Massacre in the Supreme Court

There has been no other week in recent memory that caused the kind of shock and anger generated by two events that happened last week: First, the most despised Filipino ruler, former president Ferdinand Marcos, was virtually declared a hero on Nov. 8. Second, the most reviled presidential candidate in American history, Donald Trump, was elected ruler of the most powerful country on earth the next day.

These are two extremely weighty issues, so I will limit my commentary to the first and leave others to flagellate us with their analyses of the second.

Even to this day, 30 years after Marcos’ ouster from power and 27 years after his death, the physical wellbeing of Filipinos continues to be negatively affected by his greed and misrule. The current generation continues to pay the Marcos behest loans, and the oligarchs he created continue to wreak havoc on our political and economic welfare. Now, even the people’s emotional wellbeing is damned because Marcos is forced upon them as their hero, courtesy of a Supreme Court decision allowing the burial of his remains in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

Notwithstanding Marcos’ many documented sins—memorialized in Supreme Court decisions and codified in laws—the high court, with its vote of 9-5, declares that opposition to the Marcos burial in the Libingan “unnecessarily divide[s] the people and slow[s] the path to the future.”

The high court is virtually telling the victims of murder, rape, torture, forced disappearance, and imprisonment that their complaints are unnecessary, divisive, and serve to slow their march to a brighter future. What a painful rebuke to the Marcos-era victims. They must be feeling tortured, raped, and shot at all over again.

The martial law victims and their heirs cannot be faulted if they tell the nine justices who voted to allow the Marcos burial in the Libingan that it is the justices’ kind of thinking—their forgetfulness of the past and their refusal to see how the sins of the past have damaged the present and the future—that enables wicked leaders to thrive in this country, leaders who continue the tradition of oppressing hapless citizens and plundering the nation’s wealth.

The Supreme Court also points out that during the election campaign, then presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte publicly announced that he would allow the Marcos burial in the Libingan, and that he won the presidency by garnering 16.6 million votes, insinuating that by electing him, the people also approved of his decision on the Marcos burial.

It is a giant leap, a conclusion with no basis whatsoever. The high court has transformed the presidential election into a national referendum on the burial issue, and interprets Mr. Duterte’s electoral victory as a Marcos triumph over the hearts and minds of the people. If the high court considers the 16.6 million votes in favor of Mr. Duterte as votes that favored his position on the Marcos burial, why did it not equally consider the 25.3 million votes against him as votes that resoundingly rejected his position on the issue?

The Supreme Court also questions the following: the petitioners’ personality to file the case even if some of them are martial law victims and even if taxpayers have a long-established standing in court; the filing of the case in the high court instead of merely in the regional trial court, even if direct filing in the high court has long been allowed in similar cases; the supposed failure of the petitioners to give the Duterte administration the chance to change its mind, even if doing so would have rendered the issue moot; the failure of the two Aquino presidents to expressly prohibit the burial of Marcos’ remains in the Libingan; and others.

The Supreme Court has figuratively massacred every lofty issue raised by the petitioners, and it has done so through strained and hollow justifications to allow the burial of the dictator’s remains in the Libingan. What a complete travesty of justice.

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