‘The lady is not for turning’

“Never grow a wishbone where your backbone should be,” columnist Dorothy Parker would rib friends in New York’s lower East Side. And backbone is what Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales always had.

Explain within 72 hours the $10 million stashed in two dollar accounts at the Philippine Savings Bank, Morales asked impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona. The peso deposits appear “grossly disproportionate” to income.

As a ramrod-straight Supreme Court associate justice, Morales penned the 8-7 decision that scrubbed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s draft memorandum of agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on ancestral domain.

“The furtive process, by which the MOA-AD was crafted, is in excess of legal authority,” she wrote. “(It is) whimsical, capricious, oppressive… The concept presupposes that the (Bangsamoro Juridical Entity) is a state and implies it’s on the way to independence…”

She whacked the majority for allowing Eduardo Cojuangco to dip into levies extorted from indigent coconut farmers, and to pocket 16.2-million San Miguel Corp. shares. “The  biggest joke to hit the century.”

Three complaints against Corona are before the Ombudsman: (a) Fudging SALN excluding  properties in Bellagio and Spanish Bay Tower; (b) Declaring the value of his personal properties which have an actual total worth of P31.7 million at only P27.2 million; (c) Unexplained wealth of P24.6 million in five accounts at

PSBank and P12 million with BPI.

Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago scoffed at the claim, made by Corona’s counsel, that the Ombudsman “has no jurisdiction over the Chief Justice.” “The $10 million does not exist,” the counsel said. The charges are black propaganda. Like the Land Registration Authority’s list and letters to the editor, they’re “phoney.”

“Our fears are shaped by past betrayals,” Viewpoint noted.  (Inquirer, 3/23/10) “A Supreme Court that grovels before a president whistles up a gross image… when a Chief Justice trotted behind Imelda Marcos, as parasol bearer.

“To many, that picture showed the extent to which the spirit of the judiciary had been sapped,” observed 2003 Magsaysay Journalism awardee Sheila Coronel. Can we still repose hopes in constitutional institutions that had crumbled before?

Yes. Thanks in part to strong women who challenged perverted institutions.

Tiene cojones. “She has balls” was the irreverent accolade people paid to Cecilia Muñoz Palma (1913-2006). The first woman Supreme Court justice didn’t play ball when her male colleagues surrendered to Marcos the 12th-century prerogative of courts to rule on habeas corpus pleas.

She flayed, in January 1975, the farcical “Citizens Assemblies.” “A referendum under martial rule can be of no far-reaching significance,” Palma wrote with Justice Claudio Teehankee. “It is accomplished under a climate of fear.”

Tiene cojones is also what people said about auditor Heidi Mendoza, banker Clarissa Ocampo and the late Presidential Commission on Good Government commissioner and 2004 Magsaysay awardee Haydee Yorac. These were women who, when push came to shove, did not tuck tail.

Mendoza audited the comptroller’s office of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and documented that, under Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia, the office plundered AFP funds. That included a P200-million reimbursement check from the United Nations for Filipino peacekeepers.

Mendoza, who resigned an Asian Development Bank job to testify, saw her ignored report blow open an almost P510-million AFP loss traced by congressional hearings to comptrollers. Garcia is in prison today.

“I was a foot away” when President Joseph Estrada signed a P500-million loan as “Jose Velarde,” then senior vice president of Equitable-PCI Bank Clarissa Ocampo told the impeachment court. There was an attempt to assign the trust account of Jose Velarde to Jaime Dichaves, a presidential crony. “I refused to certify it,” Ocampo said. She later received  threats on her life.

“The sole and only nobility is integrity.” That feistiness showed in Haydee Yorac’s work,  from peace negotiator to Commission on Elections official. Under Yorac’s watch, the PCGG recovered for the national treasury $683 million from Marcos’ Swiss bank accounts.

“From her sickbed, Yorac knows she will not complete the task herself,” the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation citation noted. Others will rise to it. “No one is indispensable,” she reminds us all. “Making a difference is enough.”

From her track record, Morales won’t cave in when clashes erupt over Corona’s dollar and peso accounts. One can almost hear Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s challenge to the 1980 Conservative convention. “U-turn if you will. The lady is not for turning.”

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