Political motivation at its highest

Human rights advocates from New York City tag the Philippine government’s case against former Justice secretary and now Senator Leila de Lima as “politically motivated.” What kind of comments can we expect from the friends of Sen. De Lima who blindly follow and listen to her without checking out the real facts behind her case.

In my book, yesterday when the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) presented SPO3 Arthur Lascañas as the alleged team leader of the Davao Death Squad (DDS) linking President Rodrigo Duterte in drug-related killings in Davao City, where Lascañas said that the DDS really exists during a presscon in the Senate… this was clearly politically motivated!

There are two problems here… first that this same SPO3 Lascañas earlier during a Senate investigation called Sen. Leila De Lima’s witness Edgar Matobato as a liar. Now he turns around to say otherwise. Secondly, this presscon came at exactly the time when the arrest warrant for Sen. De Lima is supposed to be out. In short, SPO3 Lascañas suffers from credibility problems and this in my book this is highly politically motivated!

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This coming weekend is the 31st anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution, where 31 years ago, Filipinos felt proud that they were able to remove the conjugal Marcos Dictatorship in a peaceful People’s Power uprising. Of course in hindsight, Filipinos have come to realize that the EDSA People Power revolt could never have happened unless the United States of America CIA turned against the overstaying Marcos Dictatorship (we often heard Americans tell us that while they knew that president Marcos was a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch) because they found a new puppet under then Mrs. Cory Aquino who took over the reins of power after the Marcoses were booted out of Malacañang.

While my favorite President, former president Fidel V. Ramos bewailed the feeble efforts of the Duterte administration for not preparing any guidelines or even a traffic plan for the commemoration of the EDSA Revolt, I don’t blame Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea simply because of the past history of the EDSA celebrations, where the attendance has dwindled down to a trickle after Filipinos realized that the EDSA Revolution did not usher any revolutionary ideas that would have ended the poverty of the Filipino people. Instead, president Cory Aquino restored the oligarchy and worse, allowed the hated Marcos cronies to return with a vengeance!

 It is a fact that on Feb. 25, 2014, president Benigno Aquino swooped down to Cebu City to celebrate the 28th anniversary of the EDSA Revolt… the first time it was ever held outside of EDSA. At that time, we suspected that it was the Aquino regime’s way of deflecting attention away from the usual EDSA Revolt anniversary where only a few thousand pro-Aquino supporters would attend. FVR also exhorted the Duterte administration to finish the long-delayed EDSA Memorial Center.

Now why are Filipinos turned off with the EDSA People Power Revolt 30 years after? First, under the presidency of Cory Aquino, we saw the massacre of farmers in Mendiola and at the Hacienda Luisita. If the Aquinos were truly pro-poor, why then did they allow these massacres to happen right in their own backyard? Perhaps the biggest turn-off especially for people like me who were anti-Marcos is that the Aquino supporters created a “cult-like” status for the Aquino Family, which is why we got Tita Cory’s son, Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III elected into the presidency.

In his six years as president we saw the incompetence especially when Super Typhoon “Yolanda” hit us and this culminated in the Maguindanao massacre of 44 Special Action Force (SAF) troopers, wherein the President’s culpability remains in question even today. While 31 years ago we removed the Marcoses from power, we ended up putting the Aquinos in power (including their images in our P500 bills) and it was business as usual for good old patronage and personality politics.

It is for this very reason why a small city mayor from Davao City, named Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte was elected President by a vast majority even if he had no national political machinery and no money. One reason why I supported Pres. Duterte was his promise of a real genuine political change through a constitutional amendment and his introduction of federalism for a new Philippines.

In the six years reign of P-Noy, he always refused to have the Philippine Constitution named after his mother to be amended… thus we lost six years in political stagnation. Worse, the Aquino regime used the highly questionable Smartmatic with its Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) or Optical Mark Reader (OMR) machines in the 2010 presidential elections and the elections of 2013 without any investigation.

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