The risks of survival

Twenty years ago, I reminded readers of the (now politically incorrect) Walt Disney film, “Song of the South,” because it contained the fable of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, which goes like this: A fox gets the goat of a rootin’ tootin’ but rather vain rabbit by setting up a baby made of tar by the roadside. The rabbit tries to strike up a conversation with the tar baby, only to get offended by the tar baby’s silence. The rabbit tries to assault the tar baby, but with every kick and punch, he gets more and more stuck until the fox comes out to taunt the rabbit. The moral of the tale is that you shouldn’t mess with something you have no business with in the first place.

Back then, constitutional change was, to me, former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s tar baby, while today, you could say the quest for government accountability is the tar baby for President Marcos.

We are a punny people, and one of the best is this distillation of the Philippine criminal justice system: the truth is, when it comes to robbing the public treasury, God knows Hudas not pay. With much of Congress (both the Senate and House of Representatives), the Cabinet, and the bureaucracy in the dock, the question, indeed, is: Who, of the Judases to the public good, will get away? Obviously, we’d have no functioning government if everyone who deserved to go to jail suddenly ended up behind bars. That, or what passes for our justice system, would grind to a halt.

This dilemma is one similar to the quest for justice in the so-called Maguindanao massacre. So many were charged that when justice comes, it will not only be slow in coming, but also hardly felt due to the passage of time: it took more than a decade for the first round of convictions. Would the cause of justice have been better served if only a few had been prosecuted, but more effectively, and relatively quickly?

This is not as cynical as it sounds. It is a practical consideration both legally and politically. Reporting in 2016, Nick Davies of The Guardian wrote that after the initial, frantic, round of sequestrations, the post-Edsa government insisted on “[stepping] on the brake,” as far as efforts to recover the Marcos loot were concerned: “Marcos and his cronies owned so much of the economy that to seize their assets would crash the banks … the PCGG was ordered to seize nothing, but instead to work through the courts. Over the following few years, it became clear that this had handed the initiative to the Marcoses, who had the money to hire the very best lawyers. Soon, dozens of cases were sidetracked by endless technical arguments.”

Davies observed that, “Just as Marcos’ wealth was too great to seize, so his political influence was too big to beat.” Today, the extent of legislative-executive-bureaucratic diversion of funds is too immense to fully prosecute, and the political repercussions are too extensive to risk.

Which is not to say human sacrifice isn’t required. It is not just expected, but innocent and guilty alike are chanting the same refrain regardless of their motivations: heads must roll. An Antipolo representative months ago proposed the ideal, politically speaking, solution: the obvious human sacrifices required were the (then) Senate President Francis Escudero and the congressman everyone now loves to hate, Zaldy Co; but off the hook, he insisted then and now, was the (then) Speaker, Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, and the Senate cochairperson of the bicameral conference committee, (then) Sen. Grace Poe.

The problem with the ex-Speaker is that no one, up to now, and not for lack of trying or stitching together circumstantial evidence plus a healthy dose of gossip, can pin him down. Even the most prejudiced mind would be forced to conclude that he fully knows how to cover his tracks. Could this change? Possibly, but in the first flush of revelations, the continuing lack of direct evidence is in marked contrast to his fellow legislators, of whom the best that can be said is that they compensated for their sloppiness by the sheer exuberance and brazenness of their greed. Never has so much been stolen so obviously and so fast.

Those still disposed to give the President the benefit of the doubt point to his supposedly insisting on watertight cases to which the friendly and cynical might both say is plausible: he would know a thing or two about the consequences of sloppy prosecutions, and his wife is a formidable lawyer with an equally formidable firm. The danger of being too clever by half; Gen. André Beaufre, explaining France’s defeat in World War II after winning World War I, remarked, “It was a very deep decay … We suffered from an illness which is not peculiar to the French: The illness of having been victorious, and believing we were right and very clever. Victory is a very dangerous opportunity.”

For it leaves the political problem of two timelines: thorough investigations and unimpeachable prosecutions require time, which is a commodity no politician, much less any president, ever has a surplus of.

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3