The Pulse Asia survey of course was taken before the defense put up its defense. It said the overwhelming majority of Filipinos believed Renato Corona was guilty—specifically 47 percent against only 5 percent who believed he was innocent, with the rest being undecided. Has the perception changed?
Well, the newspapers and TV networks have been informally carrying out surveys since the defense took to the floor, and their results have been roughly the same. Most Filipinos still believe Corona guilty, with a few deeming him innocent and the rest being undecided.
Is that judgment unfair? Is the public biased? Does the sample lack the wisdom or enlightenment or superior view of the senator-judges?
Not at all. It’s really the most understandable thing in the world. It’s really the most inescapable thing in the world.
The case is similar to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s own case when she was accused of stealing the vote. Congress voted to quash the impeachment bids against her, putting forward in the loftiest terms, which included championing due process and the rule of law, that there was no evidence to support them. Did that make people believe she was innocent? Or more to the point, did that stop people from believing she became president by the grace of Garci and not God? Not at all. To the end of her days, she was regarded as illegitimate by the public, and treated as such.
Why shouldn’t they? She had forbidden, through an executive order, any public official from testifying against her. Her Department of Justice had ruled that “Hello Garci” was illegally obtained—notwithstanding that she had merely fallen into her own trap after ordering a surveillance on the world out of paranoia—and that anything derived from it was the fruit of the poisoned tree. She had Congress, many of whose members were party to her crime or had profited enormously from it, in her pockets.
Naturally there was no evidence: They had made it disappear.
It’s the same thing with Corona. The impeachment court has prevented any discussion of corruption or hidden wealth. The justification for it being that it is not included in the prosecution’s articles of impeachment. Explicitly no, but implicitly yes. Not everyone talks like lawyers and assumes that when you propose that someone has falsified his SALN, you propose as well that he is trying to hide his wealth. And propose still further that he is doing so because that wealth is loot.
The impeachment court has agreed to obey the Supreme Court’s order forbidding it from opening Corona’s dollar accounts. What is that but allowing the family of a murder suspect to decree how the investigating officers may investigate the case? Specifically by saying that the investigators may be free to scrutinize everything except the records that show the suspect owns a gun of the same caliber from which the bullet was fired?
The impeachment court has agreed to bow down to the Supreme Court’s order that it may choose only the people it wants to appear in the impeachment court. What is that again but allowing the family of the murder suspect to determine which witnesses the investigators may interrogate?
Naturally there is no evidence, or very little of it. They’ve made it disappear, or have erased a good deal of it.
But there’s the rub—for them. The people are not fools, and since they are really the ones who are going to decide this case and not the senator-judges, despite the defense’s and the usual suspects’ ardent or arduous affirmations it isn’t so, that’s one very big rub.
The public sees what it is being treated to, or the public intuits how it is being suckered, it is not going to buy it. Or more to the point, it is going to reject it. Regaled with the spectacle of the evidence being swept under the rug, if not indeed erased with a soap-soaked sponge, the public won’t see the absence of evidence, it will see the presence of a cover-up. The public won’t see the suspect as a hapless victim of the investigators’ sloppy attempts to pin him down, it will see him as the happy beneficiary of the investigators’ strenuous efforts to spring him out. The public is not going to find Corona innocent, it is going to find him guilty.
As it has. The very evidence is the attempt to hide it.
The defense’s case is not helped by people like Miriam Defensor-Santiago who hammers a nail on Corona’s coffin, or lays down a corona in his wake, every time she opens her mouth. It’s enough to make you theorize conspiratorially that she was secretly hired by Malacañang to help the prosecution. Nothing like making them look like underdogs to aid their cause—and deepen the perception of a cover-up. She so freaked out when she saw Vitaliano Aguirre II covering his ears I worried she might burst a vein or physically attack Aguirre, whichever came first.
But quite apart from her, there’s the defense’s whole tack itself to damn Corona. The art of making things disappear, or hiding things by dwelling on procedure rather than on substance, and calling on due process and rule of law, may be very artful in Corona’s courts, but it isn’t in this one. This is a different kind of court, and one the defense and Corona himself acknowledge to be superior by addressing themselves to it. That was what the defense explicitly said when it insisted on revealing the SALNs of other government officials: They have to put their case before the public too. And that is what Corona is implicitly saying by appearing before reporters rather than the senator-judges. Unfortunately for him, silence is often more deafening than sound, absence is often more palpable than presence. Does he wonder the public finds him guilty?
It’s understandable, it’s inescapable.