Push for the punishment of the Estradas, the Marcoses and others guilty of grave crimes against the people!
With the way the cases filed against the Marcoses, Estradas and others who have serious accountabilities to the people are going, the people see no clear basis to repose their trust in the existing reactionary justice system in the country. The people's doubts are growing and settling in with the passage of time, on whether the reactionary justice system is at all able to obtain justice for the people, especially in these cases where the defendants happen to be the most powerful within the ruling class.
Fifteen years have passed since the Marcos dictatorship was ousted. The people and history's unequivocal verdict that the Marcoses were responsible for numerous heinous fascist crimes and the unbridled plunder of the nation's coffers thundered in the first mass uprising at EDSA. But no one among the Marcoses and their minions has been punished by the reactionary state for such crimes. The reactionary justice system has even allowed the Marcoses and their cronies to strut around and be restored to power.
Aside from a few confiscated pieces of property of the Marcoses and their cronies, most of their ill-gotten wealth is safely stashed away in foreign banks and dummy corporations. The people have never laid hands on even a single centavo of this wealth estimated at $13 billion.
On the other hand, millions of victims of fascist violence and oppression under the dictatorship continue to be deprived of justice. Even the simple matter of indemnification already won in a human rights case filed against the Marcoses in a Hawaiian court by some 10,000 former political prisoners during the dictatorship, has not been implemented.
With the way things are going with respect to the Estradas' trial, it would not be farfetched for them to return to power.
The Estradas are moving heaven and earth to weaken and undermine their prosecution in any way they can. Their lawyers have been seizing on each and every loophole and opportunity permitted by the reactionary laws and justice system to get the Estradas off the hook.
Even before the start of the trial, no less that 68 motions had already been filed by Estrada's lawyers on various matters, and this number is growing as time passes. With all these motions they have been dumping, the court is effectively bogged down and the trial prevented from progressing.
One significant motion they have won before the Supreme Court bars the use of Estrada's bank records as evidence in the plunder case against him, supposedly because of the Bank Secrecy Law. It is highly absurd that Estrada's bank records which have been opened and presented before the people and used in the impeachment trial, could no longer be used as evidence in the plunder case, when this is the same case endorsed to the Sandiganbayan by the aborted impeachment court.
Likewise, the Sandiganbayan ordered the prosecution in the third week of July to limit the list of Estrada-owned corporations to those already stipulated in the charge sheet. Thus, the Ombudsman is barred from presenting as evidence the Estradas' illegal investments in more than 60 other companies.
Such depraved decisions by the Supreme Court and Sandiganbayan will cover up the Estradas' anomalies and ill-gotten wealth. These are major blows that would work against the conduct of a fair trial of the plunder case against them.
It is likewise the aim of the Estradas' tactics to let the case drag on for as long as they can, hoping that they could return to power in the 2004 elections, or seize power through extralegal means such as a coup d'etat or an "EDSA 3"-style upheaval even before 2004. At every opportunity, they portray Estrada as a "martyr" and victim of "oppression" to stir up sympathy from their loyalists and others, the better to use them anew as cannon fodder in another destabilization attempt.
The fascist demon, warlord, corrupt politician and ex-Col. Rodolfo Aguinaldo was also able to circumvent the inutile reactionary justice system for almost 30 years. This June, it was the revolutionary movement that was finally able to mete out justice for his many blood debts. In many more cases, especially in the countryside, it is only the revolutionary movement that has been able to address the people's demands for justice.
Although their cases are prominent, it is not only the slow progress and faltering manner of pursuing the cases of Marcos, Estrada and others who have committed grave transgressions against the people that indicate the corruption, inutility and pro-elite character of the justice system obtaining in the country. This is daily being validated by the people through their own experiences. The people could hardly utilize the reactionary courts to defend and advance their interests. The exploitative and oppressive classes have decisive control over the reactionary courts and the entire system of administering justice in the country and in fact, are able to use them to further exploit, suppress and oppress ordinary folk, especially the poor who have no resources to spend to pursue justice.
There is need for the progressive and democratic forces and the people to demand justice in the cases of the Marcoses, Estradas and others who have serious accountabilities to the people. This is likewise necessary to obtain concessions, however slight and temporary, for the advancement of the people's interests.
At the same time, it must be made known that the issue of attaining justice in the country can only be decisively resolved through the victory of the people's democratic revolution, in expunging the old and decadent system and putting a new and revolutionary system of justice in the hands of the revolutionary forces and the people.
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