Why the Sabungero Disappearances May Haunt Duterte at The Hague?

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When the Missing Become Evidence: Why the Sabungero Disappearances May Haunt Duterte at The Hague

January 23, 2026

Atty. Kristina Conti’s statement—that the alleged link between the drug war and the disappearance of the missing sabungeros could, if proven, serve as additional evidence in the crimes against humanity case against former President Rodrigo Duterte—is neither speculative rhetoric nor political hyperbole. It is a sober legal assessment grounded in how international criminal law actually works. At its core, her point is devastatingly simple: when the same perpetrators, the same police units, or the same covert “death squad” structures surface across multiple streams of violence, what emerges is not coincidence but pattern. And pattern is the lifeblood of crimes against humanity.

The case of the missing sabungeros—over 30 cockfight enthusiasts who vanished between 2021 and 2022 after participating in e-sabong—shocked the nation not merely because of their disappearance, but because of how familiar the script felt. Men last seen in police custody or under police watch. CCTV gaps. Official denials followed by belated admissions. Witnesses surfacing years later. Allegations of bodies dumped in lakes. During the Duterte administration, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and police narratives of “nanlaban” became disturbingly routine. The sabungero cases erupted publicly near the end of Duterte’s term, but the machinery alleged to be behind them—rogue police units, shadowy intermediaries, and an entrenched culture of impunity—was already well established.

This is precisely where Atty. Conti’s analysis becomes legally potent. The International Criminal Court does not require that every victim fall under the same label or motive. What it requires is proof of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, carried out pursuant to or in furtherance of a state or organizational policy. If investigators can demonstrate that police officers or death squads implicated in drug war killings were also involved in the disappearance and killing of sabungeros, the legal implication is explosive: it strengthens the argument that these were not isolated crimes, but manifestations of an organized, tolerated, or protected system of violence.

Conti’s remarks, echoed in interviews with ABS-CBN and ANC, align squarely with established ICC jurisprudence. In cases from Latin America to Africa, the Court has relied on overlapping perpetrators, recurring methods, and institutional tolerance to prove systematic criminal conduct. Her point that such links would “add to the concept” of a criminal syndicate or alternative police death squad is not conjecture—it is textbook international criminal law. It reinforces command responsibility, showing how unlawful acts persist not despite leadership, but because of it.

Crucially, this argument does not require reckless accusations. It requires evidence—evidence that the Department of Justice, the Philippine National Police, and all investigative bodies are duty-bound to surface. Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla himself has acknowledged overlaps in personnel linked to both drug war operations and the e-sabong cases. That admission alone makes delay indefensible. Every day of inaction risks not only domestic justice, but the integrity of the Philippines’ position before the international community.

Why does this matter? Because accountability is not revenge—it is prevention. The families of the missing sabungeros are not collateral actors in a geopolitical drama; they are civilians whose loved ones vanished into a system that has yet to fully explain itself. Finding the truth is essential not only to give them justice, but to dismantle the architecture of impunity that allowed thousands to die during the drug war and allowed others to disappear in its long shadow. If the same networks that allegedly executed street-level killings also silenced sabungeros, activists, or other civilians, then the Duterte drug war cannot be sanitized as a misguided policy—it must be examined as a criminal enterprise enabled by power.

The demand, therefore, is urgent and unavoidable. The DOJ must accelerate prosecutions. The PNP must open its records without obstruction. Witnesses must be protected, not intimidated. And the government must resist the temptation to treat the sabungero case as a public-relations liability rather than a moral and legal reckoning. Justice delayed here is not neutral—it actively corrodes the rule of law.

Atty. Kristina Conti’s statement should be read not as provocation, but as warning. The missing do not stay missing forever in international law. They reappear as evidence. And when they do, they do not merely indict individual officers—they expose the system that allowed them to vanish. The truth about the sabungeros is not a side story to the drug war. It may yet become one of its most damning chapters. #LaVeritePH #WeAreLaVerite

#EndImpunityPH

#AccountabilityNow

#JusticeForSabungeros

Claude Monet

Incredible and Strange Everything 

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His teacher called him a disgrace. His father said he was ruining his life. The art critics called his paintings unfinished garbage. Today, those 'garbage' paintings sell for over $100 million—and changed how the entire world sees beauty.

Paris, 1840. Claude Monet was born into a family that ran a modest business. His future was already decided: inherit the shop, live respectably, make steady money. A safe, predictable life.

But Claude couldn't stop drawing.

While other students copied their lessons, Claude filled his notebooks with sketches and caricatures. His teachers were furious. They sent notes home calling him insolent, unfocused, a troublemaker who would never amount to anything.

His father read those notes and agreed with every word. "Art is a hobby, not a future," he told Claude. "Real men work in business. This nonsense ends now."

But Claude's mother saw something different. She saw the way her son came alive with a pencil in his hand. She saw talent that couldn't be contained in a grocery ledger.

When Claude begged to attend art school, his father refused outright. The boy would work in the family business and be grateful for the opportunity.

His mother made a choice that would echo through history. She quietly defied her husband. She saved money in secret. She encouraged Claude when no one was watching. She made sure he had supplies, time to create, reasons to keep believing.

When she died in 1857, Claude was just sixteen years old. He lost his greatest advocate at the exact moment he needed her most.

His father saw an opportunity. "Enough of this foolishness. Your mother's gone. Now you join the business like you should have years ago."

Claude looked at his father and said no.

He enrolled in art school anyway, paying his way by selling caricature drawings on the streets for five francs each. He was talented enough to survive—but caricatures weren't what burned inside him. He wanted to paint something no one had painted before. He wanted to paint light itself.

He moved to Paris. He studied under established masters. And then he began painting in a way that horrified everyone.

He painted outside instead of in studios. He used bright, vivid colors instead of the dark, muted tones that were considered proper. He captured fleeting impressions of light and movement rather than perfectly detailed realism.

The art world was scandalized.

When his painting "Impression, Sunrise" was exhibited in 1874, a critic used the title to mock the entire style. "Impressionism," he sneered—meaning it wasn't even a finished painting, just a rough impression, a sketch someone forgot to complete.

The insult became the name of the movement that would revolutionize art forever.

But in that moment, it nearly destroyed Monet. His work was rejected from official exhibitions. He couldn't sell paintings. He lived in crushing poverty. He wrote desperate letters to friends begging for money to buy food for his family.

His father had been right all along, hadn't he? Art was no way to make a living.

Monet kept painting.

Through poverty. Through rejection. Through the death of his first wife. Through years when he couldn't afford fresh canvas and had to paint over old works because he had nothing else.

He moved to Giverny and planted a garden with a small pond. And then he painted it. Over and over. The same water lilies, the same bridge, the same reflections—250 times.

People thought he'd lost his mind. Why paint the same scene 250 times?

Because he wasn't painting a pond. He was painting light. He was painting time itself. He was capturing the truth that a single moment can never be frozen perfectly because it's always already changing, always becoming something new.

The art world finally understood in his seventies. Impressionism went from mockery to revolution. Those "unfinished" paintings that critics had dismissed suddenly hung in the world's greatest museums. Monet's water lilies became priceless.

When Claude Monet died in 1926 at age 86, he was recognized as one of the greatest painters in history. The movement he pioneered had transformed how humans create and see art.

Today, his painting "Meules" sold at auction for $110.7 million.

Think about that. The boy whose father called him a fool for wanting to paint. The artist whose work was rejected as unfinished garbage. The man who lived in poverty painting the same pond over and over.

His paintings now sell for over $100 million.

But here's what matters more than the money: Monet changed how humanity sees the world. Before Impressionism, art was supposed to look "real"—perfectly detailed, carefully composed, painted in controlled studios under controlled light.

Monet asked a revolutionary question: What if we paint what we actually see? What if we paint light itself, the way it actually strikes our eyes in a fleeting, unrepeatable moment?

He taught the world to see beauty in a brushstroke. To find art in a passing moment. To understand that an impression—something quick, imperfect, alive—can be more true than perfect detail.

His mother never lived to see him succeed. She died believing in him when no one else did—not his father, not his teachers, not a single art critic.

But she gave him something that changed the world: permission to become himself.

Claude Monet didn't just become a great painter. He created an entirely new way of seeing. And it started with a mother who believed in her son when everyone called him a disgrace, and a teenage boy who kept drawing in his notebooks when he was supposed to be doing something "practical."

The next time you see an Impressionist painting—the soft brushstrokes, the dancing light, the captured moment—remember: that exists because one person refused to stop creating, even when the entire world told him he was wrong.

And because his mother whispered: keep going.

Sometimes the greatest gift we can give someone isn't money or connections or opportunities. It's simply believing in them when no one else does. It's giving them permission to become who they truly are.

That belief can change the world.