A friend once asked me, apropos of Senator Leila de Lima’s current travails: If 14 million Filipinos voted her into office, why aren’t any of them coming to her defense as she takes on the big, bad president in Malacañang?
I was forced to admit that I have yet to meet anyone who claims to have voted for De Lima last May, so I don’t really know. Perhaps it’s true, as the pundit Teddy Boy Locsin said in one of his many Twitter-breaking rants, that no one can really explain how De Lima won against a lot of worthier and more popular opponents in the last election.
If you can’t figure that one out, then perhaps you shouldn’t be reading Teddy Boy. Or the rest of this column, for that matter.
We all know that De Lima’s supposed voter base, the orphaned Yellows who are still mourning the departure of their idol, Noynoy Aquino, from the presidential palace, have found other issues to get angry about. These include the extra-judicial killings that are supposedly being committed by the police with the tacit or not-so-tacit approval of President Rodrigo Duterte and the the planned burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani of the remains of former President Ferdinand Marcos.
But while the Aquino fans routinely slam Duterte over both controversies, they hardly hold up De Lima as their be-scarfed champion, their Bicolana Joan of Arc. In fact, you never hear the Yellows defend their most vocal comrade-in-arms in the Senate at all.
(Here I must reiterate my belief that the people who were originally behind both causes —namely, real human rights advocates and legitimate victims of the Marcos dictatorship—can’t really be classified as Yellows. But their advocacies have been hijacked by the Aquino orphans, who wanted to use both controversies as battering rams against the Duterte administration.)
Everyone knows the great lengths De Lima went to put the killings of 1,000 or so alleged drug pushers and users in the headlines by conducting two days of hearings on the matter in the Senate. But when Duterte launched his counter-offensive against the senator, digging up dirt on her love life and her supposed links to drug syndicates through her liaisons, there was hardly any love expressed for her, even amongst her former fellow travelers on Aquino’s straight path, in traditional or social media.
De Lima seems to feel that way, too. So she’s upped the ante by filing a “pahabol” petition before the Supreme Court to stop the burial of Marcos—this after the tribunal has already moved to consolidate the six cases filed earlier to prohibit the interment and issued a status quo ante order to stop it in the meantime.
According to reports, De Lima did not present any new argument to stop Marcos’ burial in her petition. This means that the senator is merely making sure that her belated attendance is noted in the fight to prevent the late dictator’s interment—something she never really protested before.
Perhaps in this way De Lima will get the support that she’s been sorely needing. After all, it looks like she’ll need all the help she can get as she faces new allegations of corruption and involvement in illegal drugs almost every day.
As for me, if I had voted for De Lima, I’d defend my vote by defending her against Duterte. But I didn’t, so that’s not really my problem.
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The assassination of alleged Iloilo drug lord Melvin Odicta and his wife Meriam last Monday was apparently intended to stop them from naming names. That’s why controversial Albuera, Leyte Mayor Rodolfo Espinosa is taking no chances and has taken to identifying the alleged protectors of his fugitive son, Kerwin, in an affidavit that he hopes will outlive him.
In a press conference, Espinosa, whose lawyer was killed in broad daylight in Tacloban City recently, admitted that his being identified as a protector of drug syndicates endangered his life and that of his son. As insurance, he has submitted to the police a list of 30 people whom he said helped his son rise to the top of the illegal drugs food chain in Eastern Visayas.
Odicta didn’t have the opportunity to make up such a list, much less to put what he knows down in an affidavit. He and his wife had just enough time to talk to Interior Secretary Ismael Sueno over the weekend, to protest their innocence, before they were gunned down at the Caticlan jetty on their way back to Iloilo.
Espinosa didn’t disclose any names in the list of alleged protectors of his son. But that didn’t stop the police chief of Espinosa’s town from saying that he had seen it and that a senator who was a former secretary of justice was there.
Now, the trouble with the police chief’s claim is that there are currently two senators who once held the position of justice secretary. There’s De Lima, of course, who served Noynoy Aquino in that capacity, and Senator Franklin Drilon, who held that position—among others—during the administration of Noynoy’s mother Cory.
In addition, some people in Drilon’s home province of Iloilo keep linking the Ilonggo senator to Odicta, because Drilon is the acknowledged political kingpin of the region and Drilon’s cousin, Jed Patrick Mabilog, is the mayor of “the most shabulized” City of Iloilo.
As a fan of former Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago, all I can say is that I’m glad the police chief didn’t say that the senator was from Iloilo. Otherwise, my idol Miriam would have been dragged into this controversy, as well.