What pushed Cabral off a cliff

Maria Catalina Cabral, the controversial public works undersecretary, is dead, and at the rate things are going, all her secrets may be buried with her.

As the police ruled out foul play in her death, the public is left to confront a troubling question: What kind of justice system pushes a senior official of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to such hopelessness that she saw no other way out but off a cliff on Benguet’s winding and treacherous Kennon Road?

Cabral, 63, a civil engineer with a more than 40-year career in public works, had been paraded through congressional hearings, named in affidavits and interim reports, and warned of all manner of punitive measures, from contempt to prosecution. Yet public condemnation raced far ahead of any legal reckoning. She stood accused but untried, cornered against the wall but free to jump off it.

Could there be a starker indictment of a multipronged investigation big on spectacle but short on substance, than when someone so central to a corruption scheme could see neither justice nor redemption at the finish line?

By the time of her alleged suicide on Dec. 18 and the pronouncement of her death in the early hours of the next day, Cabral had resigned from the DPWH, was facing recommended charges from the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, and had been repeatedly summoned by the House of Representatives and the Senate over alleged budget insertions and anomalous flood control projects.

‘Key gatekeeper’

Former DPWH Undersecretary Roberto Bernardo had described her as a “key gatekeeper” in the budgeting process, alleging that she exercised control over which projects made it into the National Expenditure Program and which ones did not. These were serious accusations, aired in public and amplified by politicians. But months into the parallel probes, the process had produced little more than sound bites.

Cabral denied wrongdoing, skipped some hearings, appeared in others, and even met prosecutors at the Office of the Ombudsman barely two weeks before her death.

Still, no case had reached a point where the public could say justice, one way or another, was within reach. In many ways, it came as no surprise that someone like Cabral, even held under the presumption of innocence, would be pushed to the brink.

In rooting out corruption in public works, particularly in flood control projects long synonymous with excess and kickbacks, the government won’t be judged by the number of hearings held or names dragged into the spotlight, but its ability to move cases decisively toward prosecution and trial, whether it might lead to acquittal or conviction.

Talk of possible conspiracy

Instead, what the Cabral case shows is a machinery of justice that is quick to point fingers at alleged wrongdoers but slow to bring them under the arms of the law.

For obvious reasons, Cabral’s death has sparked talk of a possible conspiracy. House minority lawmakers are now asking whether authorities failed to protect a key witness and whether her death might silence others with knowledge of how anomalous projects were inserted into the budget.

Lawmakers led by Caloocan 2nd District Rep. Edgar Erice and Mamamayang Liberal party list Rep. Leila de Lima noted that the “suspicious timing and nature of the incident have led to an intense public demand for a deeper inquiry particularly in light of her reported familiarity with key government officials, contractors, and proponents linked to questionable DPWH projects.”

“We are deeply concerned that this case, if mishandled, could lead to the silencing of other witnesses or whistleblowers,” Erice said.

The Ombudsman, too, has moved to secure Cabral’s computer and files, with officials acknowledging that civil cases, including forfeiture of assets, may still proceed against her estate. These are necessary steps but they are also reminders of how much remains unfinished in untangling this web of corruption.

A clear and credible path

Cabral’s death must not become an excuse for institutions to rest easy on a scandal that implicates far more than one official. Neither should the investigations be reduced to containing political fallout from a suspect’s mysterious death.

But the harder task is for agents of the justice system to offer a clear and credible path to resolution for suspects, state witnesses, or whistleblowers, instead of exposing them to a humiliating trial by publicity ahead of any actual trial in a court of law.

The consequence of their failure is dire, and Cabral’s desperate case is an example of it: when potential witnesses are petrified by fear that their exposure would bring only personal ruin, rather than the truth.

Cabral is gone, but the questions her case has exposed—and the failures her death lays bare—linger. The onus now is on the government to demonstrate that the crackdown on corruption did not meet a dead end with Cabral’s demise, and that justice will not follow her silently to the grave.