Senator Leila de Lima, according to the solicitor general, is now Public Enemy Number 1. If she really is that, how come she’s still traipsing around the world, accepting awards from bodies of dubious distinction and generally making a national nuisance of herself while thumbing her nose at the Duterte administration?
I don’t know about you, but I’m weary of De Lima’s sensational trial by publicity, of which this ranking, conferred upon her by no less than the government’s top lawyer, is only the latest curious development. If the various worthies who claim they have the goods on Leila don’t come up with an actual warrant soon and a real conviction eventually, they’d be in dire danger of being laughed out of town—with the senator herself leading the chorus of laughter.
De Lima, for all her failures and frailties, knew how to pursue, arrest and lock up people that her boss, Noynoy Aquino, wanted pursued, arrested and locked up. As Aquino’s secretary of Justice, De Lima fearlessly implemented Aquino’s unrelenting policy of political vendetta, collecting the figurative scalps of heavyweights like Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Renato Corona and not just one but three incumbent senators.
Never mind that, along the way, De Lima encountered stiff opposition from the Supreme Court, United Nations tribunals and armies of high-priced defense lawyers. Leila did not let rulings from the high court or the UN or even simple reason and logic get in the way of her tireless hunting and gathering; if Aquino wanted these people taken down, all she asked was how hard did he want them to fall.
In the end, of course, De Lima’s half-assed charges fell apart like cities made out of Lego bricks, almost as soon as her patron left the palace. But the filing of cases that would stick was not De Lima’s goal, after all—her job was to jail and to force resignations, not to build the “airtight” cases that her successor-in-office believes are the conditio sine qua non before proceeding.
The point is not that President Rodrigo Duterte’s men should just throw De Lima in jail without the benefit of a proper case buildup, like Aquino would have done, were he in Digong’s Marikina-made shoes and confronted by a problem like Leila. All I’m saying is that Duterte, Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre, Solicitor General Jose Calida and the rest should stop leading the public on, exposing all of De Lima’s now-famous frailties and cupidity if they can’t even bring all of it to the next level.
And no, calling her the most badass public enemy of all doesn’t quite cut the mustard.
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It’s truly ironic that an administration that is being accused of cutting legal corners in order to end the problem of the proliferation of narcotics seems paralyzed in the face of De Lima’s virtually non-existent defenses. Even the prurient and cooperative Congress, which was only too willing to act as the forum for the very public disrobing of De Lima (again, only figuratively) and exposing her supposed links to drug syndicates inside the national penitentiary, can’t even enforce its summonses on the senator.
More than ever, I refuse to buy De Lima’s line that she is the helpless victim of a campaign being waged against her with the help of all of the awesome forces at the administration’s command. From the looks of it, it is De Lima who is showing that she’s the boss of the entire government, which can’t even serve her with a subpoena, summon her to a hearing or even stop her from leaving at the airport, like she did to a departing, court-cleared Arroyo.
(Aguirre can’t even demand cooperation from the Anti-Money Laundering Council, which used to be such a willing and important—if sometimes, as in the case of Corona, flawed—tool in the pursuit of money stashed away by people in Malacanang’s hit list. AMLAC, headed by the suspiciously named Julia Abad, can even afford to ignore Duterte himself, when he fumes publicly that the council should hand over bank documents of persons of interest like the senator.)
If the whole point of publicly demolishing De Lima is to force her Corona-like resignation, that’s not going to happen. This is, after all, a senator who had to be evicted from her committee chairmanship by a vote of all of her colleagues—and even then, not even they could stop her from joining an investigation where she herself was being accused of large-scale illegal activity by the witnesses, who included her own former lover-driver.
If all of the sound and fury generated against De Lima is intended to make her the poster girl of what happens to high officials who abuse their powers not only in compliance with their master’s wishes but also to benefit personally and financially, then we’re still a long way from that goal. And now, more and more people want to know: what is the real endgame of this exercise?
I used to think that the arrest, prosecution and detention of De Lima was the inevitable and logical progression of all the dirt that was being dug up against her. Now I’m not so sure anymore that De Lima will get what she so richly deserves, because of the role she played in the previous government.
If De Lima remains untouchable, I may soon have to revise my belief that this is a government that will stop at nothing in its pursuit of criminals, especially narco-politicians. I will still wait for the government to prove me wrong, but not for very long.