Chill

It was auspicious occasion, with the President of the Philippines as guest of honor. But then a student in the audience stood up to shout at the commander in chief, disrupting the proceedings. What happened next was … well, what happened next depended on who the President was at the time.

In 2006, at the graduation ceremony of the Cavite State University in Indang, Cavite, President Gloria Arroyo’s speech was interrupted by the heckling of one of the graduating students. Maria Theresa Pangilinan unfurled a streamer and called Arroyo a “fake president,” among other insults. After order had been restored, however, and the handover of the diplomas had commenced, Pangilinan was still allowed to receive her diploma—albeit under heavy guard.

Contrast that outcome with what happened to Pio Emmanuel Mijares. At Independence Day rites this year in Naga City, Mijares heckled President Aquino in mid-speech, unfurling a streamer and calling him the “pork barrel king.” Mijares was immediately dragged out of the hall, arrested, detained for 36 hours on multiple charges, then released on bail.

The contrast is startling, in large part because the administration that overreacted was not the one whose political legitimacy came under attack but the one whose electoral mandate remains unquestioned.

People may or may not agree with the substance of Mijares’ political statement, but he had every right to say it. Consider what senators in 2006 said regarding Pangilinan: “Embarrassing the president is not a crime,” Sen. Aquilino Pimentel Jr., the Senate minority leader at that time, told reporters. Senate President Franklin Drilon, once a member of Arroyo’s inner circle but by 2006 a leader of the opposition, reminded the public that Pangilinan was “just a student and every Filipino has a right to express his or her sentiment.”

Drilon is president of the Senate again, and again is closely allied with Malacañang. Has he come to the defense of Mijares, who is also “just a student,” and who had only exercised his right to “express his sentiment”?

Pimentel has given way to his son, Aquilino III, who ran with President Aquino’s Liberal Party Senate slate last year; has he followed in his father’s footsteps and articulated the fundamental democratic truth: that embarrassing the President is not a crime?

The use of the law’s mailed fist to hold Mijares accountable for his offense is not only unseemly; it is downright upsetting. The occasion when the fist came down hard is of special moment; if there is any date on which a citizen of the Republic can voice his opinion regardless of the consequences—or more precisely, without any consequences—it should be Independence Day.

It is a terrible mistake for the Aquino administration to prosecute a student heckler, or indeed any heckler, because it sends the wrong message, because it shows a disturbing disregard for the most basic of freedoms, because it displays a worrying readiness to rationalize the unreasonable.

Malacañang says it was the Philippine National Police which effected the arrest, and that it had nothing to do with it. We do not know whether to take this at face value, but it is true that President Aquino himself could have stopped the police from dragging the student out—perhaps by engaging him in repartee, or perhaps by simply saying, Let him be.

The result is that a young man’s not uncourageous taking of a stand was demonized, rather than taken for what it simply was: the right to free speech, freely exercised.

Another senator in 2006, Panfilo Lacson, a close ally of Mr. Aquino, warned the Arroyo administration that taking punitive action against the student heckler would “send a chilling effect on anyone expressing sentiments against the government.” The exact same argument can be raised against the Aquino administration of which he is now a part. Isn’t running after Mijares, with elaborate charges such as assault on a person of authority, merely an after-the-fact justification? Wouldn’t the sequence of events that followed Mijares’ burst of exuberance create the chilling effect we have been warned about?

Let him be.