Satirical Essay on ICC Allegations Against Duterte
Satirical Essay on ICC Allegations Against Duterte
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
February 24, 2026
Introduction
What happens when a tribunal of distant judges reads a city’s CCTV like a foreign language and mistakes a control room for a command post? How does a civic apparatus designed to coordinate safety become, in the fevered shorthand of accusation, a conspiratorial switchboard for murder? These are not merely rhetorical flourishes; they are the premise of a curious legal and rhetorical drama that invites satire, skepticism, and a certain esoteric delight in the mismatch between institutional form and interpretive fantasy. This essay takes that mismatch as its starting point and, with an academic wink, explores how governance, technology, and narrative collide when a prosecutor abroad reads municipal public-safety practice as criminal orchestration.
Governance and the Public Safety Apparatus
Is it so strange that a mayor’s office would host a command-and-control center for public safety? If one imagines municipal governance as a theater, the Public Safety and Security Command Center (PSSCC) is the stage manager: it cues lights, listens for cues, and dispatches actors when the script calls for it. Why then does the stage manager become the playwright of violence in some accounts? The PSSCC, established by executive order, was designed to integrate information flows—CCTV feeds, radio chatter, incident reports—so that the city might respond coherently to emergencies. Does coordination equal command? If a mayor watches footage and asks, “Who did this?” is that an order or an inquiry?
The esoteric delight here is in the category error. Administrative oversight, supervisory review, and investigatory curiosity are being read as criminal intent. How often do we conflate proximity to information with authorship of action? If a mayor reviews CCTV to identify perpetrators, is he not performing the most basic duty of an executive charged with public safety? Or must every gaze upon a screen be presumed to be a finger on a trigger? The rhetorical question is not idle: it exposes how legal imagination can leap from observation to orchestration without pausing to examine institutional roles.
The Agdao Incident and the Logic of Attribution
Consider the Agdao Market triple murder as a case study in attribution. Who did what, and how do we know? The defense narrative insists that the mayor’s involvement was investigatory—reviewing footage, coordinating with the PSSCC, and seeking accountability. The prosecution’s narrative, as summarized in the premise, reads the same actions as evidence of ordering. Which reading is more plausible? Which is more faithful to the grammar of municipal governance?
Here the essay adopts a satirical posture: imagine a world where every mayor who watches CCTV is indicted for the crimes that appear on screen. Would municipal leaders henceforth avoid cameras, lest their curiosity be criminalized? Would the very tools designed to make cities safer become legal landmines? The satire is not merely comic; it is diagnostic. It asks whether legal reasoning has become so hungry for causation that it mistakes correlation for command, supervision for sanction, and institutional oversight for criminal conspiracy.
Institutional Roles and the Semantics of Supervision
What is the semantic difference between “coordinating” and “commanding”? Between “reviewing evidence” and “ordering an operation”? Language matters because law is a language game with high stakes. The PSSCC’s functions—day-to-day operations, crisis response, combined security operations—are, on their face, administrative and protective. They facilitate information exchange and enable law enforcement to act within legal frameworks. If a mayor uses those mechanisms to review footage, is he not exercising oversight rather than issuing kill orders?
The rhetorical device of hyperbole helps illuminate the absurdity: imagine a mayor who, upon seeing a crime on CCTV, says, “Find the culprits.” Does that sentence, stripped of context, become an incitement to murder? Or is it the ordinary imperative of governance? The esoteric twist is to treat ordinary administrative verbs as criminal verbs. The humor arises when one pictures a lexicon of municipal verbs—“coordinate,” “augment,” “review”—being redefined overnight into a criminal thesaurus.
Anecdote and the Human Scale
Permit an anecdote: a city official, late at night, watches a grainy feed of a market scuffle. He calls the PSSCC operator, asks for timestamps, and requests that patrols be sent to secure the area. He does not shout orders to kill; he asks for help. Yet in the court of public imagination, the grainy feed becomes a cinematic montage of conspiracy. Why does the human scale—an anxious official trying to protect citizens—shrink into a caricature of villainy?
Anecdotes matter because they restore context. They remind us that governance is messy, improvisational, and often reactive. They also remind us that legal narratives that omit the human scale risk producing caricatures that are rhetorically satisfying but factually hollow. Is it not the case that the more dramatic the accusation, the more we should demand the mundane paperwork that proves it? Where are the orders, the memos, the chain-of-command directives that would transform a supervisory act into a criminal one? The rhetorical question is a gentle rebuke to narrative appetite.
Satire of the Prosecutorial Gaze
If satire is the art of exposing folly by exaggeration, then what better target than a prosecutorial gaze that reads municipal safety infrastructure as a murder manual? Picture, for a moment, a prosecutor peering at a city’s CCTV matrix and seeing not cameras but puppets. The satire thickens when one imagines the prosecutor mistaking the PSSCC’s CCTV wall for a war room and the mayor’s review for a battle plan. Is this a misreading or a deliberate rhetorical flourish designed to make a case more compelling than the evidence allows?
The humor here is dark and academic: it lampoons the tendency to prefer narrative coherence over evidentiary nuance. It asks whether the law, in its zeal to name wrongdoing, sometimes forgets to ask whether the alleged wrongdoing fits the grammar of the institutions it indicts. If the PSSCC is a hub for coordination, then the mayor’s engagement with it is a civic duty. To call that duty a crime is to invert the moral grammar of governance.
Rhetorical Questions as Method
Why rely on rhetorical questions? Because they force the reader to inhabit the space between claim and proof. They are the intellectual equivalent of a pause, a moment in which the mind must choose whether to accept a dramatic claim or to demand substantiation. When the prosecution asserts that reviewing CCTV equals ordering murder, the rhetorical question asks: where is the causal chain? Where are the directives, the communications, the orders that would convert supervision into sanction?
Rhetorical questions also serve a pedagogical function. They teach the reader to be skeptical of narratives that leap from observation to culpability. They invite the reader to consider alternative explanations—administrative oversight, investigatory curiosity, crisis management—before accepting the most sensational interpretation. In a legal culture that prizes proof, the rhetorical question is a humble instrument of epistemic modesty.
Esoteric Reflections on Evidence and Narrative
There is an esoteric pleasure in parsing how evidence is curated. Which speeches are counted, which CCTV frames are selected, which memos are highlighted—these choices shape the story. The defense claims that many speeches cited by the prosecution contain exculpatory language; the prosecution selects the most inflammatory lines. Is this not a familiar pattern in political storytelling? The esoteric point is that evidence is not merely discovered; it is curated, framed, and narrated.
Humor emerges when one imagines an evidence curator with a checklist: “Find the angriest sentence; crop the context; present as policy.” The absurdity is instructive. It reveals how legal narratives can be sculpted by selective attention. The remedy is procedural: demand full context, insist on documentary chains, and resist the seduction of the single, dramatic clip.
Conclusion
So what are we to make of a prosecution that reads a mayor’s review of CCTV as an order to kill? Is this a tragic misreading, a rhetorical strategy, or a symptom of a legal imagination that prefers narrative drama to institutional nuance? The satirical answer is to imagine a world where every municipal safety official is indicted for curiosity; the serious answer is to insist that law must remain tethered to institutional reality.
If the PSSCC is a hub for coordination, then the mayor’s engagement with it is not a smoking gun but a civic obligation. To conflate oversight with orchestration is to mistake the grammar of governance for the grammar of crime. And if the international legal imagination wishes to hold local leaders accountable, it must first learn the language of local institutions; otherwise, it risks turning cameras into conspiracies and command centers into crime scenes.
Is that too much to ask of a tribunal? Perhaps. But if law is to be just, it must be patient with the mundane, skeptical of the sensational, and rigorous in its demand for proof. If it is not, then the cameras that were meant to protect us will become, in the telling, instruments of accusation rather than instruments of safety. Who benefits from such a reversal, and who pays the price? That, finally, is the question that should keep us awake long after the satirical laughter has faded.
Ctto:
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
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