No mercy for the corrupt
My ruminations during this stormy, flood-soaked day in many places: There will be hell to pay, or so I pray. No mercy—this is what my mind and heart desperately yearn for the guilty, while the matrix of corruption involving government infrastructure projects is beginning to play out before our eyes. The evildoers are coming out of the woodwork and exposing one another in the Senate and the House of Representatives hearings on how the budget for flood control and other similar projects (like “farm-to-pocket” roads, as a friend calls them) has gone to their own luxurious lifestyles and those of their species.
It is with both disgust and delight that I watch the hearings, where fingers are being pointed (at politicians, too!), and confessions are being made. It is comforting that countless Filipinos are watching, too. One knows this from the jokes, social media posts, street corner repartees, TV sitcoms, songs, stinging TikTok posts, etc. There is a video clip of people wading in floodwaters, while a singer wails out, raspy voice and all, Bruce Springsteen-style, “Ano kaya ang pakiramdan habang kayo ay nakahiga sa yaman, kami’y nagsisisiksikan, nalululunod sa baha ng inyong kasalanan…” It throbs, it writhes, it bleeds. Whoa, thumbs up for that!
Justice before mercy, the saying goes. But what if full justice is not rendered and the Filipinos who plundered the nation’s coffers for so long—in unprecedented and massive criminal ways being uncovered in public only now—go scot-free because of some legal technicalities and whatever else?
No, you, scum of the earth, you will not get away with plea bargains or by being state witnesses. Not even by giving up your fleets of luxury vehicles—Lamborghinis, Cadillacs, Maseratis, Rolls-Royces—and private planes. Not even if you lay open your bank accounts. For so long, you left millions of your fellow Filipinos eating crumbs amidst crumbling substandard infrastructures that you built—or did not build but bid and collected on—as sources of your ill-gotten wealth. Yes, billions of pesos in public funds, so staggering that someone at the Senate hearing had to explain what actual billions in cash look like. We’ve been shown a picture of it, snapped surreptitiously perhaps, or as proof that the money was ready. Ano kaya ang pakiramdam?
Confessing former Bulacan assistant district engineer Brice Hernandez has described how billions of pesos in cash were placed in 20 or so suitcases (P50 million per suitcase) and loaded onto so many vans driven to the Shangri-la Hotel in Bonifacio Global City. These were then loaded onto elevators that went up to the penthouse. Might there be CCTV footage of these deliveries? It is something straight out of a movie, something to preserve and watch while culprits are being handcuffed and led to their oven-hot cells. Ano kaya ang pakiramdam?
I am wondering why bank personnel are not being invited to the hearings as resource persons. How exactly are huge mounds of cash being withdrawn? But before that, how are payments from the Department of Public Works and Highways being disbursed and to whom? Checks can lead to the money trail. I presume that the Land Bank of the Philippines, being government-owned, is the bank of choice in these transactions. Don’t bank managers see red flags when billions in checks are being encashed? No CCTV footage?
The unraveling has begun. I have always believed that in God’s time, what is hidden will be laid bare. Is now the time? If so, it is a great time, indeed, for so many cliches: This is how the cookie crumbles. How the bag of sh*t hits the ceiling fan. Make it Pinoy with naghalo na ang balat sa tinalupan. Schadenfreude. A denouement.
We have come to the inexorable tipping point. We cannot waste this moment and the momentum.
On the subject of mercy per se, especially in cases so severe, there cannot be mercy without justice, confession, restitution, rectification, atonement, repentance, or even compensation. Yes, “The Name of God is Mercy,” as Pope Francis’ book title says, but the evildoer has to suffer punishment and retribution. The confessed plunderers better know this: being a whistleblower is not enough. Being under the witness protection program (only to protect your life and what you know and might yet confess) does not mean you qualify as a state witness and get off the hook. You must hang. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. I do not wish for the death penalty. While it was briefly in place during the short-lived presidency of Joseph Estrada (he was deposed and tried for plunder), I, along with several journalists, was allowed to watch a convicted rapist die by lethal injection. Ano kaya ang pakiramdam…
Last Sunday’s “Trillion-Peso March” of protest against corruption in Rizal (Luneta) Park in the morning and another around the People Power monument on Edsa in the afternoon were, to me, a portent of things to come. I was there.
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