On the watch list

Ah, how the tables are turned. In June 2010, then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo approved the issuance by Justice Secretary Alberto Agra of a circular governing the department’s issuances and implementation of hold-departure orders, watch-list orders and allow-departure orders. Section 2.b of the circular specifically says a watch-list order may be issued by the DOJ “against the respondent, irrespective of nationality, in criminal cases pending preliminary investigation, petition for review, or motion for reconsideration before the Department of Justice or any of its provincial or city prosecution offices.”

Arroyo must now be ruing giving her imprimatur to that otherwise innocuous circular. Just over a year later, her own name is on a DOJ watch list, placed there by incumbent Secretary Leila de Lima in the wake of several cases of plunder and graft that have been filed against Arroyo, plus a poll fraud case relating to the May 2007 elections that she and her husband, former First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo, also face. These cases all happen to be under preliminary investigation at the DOJ, which puts the department on solid legal ground, based on the Arroyo administration’s own circular, to inscribe her name on the watch-list.

To hear it from Arroyo lawyer Raul Lambino, however, there is nothing more base or foul—“dangerously evil,” in his overabundant phrase—than the DOJ watch list. “We believe that the evil called the watch-list order of the DOJ secretary, which has dangerous effects far greater than a hold-departure order issued by the regular courts, would still be around even if De Lima will allow the former president to leave,” Lambino said, referring to Arroyo’s request for travel clearance from the Aquino administration to seek medical treatment abroad. “Such a dangerous evil must be obliterated once and for all for the sake of every individual in the country. Unless and until the Supreme Court rules on this fundamental issue, everyone will be at the mercy of De Lima’s whim and caprices.”

So, in Arroyo’s time, it was par for the course to issue a watch-list order. This time, when the law has unexpectedly boomeranged on her, it has morphed into a “dangerous evil” with “dangerous effects,” threatening the very life, liberty and happiness of every citizen of the republic. Lambino’s ululation would hold more merit if there was a smidgen of acknowledgment there that Arroyo’s pending legal troubles do place her squarely within the sights of the very regulation she herself had promulgated.

There might no longer be any question that Arroyo is sick and requires urgent medical treatment. There remains, however, the question of whether it’s worth the risk to let her fly out of the country and see justice subverted instead when she flees the multiple charges awaiting her here. Arroyo and her camp must forgive the public’s cynicism in this matter. The former president has not exactly been a model of candor and sincerity in her 10-year tenure in Malacañang, and even beyond, when she used her still-considerable political clout and material influence to dismiss, diminish, stall and frustrate questions and investigations into her scandal-plagued administration. Truthfulness is a virtue that seems to have long fled the Arroyo character, from her broken promise not to run for reelection, to the unresolved “Hello, Garci” affair, to ZTE and its sordid by-products of kidnapping and bribery, to the helicopter mess that her husband could not even be bothered to testify about in person, preferring rather to mock the public’s credulity by foisting on it, for the second time, his patsy of a brother as the fall guy.

Even Arroyo’s allies know any assurances from her that she would come back and face the music won’t hold any water anymore with a largely skeptical country, hence their appeal to absolutist scenarios to justify her request. No doctor in this country, they insist, is good enough to treat her bone disorder—a condescension that has earned them the ire of the Philippine Medical Association, which, while conceding that Arroyo has as much right as any patient to choose her own doctor, also says the country’s top bone specialists are as good as anyone whom Arroyo could tap abroad.

That she has been afflicted by what looks like a serious illness is not Arroyo’s fault. But that she has to labor under the impression that she’s not above using her condition to escape accountability and the reach of justice—sadly,

Arroyo has no one to blame but herself.