It looks like Senator Leila de Lima will soon join Jinggoy Estrada and Ramon “Bong” Revilla in jail. The explosive testimony in the House yesterday of high-profile inmate Jaybee Sebastian practically guarantees that.
Sebastian corroborated, in great and credible detail, earlier testimony given by other convicts and former subordinates of De Lima before the House committee on justice. If the current leadership of the Department of Justice still cannot cause the filing of charges against De Lima after receiving the affidavit of Sebastian, then it is merely intent on torturing the senator, as she has repeatedly claimed.
I seem to remember Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre saying that he will file charges (most likely of making money from the illegal drug trade that blossomed in the national penitentiary during the previous administration) against De Lima as soon as he builds an “airtight case.” I’m no lawyer, but the corroboration by Sebastian of earlier testimony—plus the huge amounts thrown around—not only make the case that Aguirre will file airtight, it damned well hermetically sealed it.
There is no other denouement to the House investigation but the prosecution of De Lima before the Ombudsman, which will then follow the template that it used to jail Estrada, Revilla and Juan Ponce Enrile during the Aquino years. And because the Senate showed during the stewardship of Franklin Drilon that it will not stand in the way of the Ombudsman if it wants to jail a senator (or a bunch of them), the chamber can no longer keep De Lima out of detention, even if it wanted to.
Of course, the current Senate leadership will probably not be inclined to aid De Lima. The 16 senators who voted to remove the rookie senator as chairman of the justice committee cannot be expected to rescue Leila after what she and her riding-in-tandem buddy, Antonio Trillanes, did with their own witness, Edgar Matobato.
And the saddest part about the drama involving De Lima is that it was totally unnecessary. I doubt very much if she would have courted the ire of the Duterte administration and provoked the reaction that now threatens to land her in jail if she had not embarked on her harebrained probe using the poorly coached Matobato.
But I suspect that De Lima had no choice but to conduct her strange investigation of supposed extrajudicial killings. I think De Lima was ordered to start the preemptive probe of the slays because the campaign against illegal drugs started by President Rodrigo Duterte was getting dangerously close to the people to whom the senator was deeply indebted.
If it is true that the illegal drug trade made the New Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa its headquarters during the Aquino administration, I can’t believe it would happen simply because De Lima wanted it to. The repurposing of Bilibid was, I insist, way beyond De Lima’s pay grade as Justice secretary.
Of course, the only person who is certain to go to jail now that the huge racket has been brought out into the open is De Lima. For now.
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Eventually, if the House really wants to get to the bottom of the drug trade, I think it will have to go beyond De Lima and take its investigation, as the late Senator Joker Arroyo once said, to the very doorstep of Malacañan Palace. A good place to start, in my opinion, will be the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission, headed during the Aquino administration by Executive Secretary Paquito “Jojo” Ochoa.
Most people have already come to the conclusion that Ochoa did nothing to stop crime despite the huge, unaudited annual outlays given to the anti-crime office he was supposedly the head of. The leadership of Ochoa of the PAOCTF, I’m told, was not only made to “secure” the funds allocated yearly for the operations of that office; by neglecting to use the task force’s funds for their intended purpose—including fighting the illegal drug menace—Ochoa allowed the rise of Sebastian and other gangsters in their bid to rule Bilibid.
Assuming that Ochoa and his boss, Noynoy Aquino, were not directly involved in the illegal drug trade, their power to influence De Lima after her election to the Senate must surely have been strong enough to urge her to start her own investigation of the EJK killings. There is no other reason why De Lima and Trillanes came up with Matobato, if not to launch a counter-campaign against the fast-approaching investigations into how the previous administration bungled the anti-crime drive.
But I don’t expect De Lima to rat on Ochoa, Aquino and all the other officials of the previous government who served as her enablers in the conversion of Bilibid into Ground Zero of the illegal drug trade. Again, I look to the example of Estrada, Revilla and Enrile, who would rather remain in jail rather that turn in the people who helped them “misuse” their pork barrel funds.
As for De Lima, I wish her all the luck as she makes her inevitable trip to the place of detention that will soon be her place of residence for the foreseeable future. As they say, you play with fire, you get burned.
Karma can be a real bitch.
