remove The Rock from the Senate and NBI’s oversight; this claim was angrily denied by his allies.

Richard Heydarian, a Filipino political scientist at the University of Oxford, said: “What actually happened here was that Bato dela Rosa, who was facing an ICC arrest warrant and had been in hiding for months, came out of the cave, got to the Senate safely, held a vote to change the Senate leadership to bring pro-Duterte elements to power, and so they played with the impending impeachment trial of Sarah Duterte. And then it looks like they made a drama … and Bato escapes again.”

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