PWERSA ng Masa senatorial bet Juan Ponce Enrile said that the country’s problems of drug trafficking, drug abuse and rape are partly due to the irresolute prevention and tenuous criminal justice system during President Corazon C. Aquino’s administration.
Citing official records at the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice, Enrile said that by October 10, 1998, five years after the reimposition of the death penalty, various trial courts have meted out a total of 748 death penalties, including 422 for rapists.
Records showed that of the 422 convicted rapists, 153 of them (mostly drug addicts) victimized their own daughters.
In 1972, when Marcos declared martial law, and up to the time he was deposed in 1986, there were only 20,000 or more users of different kinds of prohibited and regulated drugs.
During President Aquino’s time, specifically in early 1987 when methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu, known also as the “poor man’s cocaine or Ice in the United States,” was introduced in the Philippines, the number of drug users reached 480,000 and many policemen, according to then-Sen. Ernesto Herrera, were getting involved in drug-related activities.
In 1972, Marcos enacted Republic Act 6425 or the Dangerous Drugs Act, subsequently resulting to the discovery by the military of a heroin laboratory and the arrest of Lim Seng, a drug trafficker and manufacturer, who was executed in public by firing squad.
From 1972 to 1993, the law went through four amendments to eradicate the scourge of Shabu and other dangerous substances introduced into the market by traffickers and manufacturers.
Although the amended law was envisioned to be an effective tool against drug traffickers, manufacturers and users, the government lost its focus to stifle the problem by putting more premium on the quantity of drugs seized rather than on the criminal act and intent of the drug traffickers, or both.
Enrile said the abolition of the death penalty by the Aquino administration, in reaction to the misplaced outcry of some condescending politicians, churchmen and cause-oriented groups, also compounded the problem.
“Because the peace and order situation in our land has become so bad, the US government withdrew only recently from the Philippines all US Peace Corps volunteers, following the kidnapping of a Japanese national and an American Peace Corps volunteer by the New People’s Army in Negros Occidental. Until now, these two abducted foreigners have remained unrecovered by the authorities. Sadly, the Philippines has acquired the not too flattering image and distinction of being one of two countries in the world, Liberia being the other, where the United States opted without warning and without notice to the host government to pull out suddenly its Peace Corps volunteers,” Enrile said
At the center of history
AFTER all, Enrile, the respected lawyer, legislator and public servant, was always there at the center of contemporary Philippine history, from the time he served in the Marcos administration as defense minister, through his celebrated breakaway that ushered the Edsa revolt, to serving Cory Aquino as her first defense secretary, and his election for several terms to both houses of Congress.
Many observers at the time, in and out of the Aquino administration, agreed with most of Enrile’s observations, much of which were common perceptions of the failings of Aquino’s administration.
Aquino’s first agriculture secretary, Ramon V. Mitra Jr., who later became Speaker of the House of Representatives and vocal critic of the Aquino regime, had this to say: “Repeatedly over the past 46 years, our democracy has been besieged by the hammer of rebellion and insurgency at one end and by the spectacle of weak and ineffective government on the other.”
Mitra said: “At no time has this been more sharply highlighted than during the five-year period from 1986 to 1990—a period which began with so much promise and concluded with so much pessimism and uncertainty.
“Over this brief time, the country became known to the world as the setting of pervasive coup attempts and as one of the last bastions of communist insurgency in the planet.
“The series of crises that have bedeviled the nation, the failure to ameliorate the plight of our millions, and the evidences of misgovernment and corruption that have hobbled the Aquino administration—all these have put to doubt for some whether our present system can arrest the experience of decline and begin the process of national modernization.”
There were similar and just as incisive criticisms from inside the Aquino administration itself, one of them was from Cory’s very own vice president, Salvador H. Laurel, the boyhood friend of Aquino’s husband Ninoy:
“Cory liked to boast that during her term, she had at least succeeded in restoring democracy, if she had done nothing else.
“But it is also true that she resurrected the detention centers, and it was in her administration that warrantless arrests were carried out,” Laurel states in his book Neither Trumpets Nor Drums, adding Amnesty International, the International Labor Organization, the Task Force Detainees were continually protesting against the illegal arrest and detention of farmers, students, teachers and the urban poor.
“The Cory government, by remaining indifferent to the popular clamor for change, failed to herald a new era for our country or to bury the traditional forces of cronyism, favoritism, corruption and greed,” he said.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.