Repression
Since the day President Rodrigo Duterte issued the proclamation that voided the amnesty granted by former president Benigno Simeon Aquino III to the erstwhile Lieutenant Commander Antonio Trillanes IV for his involvement in the terrible military misadventures called siege of Oakwood and Manila Penn, I expected that the president would similarly issue a general order nullifying the amnesty as against the other elements who joined the senator in the putsch. In fact, I also awaited for a like action by the Department of Justice seeking from the courts of law warrants for their arrest. Two months have gone by and Malacanang, as well as the DOJ, has done nothing of sort, leading me to believe that this administration only wanted to shut the mouth of a pesky critic in the senator as it did earlier in the case of another lawmaker in the person of Sen Leila de Lima.
The other day, amid conflicting expectations, the judge presiding over Branch 148 of the Regional Trial Court in Makati City denied the motion earlier filed by the DOJ, asking for the issuance of a warrant for the arrest of Sen. Trillanes. His ratio was classic doctrinaire because to him, the dismissal of the coup d’etat case versus Trillanes and company has assumed finality and therefore it being a closed case, he had apparently lost jurisdiction to entertain the motion.
I am certain that it was not easy for him to rule in the way he did. Not only must have he perceived that his order was going against the obvious intention of the powers that be, a parallel court, in Branch 150, seemed to have blazed another albeit entirely different trail. The denial order by the judge was unlike the ruling made by Branch 150. Motions of similar content and praying for one order met two opposing fates. Naturally, Sen. Trillanes immediately hailed the action of the judge as a form of victory of democracy.
Right after the Judge handed the ruling that signaled the initial triumph of Trillanes, the DOJ announced it was probably contesting it in a superior court. It meant that the government was poised to marshal its legal team in a frenzied attempt to secure the warrant for the arrest of Trillanes. The words of the Secretary of Justice - “the battle has just begun” - said it all. Its announced course of legal action tended to validate the impression that the tag of the nullity of the amnesty contained in the Duterte proclamation was just a cover. The clear target was Trillanes.
We remember that Trillanes was not alone in forcibly taking over the Oakwood and the Manila Penn. He was working with many other men clad in military uniform. The muzzles of their guns appeared superior and their warlike behavior compellingly dominant. Did they all break the chain of command? The video footages of those two military operations showed that there were over a hundred fully armed participants. When the end of the military uprising came, all of the “rebels” were supposedly herded back to the barracks and sued. They had to answer for whatever damage they inflicted upon our nation and be held liable for their criminal misconduct until the executive clemency, in the form of an amnesty, intervened to free them from the consequences of their misdeeds.
I had to assume that the comrades-in-arms of the lawmaker, then a soldier, were also the grantees of Aquino’s amnesty. The commonality of their act had to be forgiven in one stroke. If Trillanes had to be accorded an amnesty, his companions too deserved the same compassion. And so it was. Their cases had been similarly dismissed by the courts that earlier obtained jurisdiction.
Logic tells us that if the clemency given by Aquino to Trillanes was implemented with such fatal defects as to make it invalid, then the same flaw attended the amnesty issued to the rest of the group. The failure of the administration to pursue against them only yields to one conclusion. Government, as it did to De Lima, has to stop Trillanes from casting aspersion on the administration. I call it repression.
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