The deal is simple: Fire Justice Secretary Leila de Lima and dismiss the case of illegal detention filed against members of the Sanggunian of the Iglesia Ni Cristo. Then the Edsa rally will end.
The protest action ended at mid-morning yesterday. The INC told its gathered faithful, who had come from all over Luzon, that an agreement had been reached with the government; they could go home now, because their demands had been met.
Of course, Malacañang Palace has denied agreeing to any quid pro quo. The Aquino administration wants us desperately to believe that the rally on Edsa self-dispersed just as fast as it had gathered, for no apparent reason.
But that was certainly not the case. The INC protesters were all set to march back to Manila, to the offices of the Department of Justice along Padre Faura Street, when word reached them that they could all leave peacefully.
Had the INC not dispersed, who knows what the endgame would have been? At the very least, had the government not given in, the INC would never have left the area that had been given to them by the Mandaluyong City government, at the junction of Shaw Boulevard and Edsa, underneath the MRT station.
Moving forward, it would be interesting to see how the government complies with the INC’s demands. It’s fair to expect that De Lima will fight any move to remove her, especially on the behest of the INC.
Already, sources at the Justice Department say that De Lima has enough ammunition of her own against the Aquino administration to ensure that she is not removed. And De Lima has been with the administration from the very beginning, dutifully doing everything that Malacañang bid her do, as a “good” justice secretary should.
But in the process, De Lima has compiled an impressive amount of inside information that could be very damaging to the administration, if it decides to make a move against her. And if Malacañang fires the Justice Secretary, there will be hell to pay from an insider who would make Vice President Jejomar Binay look like a mere chismoso.
This is what President Noynoy Aquino gets for not paying attention— and for freezing once again in the face of a crisis situation. Had the President only taken seriously the emissaries sent by the INC to him, who told him that De Lima was wrong to treat the case as a tool to bludgeon the church into submission ahead of an election, the rally would not even have happened.
But Aquino could not be bothered when the problem was just a threat. And then he froze, not acting until the rally threatened to spill over from the long weekend and into the workweek, when it could really get ugly.
And if Aquino had only acted right away when the rally started, he still could have defused the situation before it threatened to get out of hand. Now he must pay the piper and deliver De Lima’s head; that’s the deal and it’s always been the deal.
There’s always a chance that Aquino will renege on his promise. But that’s a risk that he will have to take.
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As for De Lima, if she had not been the poster girl for the administration of selective justice under this government, I would actually sympathize with her. But De Lima has never believed that this dispensation should be fair in going after those believed to have committed a crime—not when she stood by when Aquino absolved all his officials in the August 2010 hostage crisis at the Rizal Park and not when she refused to charge any of Aquino’s allies in the so-called “third batch” of lawmakers who allegedly stole their pork barrel funds.
In between, De Lima has defied the Supreme Court to jail former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and refused to prosecute anybody for the Mamasapano Massacre. She has loaned one of her undersecretaries to the Ombudsman just to make sure that the supposedly independent anti-graft prosecutor works hand-in-hand with the Executive in going after Aquino’s political enemies.
De Lima has used her powers to file the flimsiest charges against people with the least apparent guilt while refusing to indict anyone allied to Aquino, or even to throw them in jail after their conviction. Now she wants to perpetrate the supreme insult on the populace by running for the Senate, leveraging the debt of gratitude that Aquino owes her and the fealty of the diminishing Yellow horde that catapulted him to the presidency in 2010.
The INC may have erred in its methods, but that doesn’t make De Lima or her boss look any better. Given the methods employed over five years by Aquino, De Lima and the other top officials of this administration, they deserve to be pushed back by any means possible.