In less than a week since seizing Senate leadership, Alan Peter Cayetano has smuggled a fugitive senator into the chamber’s hallowed halls, presided over the spinning of a narrative on the chaos that attended that fugitive’s arrival, lost him into the night, and still found time to tell the press that Juan Ponce Enrile was like an uncle to him.
There is something particularly shameless about invoking the dead as a character witness. The dead cannot correct the record. They cannot stand up, as JPE did from his Senate chair to disclose to the room that the Cayetano family still owed him ₱37 million from a law partnership that did not end well. Appropriating the legacy of the conveniently deceased is merely one of the ways Alan Peter Cayetano has been managing borrowed things.
Cayetano wasn’t at JPE’s necrological rites. The family pointed that out. He delivered no eulogy, offered no public tribute, and left no record of his presence. This could have remained a minor biographical footnote that polite society quietly files away, except that the freshly installed Senate President decided JPE was not merely a colleague or a predecessor, but an uncle. Not even “Tito,” the ordinary honorific extended to family friends and ward bosses. Uncle. The intimate word, reserved, he clarified, for only two people outside his blood relations.
The Enrile family’s statement was precisely worded to convey the fury beneath its formal surface. One needs to read it slowly, as we did. Genuine relationships are measured not by public declarations made after a person has died, but by presence, sincerity, and the quiet acts of respect shown during grief. Note that the family did not even have to name him.
Consider what he has done with the Senate itself. On May 11, 2026, Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, absent from public life for months and wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity, reappeared at the Senate in Cayetano’s own car. Dela Rosa’s attendance was not incidental. The 13 votes Cayetano received were the exact minimum needed to become Senate President. As a vote of thanks, Dela Rosa was handed the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Public Order and Dangerous Drugs, a committee whose jurisdiction covers the very conduct for which the ICC wants him in The Hague.
Two days later, gunshots rang out through a Senate hallway. What happened next depends on whom one asks, which is itself a remarkable situation for an incident that occurred inside one of the most heavily surveilled government buildings in the country.
Cayetano took his position at the rostrum the following morning and declared, voice raised, that there was no question the Senate had been under attack. He addressed the assembled press directly: your lives were in danger last night. The country was then asked to believe this account largely on the basis of his word, since the physical evidence was proving uncooperative. The Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms announced it could find no CCTV footage of its own personnel during the incident. The cameras, it emerged, had captured only the tail end of the tactical formation. In a building on lockdown, ringed by police and marines, with multiple shots fired across a corridor, the angles that mattered had gone dark.
Senator Jinggoy Estrada was meanwhile captured on video telling colleagues the footage should be hidden — “itago” — before later claiming he merely meant it should be secured as evidence. Cayetano then parroted this clarification. The footage was secured so thoroughly that investigators were still attempting to recover it days later.
The NBI director said his agents held a firm view that the entire incident had been staged to allow Dela Rosa to escape. Cayetano rejected all of this with the wounded indignation of a man who regards skepticism as a personal attack. “Napakagaling ko naman mag-orchestrate ng lahat ng ’yan,” he said, adding that those who doubted his account were doubting Philippine democracy itself.
JPE survived a century of this country’s worst and most creative political maneuvering. He was not easily used, and he was not easily fooled. His family knows this, which is why they refused to allow someone who wasn’t even at the old man’s necrological rites to harvest his legacy for political warmth.
The Senate deserves better than this. Juan Ponce Enrile, whatever one may say of his own complicated history with this institution, deserved at the very least a Senate president honest enough not to claim kinship with someone he didn’t even bother to mourn.
