What have we become? It seems we are increasingly unable do the right thing for the risks it entails. Leila de Lima has been in jail for over six years—and for what? For doing her job only properly, that is, by trying to make Rodrigo Duterte pay for the death-squad horrors of his long reign as mayor of Davao City. As soon as he became president, he turned the tables on her, dragged her to court on charges of drug dealings without a shred of evidence, except for the testimony mostly of convicted and imprisoned criminals.

So, Secretary Crispin Remulla, don’t dare even try to fool the International Criminal Court that our own courts are working properly. In fact, if they were Duterte, the injustice against De Lima—not to mention that against many others—could not persist even after his presidency.

It all recalls the Marcos years. The good guys who stood up against him went to jail, while his cronies and henchmen who did his bidding profited from it, until we came together and finally did the right thing—at Edsa.

Imagine

Imagine, if we did the same right thing today: Ferdinand Marcos Jr. would be made to pay his taxes, his mother Imelda would be in jail and all those who dealt with the scammer Janet Napoles would have been brought to proper justice, instead of exonerated or freed.

Imagine if the press continued to be free, and ABS-CBN had the likes of Christian Esguerra doing, again, the right thing. Imagine if public officials were hounded and made to answer for their actions by a free press in open interviews or by free citizens in a Town Hall.

I feel so envious whenever I observe other societies where the worst problem is not self-censorship or lack of freedom, but information overload; where discussions of public issues are held to death.

I feel envious observing other governments where the executive and legislative departments don’t connive to railroad a draconian bill like our own Maharlika Investment Fund, in spite of its textbook flaws that could result in further losses to us simple folk and profit to its managers and clients.

Perhaps, if more light were shone on the workings of government, particularly since a Marcos is presiding over them, we could avoid the same untold suffering dealt us by the first Marcos for 14 years of murder and plunder.

Official thievery, to be sure, cannot happen without wide collaboration within the government and serious and fearless press and civil society watching. Are the rewards for complicity and the convenience of looking away too good to pass up? Is there nothing more that is worth the risk of being upright?

Complicity

A scene before us should provide some answers to my own question. In a picture of overkill, police spill out of a bus enveloping De Lima to make her disappear from the view of her champions and supporters. There’s your complicity, exhibited from far down the hierarchy—obsequious complicity.

Vergel and I happened to be outside the courts at the hearing that acquitted De Lima. Just by being there, we felt we were doing the right thing, at least the least right thing. And we felt happy and hopeful enough.

But Judge Romeo Buenaventura, the most recent face of collaboration, was quick to deny De Lima bail at the immediate next turn. He would be exposed, but not soon enough to keep him from having anything to do at all with the case. He did recuse himself upon being revealed, but still tried to make a virtue of his choice as some noble sacrifice for the court—to minimize the effects of what he misrepresented as an undeserved soiling of its integrity. The man is simply shameless.

But shamelessness is the official currency. It kills whistleblowing, heroism, all in all the nobility of public service. And I begin to wonder if it might have infected us ourselves into doing nothing, if not into joining those we could not lick. Either way it constitutes accepting our enslavement to tyrants, of whom there would be none otherwise.

In other words, this is no longer just about Leila de Lima but about us—I, you and everyone else identifying with her oppressor, not with her. INQ