The balaclava-wearing fugitive

They found him at last, a remnant of the powerful man he used to be, the man who barked kill orders to his subordinates, now cowering inside a long-unused septic tank, in the foul company of vermin of every size and shape, his head and face concealed by a balaclava with fancy prints that looked like Jesus with aviator sunglasses.

“He is down there,” a member of the search team said to her buddy, but almost in a whisper, as if she was in a sacred space and moment that she wanted to hold still. She nodded to her superior, who was several meters away, then took several steps back to let the men in her team take over while she restrained the tracker dog who would not stop barking, a Belgian Malinois named Rockee. It had been a long chase.

The search and investigation team from the crime bureau gathered around the septic tank’s opening and beamed their flashlights into the dank, dark bottom. Silently and almost simultaneously, they made thumbs-up signs to one another. Cameras were recording, a ladder was ready, even a fire extinguisher. Almost everyone had bulletproof vests on.

“Senator Rosaldo, sir? We are here to arrest you, sir. We will get you out of there. You are in safe hands, sir,” the team head said. He was using a megaphone. “Please put down your firearm if you have one. Please remove your head cover so we can see your face clearly.”

It was early in the evening, and the full moon was just beginning to rise overhead. The sky was cloudless, and the few trees in the abandoned compound cast strange shadows on the dry grass. Here, just of Metro Manila, intermittent sudden thunderstorms have been drenching the landscape with the long-awaited agua bendita, signaling the end of the scorching Philippine summer, the end of the Marian month of May, of loud fiestas and Maytime escapades.

For Senator Rosaldo, it has been an escapade of sorts—if it can be called that—in the last four months, starting when he received loose information that a warrant of arrest for him from the International Criminal Court in The Hague had arrived and was ready to be served. But why, he wondered while speaking to a journalist who had tracked him down, was there no move from any government agency to get him? Was it a strategy to make him complacent?

Senator Rosaldo’s police instinct did what he thought was best. He decided to make himself rare to the public and the media. And so nothing was heard from him since. He did not report to his Senate office, absented himself without official leave. No work, but receiving hefty pay as a senator of the republic. His staff, mostly family members, continued to receive theirs, amounting to several million monthly, courtesy of taxpayers.

When Senator Rosaldo showed up in the Senate in mid-May after months in hiding, it was to cast his vote for “a change of leadership” in the Senate, to form a new majority and oust the sitting Senate President. He delivered the needed 13th vote, he proudly told an interviewer while in the Senate’s protective custody. But a day before that interview, all hell broke loose when arresting agents almost caught up with him in the emergency stairwell where he scampered up, fell, rose and reached the protective space that was the Senate area where he ensconced himself for a couple of days while “under protective custody” until, after having dutifully delivered his vote for the new Senate president, it was time for him to slip out into the dark. His leaving was straight out of a mediocre cops-and-robbers cinema flick that hogged the next day’s news headlines. But that is another story.

And so began the second episode of his life as a fugitive from justice, evading the long arm of the law that is supposed to take him to where his former boss, the foul-mouthed former president has been detained for more than one year, where he once vowed he should also be to show his loyalty and affection for the man who made him his chief enforcer and executioner. Didn’t his former boss, say at a Senate hearing investigating extrajudicial killings that yes, he, that guy sitting there, was a member of his death squad? A deadly flattery it was, that sealed the man’s fate. Because long before that, in the southern city where his boss once ruled, they were already of one mind and guts—to kill and to kill effectively with their team of hitmen inspired by Scaramanga, the man with the golden gun in a James Bond movie.

For when the boss barked, Rosaldo chased and bit his quarry. He was the chief enforcer. The two of them were again a pair in the national vicious, brutal war against drugs, where the small fry—thousands of them, including innocents—got fried, and the big fish were allowed to sail away into the blue-black sea with their purloined wealth.

But now the time has come. The man wearing a balaclava has revealed his face and stated his name to his captors. “Yes, I am Warlito Rosaldo, a senator of the Republic of the Philippines.”