There always comes a point when those in power make a high-profile arrest, as shown in the current and recent administrations. It was Joseph Estrada in Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s time, Arroyo in Benigno Aquino III’s time, and Leila de Lima in Rodrigo Duterte’s time. Now, under Ferdinand Marcos Jr., we have Alice Guo and Pastor Apollo Quiboloy. 

It seems to be a defining feature of presidents: Who do they arrest and what would the arrest mean for their reign?

But over the past few days our notions of what an arrest should look like were challenged, with the persons involved unintentionally reminding us of something that we’ve known all along—that politics is a grand spectacle and we are only too willing to believe it.

When Alice Guo was seen smiling in photographs with the arresting agents of the National Bureau of Investigation and, later, sandwiched between the giddy smiles of Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos and Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Gen. Rommel Marbil, it felt more like an unmasking of every villain in the room than the usual PR stunt that Filipino politicians so often do. No surprise there. The joke has always been on us.

To save face in the resulting backlash, Abalos and his cohorts would go on social media to detail a supposedly painstaking process of bringing back the dismissed mayor of Bamban, Tarlac, from Indonesia. The President would neutralize the smiling selfies with a euphemism, that we’re “the selfie capital of the world”—so akin to his mother’s past curating of perceptions. Alice Guo would proceed with her antics at the Sept. 9 Senate hearing, refusing to give any sincere answer, and even denying the inquiry of an unequivocal answer as to what her name is. 

And, as if in some magician’s spell, Abalos and the PNP couldn’t make Quiboloy show his face at the press conference formally announcing his arrest and also blurred his mug shots.

All this is so very different from past high-profile arrests where helicopters were employed to watch over Estrada’s house in San Juan as the warrant was served, where Arroyo in a neck brace and on a wheelchair attempted to fly out of the Philippines, and where De Lima faced the police and the media unashamed at her Senate office. In the narrative of capturing Public Enemies No. 1, we have arrived at a crossroads where we’re supposed to ask: What exactly should we feel with these arrests?

Sense of justice

In various periods and societies, prison serves as the most tangible representation of the existence of a moral code and a sense of justice. It draws the line between the law-abiding, normal, and boring citizens and those who do “wrong,” whatever “wrong” might mean to this or that set of mortals. This is why in our history, prison has always been tricky ground: Is it a place where criminals end up? Or a place where good people land for attempting to go against the great powers that lord over us?

In Jose Rizal’s novels, there is no shortage of arguably good prisoners: Tarsilo, the protagonist Crisostomo Ibarra himself, and the mythological giant Bernardo Carpio, chained to a cliff. In Juan Luna’s colossal Spoliarium, we look at the corpses of once-valiant gladiators, prisoners in a way, being dragged to the abyss. Those who believed in and fought for democracy during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. were all likely to end up in prison for various degrees of doing good. Even in the 2022 election ads of De Lima—now cleared of all the drug charges against her—at the center was the idea of good and simple Filipinos being imprisoned in bad governance, in poverty, and in the fear that Duterte so regularly conjured with the extrajudicial killings that occurred during his term. With a PNP that appears to be in the same mold as the guwardiya sibil, it’s no mystery how the business of the Bureau of Corrections could still sound moronic.

Make no mistake, however, in thinking that the police are toothless and incapable of applying force. For decades now, it has been clear how citizens who are not as well-known as Alice Guo or Apollo Quiboloy would normally be manhandled by the police for much lesser offenses. Authorities would even go way out of their way and tap the anticommunist task force to file dummy cases against religious persons, nongovernment workers, and the like, just to make the lives of the already suffering more difficult. There are still hundreds of political prisoners and disappeared persons.

Lest we forget, the baby River Nasino’s funeral in October 2020 was a gruesome show of force in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic. Though no one was killed on that day and the burial was for a 3-month-old baby, the show put up by the hundreds of heavily armed police officers guarding her mother, the then-imprisoned activist Reina Mae Nasino, felt more nauseating than watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. (Reina Mae was acquitted in July 2023 of charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives.)

It is clear that, in this country, the ones who benefit the most from imprisoning people are the police. It reinforces the illusion that they are in the service of good and allows them to shape a narrative wherein their use of force is governed, supposedly, by the people’s sense of right and wrong and, just as much, the people’s sense of justice. Unlike extrajudicial killings and other impulses by policemen holding guns, lawful arrests paint a direct relationship between the police and a thinking, moral state.

Remember Pharmally

This makes me wonder if there’s really any point in arresting those who would almost surely even enjoy privileged accommodations. When the scandal involving Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. blew up and the Dargani siblings were detained in August 2021, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine them being fed three times a day in a cell at the Senate—especially when they were captured trying to exit the Philippines through Davao International Airport—during a time when so many Filipinos could hardly feed themselves.

We need not go far and consider the case of Duterte. If he is ever arrested on whatever charge, he who increased the salaries of policemen to unprecedented amounts and is so loved by the institution would most certainly bask in the pleasures of Camp Crame or, as in Estrada’s case, in a resthouse in Tanay. Should he be arrested by the International Criminal Court, he probably won’t live long enough, anyway, and could even enjoy better health care in a prison cell abroad.

This is why it’s weird to take these recent arrests seriously, with or without Abalos and the PNP chief smiling with their prisoner. I take these worldly events with a grain of salt, what with our government’s rich history of arrests, imprisonments, and everyday malformation of the idea of liberty.

One of the many reasons I remain a practicing Catholic is the belief that in imagining Heaven and Hell, we can’t even begin to understand how God made them to be like. In my attempt at informing myself of a possible Hell, I do not discount the prospect of a prison of souls that exists, at the same time, here on Earth and down below. Where corrupt leaders—many of them still happily dancing today—feed their bone marrow to the devil every day.

DLS Pineda is an assistant professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature-College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines Diliman.

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