Part 10
Contemptuous mockery of the country’s judicial system
ON trumped-up charges of rebellion complex filed by the Department of Justice, then under lawyer and now Senator Franklin M. Drilon, President Aquino imprisoned Enrile, the man who led the Edsa mutiny and some of the people who supported him.
This writer, on legitimate pursuit of his profession gathering materials for his columns and books, was not spared and was also charged with rebellion complex, a nonexistent crime in the statue book, hoping they can silence him.
Next, she persecuted her own political enemies and allies, including Salvador Laurel, her own vice president; businessman Eduardo Cojuangco, her own cousin who was a close Marcos associate; Ramon Mitra Jr., the Speaker of the House who objectively pointed out some of the serious defects of her government; and key members of the Rebolusyonaryong Makabansa (RAM), whose members guarded her and the ballots during the snap elections, and subsequently staged a rebellion that ousted Marcos and handed her the power on a silver platter.
Very early, Enrile, Laurel and the RAM officers already sensed signs of betrayal.
“I thought for a while that the shift away from Edsa’s compass was merely spurred by the cross currents of transition and was not really a symptom of early decadence,” Laurel said in a series of exclusive interviews with this writer.
He recalled that only an hour after their oath-taking, President Aquino, in reading Proclamation 1, wanted to appoint Enrile and Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Fidel V. Ramos in acting
capacities only.
Laurel pleaded with Mrs. Aquino not to mistrust Enrile and Ramos who, according to him, had been mainly responsible for their ascendancy to power. “She relented and agreed to delete the word ‘acting’ from their appointment papers.”
Laurel thought that it was the first and last time that she would show mistrust of Enrile.
He was wrong.
A few days after she transferred to Malacañang from the Cojuangco building where President Aquino held office after assuming the presidency, she again sought to banish Enrile from her government.
“We were alone in her office in the palace when Cory asked me: ‘Doy, how can I get rid of Enrile?’”
Laurel kept the incident from Enrile and decided instead to cooperate with President Aquino.
Later, however, President Aquino’s advisers mistook Laurel’s cooperation for a weakness that resulted in his being treated as a wimp in the Aquino Cabinet, seen as constantly deferring to the lady President.
The new administration, before it could begin with anything, plunged into a disquieting debate: “Would it be a constitutional democracy or a revolutionary one?”
Laurel and other officials thought this question was already resolved with the 1973 Constitution in place.
They felt it ironic that after abolishing a dictatorship, the new government would again resort to dictatorial powers by abrogating the Constitution and governing by proclamations.
Laurel, for his part, said it was apparent that President Aquino’s manipulation of the government was planned from the very start, adding that she and her advisers were determined to monopolize power.
Former Tanodbayan Justice Raul M. Gonzalez recalled in a series of interviews that, instead of the phrase “preserve and defend the Constitution of the Philippines,” which he prepared the day before she was sworn into office, President Aquino’s hidden advisers quietly typed out a new line, “Preserve and defend the Fundamental Law,” just a few minutes before the oath-taking.
In Laurel’s case, Gonzalez said, he read exactly the text of the oath prescribed in the 1973 Constitution: “To preserve and defend the Constitution, execute its laws and do justice to everyone…”
Gonzalez, the uncompromising government prosecutor, who was among those who strongly opposed the abolition of the 1973 Constitution, later figured in a controversial Supreme Court decision that resulted in the abolition of his office and his indefinite suspension from the practice of law after he had exposed the involvement of some of the Aquino-appointed justices in graft and corruption and immoral extravagance, details of which were in my best-selling book, Greed & Betrayal, also published by Amazon in 2000.
As a result, the Gonzales incident and the transition period between President Marcos’s constitutional
regime and President Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino’s revolutionary government saw the endless contemptuous mockery of the country’s judicial system.
In contrast to President Marcos’s constitutional democracy and adherence to the rule of law in his time, Mrs. Aquino, only a few days in power, abolished the 1973 Constitution under which she took her oath of office, arrogated unbridled authority unto herself and arbitrarily ordered the wholesale removal of Supreme Court justices, Appellate Court justices, lower court judges, prosecutors and other career officials and employees of the Ministry of Justice.
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.