A year ago last week, Chief Justice Renato Corona died of cardiac arrest. One year later, there is still no real effort to correct the injustice of Corona’s removal by a vindictive, monomaniacal president in 2012, aided by a larded, servile Congress and a deluded, unbelievably partisan media—an injustice which led to the chief justice’s untimely death at the age of 67.
I wrote the following column shortly after Corona’s death. The article still rings true now, a year later:
These days, when politicians routinely accuse each other of amassing huge sums of money while professing a monopoly on decency, I remember Corona. He was a truly decent man falsely charged with enriching himself by thieving hypocrites, and yet he still fought a war that he must have known he simply could not win.
Corona always believed in the majesty and inherent fairness of the law. He was also convinced that he headed a branch of government co-equal with the presidency and Congress.
How wrong he was. And how wrong many of us, who allowed Corona’s thoroughly unjust public humiliation and eventual removal, were.
Corona, in his political naivete, committed several fatal mistakes. And foremost of these was trusting that his innocence and the law were enough to make him beat back his powerful accusers.
He believed that his appointment late in the Arroyo administration was lawful because the Supreme Court said so, in a 14-0 vote. And then he thought he could get away with winning the case to return the land of Hacienda Luisita to the farmers who tilled it.
Corona never expected how vindictive his main adversary was and how willing he would be to use the limitless resources at his command to get back at the chief justice who dared to engage him in a stare-down. And Corona probably never imagined how easy Congress, both of its craven Houses, would acquiesce to Malacañang’s demands, especially if it was sufficiently larded with Disbursement Acceleration Program funds.
Corona was convicted and removed from office because that was what President Noynoy Aquino, still enjoying stratospheric popularity and an unlimited supply of taxpayers’ money, wanted. To believe otherwise, this late in the day, is to be pig-headed like Noynoy himself—as if refusing to accept blame and responsibility for errors committed in the past absolves the one who committed the error in the first place.
But how can anyone bewail the injustices that Aquino committed as president, a fashionable pastime in these times, and not recall what he did to Corona four years ago? How can anyone mourn the victims of the treasonous crimes of this administration, from Abaya to Zamboanga, and forget how Aquino plotted and suborned, schemed and stole just to exact revenge on the chief justice whom he hated with such a monomaniacal passion?
I must insist that Aquino killed Corona, a man whose intellectual and career accomplishments he could never dream of approaching, just as surely as if he took a gun to Corona’s head and pulled the trigger. And those of us who stood idly by—and those who even cheered—were accomplices to the murder of a truly great man.
Now Corona is dead and Aquino is still alive. Where, pray tell, is the justice in that?
* * *
Like that memorable character in Jose Rizal’s novel, Corona died without seeing the dawn. But I hope that someday, when we are all finally cured of the Yellow plague, that we will understand Corona’s sacrifice— and Aquino’s culpability.
By dying just months before Aquino leaves the presidential palace, Corona was deprived of the satisfaction of seeing his vengeful tormentor return to being a full-time self-pleasuring layabout, his real profession before he inflicted himself on an entire nation of clueless, gullible Filipinos. But this doesn’t mean that Aquino will forever escape blame.
The blood will never be washed away from Aquino’s hands—from Tacloban to Kidapawan, from al-Barka to Mamasapano. If there really is justice in this world, Aquino will have to pay.
Never again, they say, hypocritically, apropos of something else entirely. Never again, I say, should goodness and truth be co-opted and prostituted in the name of a thoroughly discredited movement of self-serving, self-righteous slaves of the oligarchs and the oligarchs themselves.
Of course, it’s perfectly possible that history and future generations will absolve Aquino and look kindly on him for what he did while in office. But I was there and I saw what Aquino did to Renato Corona, a man Noynoy broke and, for all intents and purposes, killed.
I can only hope that Aquino suffers for his crimes, just like he made the people he decided were his enemies—for reasons only his twisted mind can come up with—suffer.
Rest now, CJ. The fight continues