Checkmate

The Commission on Elections has come to the rescue of the Aquino administration in stopping former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from leaving the country. By filing election charges against Arroyo in connection with the alleged rigging of the 2004 elections, the Comelec has provided the Executive Branch the excuse to finally serve Arroyo a warrant of arrest and effectively stop her from going out of the country, ostensibly to seek medical treatment for her bone and thyroid disorders.

The arrest capped a dramatic week of legal and even physical tug-of-war between the Aquino administration and Arroyo. The Supreme Court had lifted the travel ban on her, but she failed to leave the country Tuesday when the Department of Justice defied the Court and physically prevented her from boarding a plane for Singapore. The administration bought time by filing a motion for reconsideration with the tribunal, but it was the en banc decision last Friday of the Comelec, a constitutional body, to file charges and have her arrested that effectively stopped Arroyo from leaving. Since many suspect that she’s just making her medical condition an excuse to flee the country, she has been served a legal checkmate that her fancy lawyers may find hard to overturn. Now she is under “hospital  arrest” at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Taguig, and she could become the second former president to stand trial, after her ousted predecessor, Joseph Estrada, was sentenced to life imprisonment on corruption charges before being pardoned by her.

“We promised the Filipino people her day in court, and now she is getting it,” said presidential spokesman Ramon Carandang from Bali. But while the Comelec move added fuel to an anti-corruption drive engineered by President Aquino, the fact that the Comelec has to come to the help of the administration in providing a legal and constitutional underpinning to keep Arroyo from leaving may indicate it’s not up to the task it has assigned for itself. Until the Comelec moved in, putting Arroyo on trial and re-energizing his anti-graft drive had appeared out of Aquino’s reach. The Comelec has done the administration a favor.

But it’s a favor whose wages the Comelec may find too steep and even risky to pay. To be sure, the Comelec and the administration now have to make the charges against Arroyo stick. In a way, the Comelec’s action has created its own set of problems for itself and the administration. While it is true that the Supreme Court, composed largely of Arroyo appointees, has persistently blocked Aquino’s efforts to set up a truth commission to investigate allegations of corruption against the Arroyo administration, raising questions about the politicization of the judiciary, it is also true that the Comelec, an independent body stacked with Aquino appointees, has left itself open to charges of itself being politicized when it joined the DOJ in the task force to investigate alleged electoral rigging by the previous administration. In fact, Arroyo has formally questioned the legality and constitutionality of the task force before the high court. By filing electoral charges against her and having her arrested, the Comelec may have buttressed Arroyo’s arguments.

What all of this means is that the war has just begun and the public should prepare not only for a classic give and take of legal and constitutional punditry, but also for the agony of witnessing its democratic institutions in a mad, mad brawl that may test the limits of Philippine democracy.

It is easy to say that justice has been served and Arroyo, considering the prostitution to which she subjected our institutions during her regime, is getting a dose of her own medicine. But the more worrisome prospect really is Philippine democracy not surviving the weight and strain of its institutions colliding with one another and going beyond the arena of legal niceties of checks and balances and into the uncharted territory of a take-no-prisoners war and the total annihilation of each other. We are seeing a growing polarization of our institutions and to some extent everybody should share the blame for our democracy having become such a sorry spectacle. But then again, the agony and the war have just begun.