This is the way justice works in this country: On one hand, Jun Lozada is desperately fighting for his freedom, if not his life. One is tempted to add that for some people they are pretty much the same thing: Freedom is life, and life freedom, and ne’er the twain shall diverge. But it is literal in this case. The reason Lozada has guarded his freedom jealously, insisting on remaining with the La Salle brothers rather than seeking refuge elsewhere, or indeed going back to his former life, is that he fears for his life. In the hands of the authorities, his life is cheaper than a peso. The phrase in fact for him is, “in the clutches of the authorities.”
Lozada is fighting for his freedom now because another judge has reversed an earlier ruling dismissing Mike Defensor’s complaint of perjury against him. The new judge found merit in Defensor’s charge after all, proving that judges in this country are called that because they are able to weigh very carefully the value not of legal cases but of attaché cases, the merits not of oral arguments but of arguments on paper of the various heroes.
Such apparently is the court’s fear that Lozada will jump bail (after he has holed out for what seems a lifetime in La Salle Green Hills, despite not lacking in offers for asylum abroad) it refuses to release him into the custody of Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim.
Who is the man accusing Lozada of perjury? He is the same man who abducted Panfilo Lacson’s chief witness in his exposé on Jose Pidal and called it a rescue. He is the same man who brought in an American expert to say that the “Hello, Garci” tape was doctored, only to have the same expert say it was not. He has something profoundly in common with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. And that is not height.
On the other hand, Jovito Palparan is enjoying the fruits of, well, he and his boss call it “labors.” The grieving widows and mothers and children of his victims have other words for it. He looks every inch like a cat who has just swallowed the canary having just been promoted congressman.
He has never been prosecuted for massacring political activists to fight communism even as his boss was busy selling this country to the biggest communist country on earth, which is China. In fact, his boss has been ecstatic about his work, promoting him to higher positions in the military.
Who has accused him of being a mass murderer? Jose Melo-at least when he headed the commission to investigate the killings, and was still bothered by things like this and still thought no nation ever moved forward without justice. And Philip Alston who carried the weight of the United Nations with him when he spoke. One is tempted to say that Raul Gonzalez should look in the mirror first before calling anybody a “muchacho,” but the absolute terror the image there is bound to induce in the looker must make you not wish that even on your worst enemy.
On one hand, Ted Failon continues to fear for his freedom as well. Despite all of his family, including all of his wife’s siblings, insisting his wife committed suicide the authorities are determined to find him guilty. The world saw the police in action last week, carting off Failon’s in-laws and staff while they tarried at Trinidad Etong’s hospital bed, giving her words of encouragement, egging her to live on. They went on to manhandle them because they would not leave. Elsewhere in the world, there is no more compelling reason to leave well enough alone than when someone demands to be on the side of dying kin. And Failon and his kin were not even suspects.
Today, despite the preponderance of physical evidence showing Trinidad to have taken her own life, the police are not satisfied. They are not satisfied because they say it is quite possible that Trinidad might have been murdered elsewhere and dumped in the bathroom. They are not satisfied because, as Gonzalez says, they have someone who claims to have been at the scene before everybody else, whose identity they cannot disclose, who says it was not suicide. In fact they are not satisfied because, attempting to prove their case by insinuation and innuendo, they find it quite impossible that someone who has been critical about the way they have been rubbing out suspects and the way this regime has been conducting business can possibly be innocent.
On the other hand, Daniel Smith has been sprung out of jail. Despite the preponderance of evidence against him, he has been found innocent by a higher-legally, if not morally-court. With no Nicole to insist on the crime, the court has ruled there is no crime. “Sprung out of jail” is a figure of speech; it is doubtful if he ever spent time in it, other than his short stint in a cell in Jojo Binay’s favorite city.
He is not the first criminal to be freed in this country in recent months. This year alone, several of them have been so or about to be so. They include: the murderers of Ninoy Aquino, despite the protestations of the Aquinos that the killers neither acknowledged their guilt nor repented; Claudio Teehankee Jr., the murderer of Maureen Hultman and Roland Chapman, who too never repented, and who, if the Hultmans are to be believed, might as well have been spending time in Boracay; Roberto Manero, the bald-headed cultist who ate the brains of Fr. Tullio Favali after he murdered him; Rodolfo Manalili who masterminded the murders of sweethearts Cochise Bernabe and Beebom Castaños; Romeo Jalosjos, the man who loved women, or loved to rape little girls.
This regime may not be able to attract investors to these shores, but it will be able to attract murderers and rapists to it.
That is the way justice works in this country. If you are guilty, be happy. If you are innocent, be afraid.
Be very, very afraid.
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A column by Conrado de Quiros published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on April 28, 2009.
